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This post contains my personal notes about the big ideas in Abby Marks-Beales 10 Days to Faster Reading. My book notes are different than many of the book summaries youll find on the web. Instead of following the structure of the book in question, well isolate and examine the key ideas and themes that make the book useful. Along the way, Ill tell you how I actually apply the ideas. Enjoy! Abby Marks-Beale is the author of the Personal MBA-recommended book 10 Days to Faster Reading, as well as The Complete Idiots Guide to Speed Reading. If you want to fly through your reading pile, RSS reader, and e-mail inbox at breakneck speed while maintaining consistently high levels of reading comprehension, these speed reading books are for you. For more information about Abbys work, check out: Rev It Up Reading Abbys new online reading skills course. The Corporate Educator Abbys business skills website. 10 Days to Faster Reading Personal MBA-recommended guide to improving reading speed and comprehension. Here are ten big ideas from Abby Marks-Beales 10 Days to Faster Reading
#1. Linear Reading is Inefficient You Dont Have to Read Every Word to Extract Value from Non-Fiction Material
The purpose of non-fiction reading is not to read every word on every page its to extract useful
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information from the material. Growing up, most of us learned to read by starting with the first word on the first page, then continuing to read until we get to the last word on the last page. Unless youve learned structured non-fiction reading techniques, you probably still read this way, even though its extremely inefficient. Efficient reading is non-linear a series of quick skims, skipping around, referencing, and note-taking. The purpose is not 100% eye-coverage of the text: its to extract all of the useful information thats relevant to what you want to do. Its easy to get hung up on reading the book as turning pages until there are no more pages to turn. Once you get comfortable with the idea that you dont have work your way through the entire book linearly to benefit from your reading, you can read much faster, and put the book down when youve learned what you need to know.
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Priming is the act of programming your brain to notice certain things about your environment. If youve ever been interested in a certain type of car, only to find you start seeing them EVERYWHERE you go, you know what priming feels like. The universe hasnt unloaded thousands of new cars all over the highway theyve always been there, but your brain filtered them out as irrelevant. Your interest changed the filters, so you actually notice when they appear. Priming happens unconsciously, but you can control it if you know what youre doing. Purpose-Setting works because it gives you an opportunity to consciously prime your perceptual filters to notice information related to your interests. Thats what allows you to read so quickly when youre sufficiently primed, you can skim through a book quickly until your brain recognizes something as interesting or important. As you skim, you suddenly find your eyes stopping on the part of the text that relates to what youre looking for. It feels like magic, but its just your brain doing its job. Before you start reading, dont skip the two richest sources of priming material in the book: the table of contents and the index. The TOC gives you information about the books structure, content, and order. The index, aside from being a useful reference tool, is essentially a frequency-map of the books key terms. If you find a term you dont know with a large number of citations, chances are its important write it down on a list of key terms before you start reading. Purpose-Setting and Priming only take a few minutes. Once youre done, youre ready to fly through the book.
#6. Your Eyes Can Absorb More Information Than You Think
Your eyes can easily take in more than one word at a time. Instead of fixating on every word, taking in groups of 3-5 words at a time can increase your reading speed without harming your comprehension. Learning to read more than one word at a time is mostly a matter of training Marks-Beale includes many exercises that can help you learn this skill. New speed readers tend to gravitate to eye fixation techniques because theyre concrete, but theyre not the most important part of reading speed. In my experience, Purpose-Setting and Priming are far more important if youre trying to get the 80/20, start there. Eye fixation naturally develops with practice and experience.
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(Note: a useful tool you can use to train your abilities to read without subvocalizing and taking in more than one word at a time is Spreeder.)
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The purpose of reading non-fiction is not to simply read the book its to learn something useful. While reading is fun (and gets even more fun as you learn these skills), it doesnt become profitable until you start translating things youve read into real-world results. After reading a good book, you should always be able to add at least 3 tasks to your active to-do or projects list. Capture these actions while youre reading, and review the list when youre done. Ideally, these actions should be directly related to accomplishing one of the goals you had in the purpose-setting step.
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Master the most important ideas in business with Josh Kaufman, author of The Personal MBA: Master the Art of Business, second edition. Learn more...
Josh Kaufman is the bestselling author of The Personal MBA: Master the Art of Business. Josh specializes in teaching professionals in all industries and disciplines how to master practical business knowledge and skills. About Josh Kaufman...
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