Greetings, Steemians and Steemettes

After having finished with the preamble, let's start with part 1 of this book!

Part 1 - Recognizing and developing your speed reading skills

We start off this chapter with a bit more input on how reading actually works. Reading becomes one of these things that we usually don't spend much thinking on, but we have to realize how amazing a skill reading actually is. Just imagine the complexity of the teamwork our eyes and brains and the many nerves between them have to perform. Seeing and recognizing computable data with our eyes, being relayed into our brain in order to make sense of the hieroglyphs we are reading only to find out that we can identify them as letters of our known alphabet that we can form into words with meaning.

It is really amazing, isn't it?

And we aren't stopping there, we are also able to memorize the stuff we take in thanks to our magnificent brain.

The Author uses the opportunity to show us how he likes to visualizes information in the form of pictures to help him memorize and process data he takes in. He usually takes a thing, an object and creates a mind map around it. A common practise for people who are more accustomed to these.

In summary, the process of reading can be split into these steps:

1. Recognizing - Being able to notice that the thing you are looking at is something you are familiar with. In this case, the alphabet, words and the likes.
2. Assimilating - The process of getting the things you have recognized into your brain.
3. Capturing - Being able to make something you can comprehend out of many blocks of the whole picture.
4. Understanding - Putting the information you have learned into relation with your current knowledge and understanding to make sense of it.
5. Memorizing Putting the learned information into storage for later use.
6. Recalling Getting previously stored information out for actual use.
7. Communicating Being able to actually use the information learned previously.

As one can see, he goes over the simple reading process and beyond that, which is good. Not a lot of people actually consider what to do after one has read something. This ends up leading to people quickly forgetting what they read.

The author suggest that one should reflect on which ones of these steps is considered problematic by the reader. Some of them can be fixed and the book will cover some methods for that later on.

Time for the first test!

In order to find out where we actually stand, it is only naturally understandable that we have to put our current skills to a test. Within the book, there is a short text that one has to read. It stretches a couple of pages and is used as an easy way to measure your current words per minute.

Afterwards, there will be a small test asking 15 questions in order to check how well one was able to comprehend the content.

Of course, I won't be able to provide you with either here. You can still test your reading speed by yourself.

A quick google search will give you plenty of pages that have programs and applications made in order to test your reading speed. If you prefer to actually use a book, you can use the method I do.

I count the words in the first couple lines of a book and take the average number of words per line. That number I multiply with the number of lines per page. If you have a book with very big passages between them or pictures, you will have to apply some more complicated math.

Or grab another book. That would probably be simpler.

One way or another, you will have a certain number of words per page on average. Start reading a chapter of that book and stop your time. Read it the way you usually would. After you have finished reading the passage of your choice, divide the number of words you have read with the number of minutes it took you.

Voila. You now know your current reading speed.

Oh, how the test ended for me you ask?

I ended up scoring a super average 253 wpm the first time I did this test. Better than below average, I'd say, but still pretty disappointing considering that I really do enjoy reading. And considered myself to be good at it.

On the positive side of things, I ended up having a reading comprehension of 80%. Not all was lost!