Reading With the Right Brain: Read Faster by Reading Ideas Instead of Just Words by David Butler Page A
Authors: David Butler
Ads: Link
there are always ways to improve any skill. But because of the outlandish promises made by many of these courses, people felt cheated and then ridiculed all speed reading courses to avoid looking foolish enough to fall for such ridiculous promises. As comedian Woody Allen described it, “I took a speed reading course and read War and Peace in twenty minutes… It involves Russia.”
Progress
Although the past century was littered with many courses using all kinds of incredible exercises and making even more incredible claims, at least the past hundred years saw a huge increase in the number of people who actually could read.
In the century before that, a lot fewer people could read—and most who did, only read aloud, and only for entertainment. But even as a form of entertainment, reading was probably as fascinating to the people of that time as any of our entertainment is to us today. It’s interesting when you realize that before there was radio or TV, most people never even heard what people in other places sounded like. In fact, this is why many books of the 1800s— Tom Sawyer is a good example—are so full of colloquialisms and strangely spelled words. These books were written this way to reproduce the way people sounded .
Throughout the twentieth century, reading instruction became much more widely available than in previous eras; however, it was still primarily aimed at reading sounds, not ideas.
Future Reading
Reading has made great progress over the centuries, but that doesn’t mean the progress has to stop now. With the recent erosion in reading skills, there is now even greater room for improvement. Today half the people read below two hundred words per minute, the vast majority of high school graduates aren’t ready for college, and SAT reading scores have plummeted to their lowest level in four decades. The best path out of this this problem is through improved reading skills. The good news is that this is something people can do on their own.
Due to the massive and rapidly growing amount of information available since the advent of computers, the internet, and e-books, reading skills are becoming ever more important. Information is no longer expensive or difficult to access, and this means that regardless of the issues we may have with our current educational systems, we seem to be entering a new era of do-it-yourself education—and the only entrance exam or tuition required is the ability to read.
In order to read more, reading needs to evolve beyond text as sound to text as meaning. This is the same goal Evelyn Wood suggested when she said we needed to " rely more upon the total idea of thought rather than the individual words. "
But now there is an important difference: the order. Comprehension must come first, before speed. Wood’s method was basically an improvement on the old tachistoscopes—it still focused on pushing speed and merely hoped for improved comprehension as a result. The reverse, however, is the better way to read faster. Faster reading won’t lead to faster comprehension, but faster comprehension will naturally lead to faster reading.
There have been many disagreements over methods to teach reading, but when people think of controversies in reading education, they usually only consider disagreements about word recognition training—such as the long-standing argument between phonics and sight learning. Both of these methods only teach how to match text with words, but regardless of which method is used to recognize words, word recognition is really only the first step of reading.
To be an effective reader, you need to be able to rapidly and accurately process the thoughts behind the words. The thoughts are what the author wanted to communicate; the words were used only as a vehicle to communicate them.
The history of writing has gone from simple record-keeping, to sound recording, and then to idea recording. Reading now has to catch up and advance from sound playback to
Progress
Although the past century was littered with many courses using all kinds of incredible exercises and making even more incredible claims, at least the past hundred years saw a huge increase in the number of people who actually could read.
In the century before that, a lot fewer people could read—and most who did, only read aloud, and only for entertainment. But even as a form of entertainment, reading was probably as fascinating to the people of that time as any of our entertainment is to us today. It’s interesting when you realize that before there was radio or TV, most people never even heard what people in other places sounded like. In fact, this is why many books of the 1800s— Tom Sawyer is a good example—are so full of colloquialisms and strangely spelled words. These books were written this way to reproduce the way people sounded .
Throughout the twentieth century, reading instruction became much more widely available than in previous eras; however, it was still primarily aimed at reading sounds, not ideas.
Future Reading
Reading has made great progress over the centuries, but that doesn’t mean the progress has to stop now. With the recent erosion in reading skills, there is now even greater room for improvement. Today half the people read below two hundred words per minute, the vast majority of high school graduates aren’t ready for college, and SAT reading scores have plummeted to their lowest level in four decades. The best path out of this this problem is through improved reading skills. The good news is that this is something people can do on their own.
Due to the massive and rapidly growing amount of information available since the advent of computers, the internet, and e-books, reading skills are becoming ever more important. Information is no longer expensive or difficult to access, and this means that regardless of the issues we may have with our current educational systems, we seem to be entering a new era of do-it-yourself education—and the only entrance exam or tuition required is the ability to read.
In order to read more, reading needs to evolve beyond text as sound to text as meaning. This is the same goal Evelyn Wood suggested when she said we needed to " rely more upon the total idea of thought rather than the individual words. "
But now there is an important difference: the order. Comprehension must come first, before speed. Wood’s method was basically an improvement on the old tachistoscopes—it still focused on pushing speed and merely hoped for improved comprehension as a result. The reverse, however, is the better way to read faster. Faster reading won’t lead to faster comprehension, but faster comprehension will naturally lead to faster reading.
There have been many disagreements over methods to teach reading, but when people think of controversies in reading education, they usually only consider disagreements about word recognition training—such as the long-standing argument between phonics and sight learning. Both of these methods only teach how to match text with words, but regardless of which method is used to recognize words, word recognition is really only the first step of reading.
To be an effective reader, you need to be able to rapidly and accurately process the thoughts behind the words. The thoughts are what the author wanted to communicate; the words were used only as a vehicle to communicate them.
The history of writing has gone from simple record-keeping, to sound recording, and then to idea recording. Reading now has to catch up and advance from sound playback to
Similar Books
