Customer Reviews

How to Be a Rapid Reader

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The book consists of two parts.

The first part deals with making the physical act of reading quicker. Suggestions includes reducing subvocalization, reducing regressions, reading in larger chunks of words, use of periperal vision and using your finger as a guide to help focus your eyes on the page. The premise behind all these seems to be that it is not worth your time to read slow because you can't remember everything you read anyway. Hence you read fast and don't worry about not being able to read every word. The book also argues that multiple quick readings of the same material is better than a single careful reading.

The second part discusses a six part strategy to reading faster. They are:
1. Motivation: know why you want to read a piece of material.
2. Objectives: what you want out of it.
3. Overview: familarize yourself with the structure of the material.
4. Preview: elminate parts that do not support your objectives.
5. Inview: read only the parts that are relevant to your objectives.
6. Review: make notes. (I am currently making notes for this book.)

So, the second part is really a strategy to save time by not reading the irrelevant parts of a book. So, the term rapid reading is somewhat deceptive because you really didn't read the parts you skipped.

While this book has over a 100 pages, there really isn't much more materials than for a 2 or 3 hours course. So, by applying the principles taught in this book, I skipped about 50% of it. Hence becoming a "rapid" reader.

This is a must read before launching in other speed reading books. It combines the speed reading technique with a compeling reading methodology. A great easy to read book. And to follow Kathrin's advice you do not need to read it all.

Manuel Vexler
VP Marketing
MotorWiz Inc

It's a basic level book about speedreading, but helpful.