Things to keep in mind.

From reading the speed reading books, I have picked up a couple of techniques that are so to say universal. These things are not about technically reading faster, for those things you have to look up these books yourselves, but rather things to facilitate your reading and recollection in general. One important thing to keep in mind - and something I often forget - is that you have to develop the two skills of reading fast and remembering what you read separately. I'm no expert yet, but I intend to apply these ideas in the future.

1. Always ask yourself why you are going to read something, what your purpose of reading is. Is it important to remember something? Are you looking for something in particular? (In that case, formulate a question that should keep in mind while reading.) Are you just reading to pass time?

2. Always browse through your material before starting to read it. Look at every page for four seconds, noting the different chapters and so on. This is not something I would do for fiction :-) And, it is way easier to do for separate chapters. I guess you could say you that you are preparing your mind for what you are going to read.

3. When you have read something, always take a couple of seconds to think back on the chapter, article or whatever it was, noting in your minds or on a piece of paper what it was about - without looking back! This is intended to improve your memory.

4. When taking notes, don't write blocks of text or lists; make mind maps. Try to avoid using full sentences and avoid using the words of the author. One good mind map pattern is a treelike structure. Draw a horizontal line on a piece of paper and write the topic of whatever you just read on this line. Draw branches coming out from this line for every main thought and smaller branches coming out from the main branches on which you add information. Always write from memory, don't copy from the book.

I think these were the main points but I have a feeling I've left something out...

Reading somewhat faster.

I have always been concerned about my reading rate. I have always wanted to improve it, I have always been very jealous of rapid readers. I did actually read rather fast when I was 15 and mainly read fantasy; back then I had way more confidence when it came to my intellectual capacities than I do now and I often read one book in a day. I even had more confidence when it came to my language abilities, which is quite funny since I was merely bilingual back then.

When I was 16 or 17, my boyfriend at the time gave me a speed-reading book. By that respectable age, I was already a nervous wreck when it came to my reading speed. I was almost a bit reluctant to start the book since I was convinced I would just fail at it – which I also did. It’s hard to say why exactly (except for bad attitude) because I worked rather hard with it (the method included making texts with columns and increasing your eye span ), but I think that in the end the whole thing is made me feel stressed and reluctant about reading which was really not the point to begin with… however, Thom recommended this site to me and on it you can find another speed-reading book. Since I do a lot of reading and since I am soon to become a student at the University of Oslo I thought it would be too silly to not even give it a try. So that’s exactly what I’ll do and I will evaluate the progress here on my blog.

My starting point seems to be a good one, my reading speed is rather average and according to the book I should be able to make a lot of progress. In case anyone was wondering, I can manage 240 words per minute when reading English nonfiction at the moment. I know very well that I do a lot of conscious regression when reading, but I’ve always felt incapable of stopping this bad habit. I did not, however, know that you should be sitting up all the time! I don't even have a desk to sit at, nor a normal table, so I'm not sure what I'll do about that.

Oh well, here we go!