The Chicago Ideas Festival has just wrapped up and we’d like to share this thought-provoking debate that happened in Chicago last week: Do Too Many People Go To College? Let us know what you think in the comments…

Comprehending what you read better comes easy one you know the mechanics of how you comprehend. In my post Reading Comprehension Strategies, I cover in detail the mechanics of how reading comprehension works. I highly recommend you check it out fist prior to moving on to this tip.

The Tip: Read the first sentence of every paragraph prior to reading the article in it’s entirety.

As simple as this sounds, this technique is very effective for improving your reading comprehension. The first sentence in every paragraph is called the “topic sentence”. In the formal academic paragraph, it is the most general of all sentences and contains within it, the most relevant information about the paragraph’s contents. By taking the time to read the first sentence of each paragraph prior to reading the entire article, you will learn a great deal about the article’s contents. When you then read the article, you will comprehend it better.

This little tip is a spin on the truth that if you read an article twice, you will comprehend it better. That’s however a very time consuming task and won’t help you in your overall reading speed. If you read the first sentence of very paragraph, you will be able to enjoy the same benefits of reading it twice but in a fraction of the time. Give it a shot and post your feedback, thanks for reading!

What is the number one step I can can take right now to read faster?

Is there really a way to teach someone how to read faster with one simple step?

Yes there is and today I want to share it with you. If you follow this one step that I am going to share, you should at least notice an immediate 20% increase in your reading speed. With practice, you will break well beyond that barrier. All it takes is time and practice.

Use your finger or a pen as a guide to assist you while you read. Consider the pen or your finger as a guide to focus your awareness. Without having a guide to zone in on our focus, we can easily end up reading very inefficiently resulting in a huge loss of speed. If you use a guide like your finger or a pen, you can not only increase your focus on reading, you can also push yourself to read a little faster. It is to my estimate that most of us without any formal training on Speed Reading, already have the ability to read 20% faster just by using a guide to focus our awareness.

How to you do it properly?

Use your finger to hover under the word you are reading. Allow your finger to move a little faster then you normally would read and let it be your guide as you go from line to line, focusing on the word above your finger. It is very simple yet very effective. One of our major problems today is lack of focus. Lack of focus will cause you to read slower. By using your finger or a pen, you not only increase your focus, you also maintain it for longer periods. Also, you can increase your reading speed by simply moving your guide a little faster then you normally read.

Will you always have to read with your finger or a pen going forth?

No, with practice you will be able to maintain most of the speed without using the guide. When I started Speed Reading, I used my finger as a guide a lot and kept practicing every time I read. Eventually, I found that I was able to read almost as fast without the guide. I still use the guide when I feel that I am lacking focus or if I would like to improve my speed even more. When you read with a guide, you train yourself to focus and read faster. Once you have trained yourself, you will be able to read fast without the guide.

But what about reading on a computer screen? Do you still use a guide?

I recommend Accelareader when reading material on a computer. You won’t need your finger at all because Accelareader will take your text and display it one word at a time so you only have to focus on one spot. Just follow the instructions on the Accelareader site and enjoy reading on a computer like you have never done before. In an upcoming post, I will show you how to use Accelareader with great detail to read faster and also improve your reading comprehension. It is a great free tool and I highly recommended that you check it out!

So there it is, the simplest yet most effective step you can take right now to improve your reading speed. We cover this in our workshops along with other techniques to help you read even faster. We also teach our students how to comprehend the information better and retain it longer with special techniques and strategies. The goal of our workshops is to help you read faster, comprehend more and retain information longer. I highly recommend that you take advantage of one of our workshops if you are ready to improve your reading speed, comprehension and retention. Thanks for reading this post, if you have any questions, please post a comment below and I will respond back as soon as I can. You can also e-mail directly me at joe@irisreading.com.

Check this Out:

Harald Weinreich* and his team supplied 25 users’ browsers and recorded extended information about their normal Web activities. This study is completely naturalistic and users weren’t asked to do anything specific.
If we take an online page it usually will contain some images, some text (on average 593 Words) and navigation tools.
. Clearly, we don’t read every single second while we stay on the page, instead we spend time understanding the layout, figuring out navigation as well as looking at images. Harald Weinreich did not perform an eye tracking research but we can’t say how much time exactly his participants were reading, but it will compensate for the fact that his users had above-average intelligence, with several being university employees. In the table below you can see that with the increase of words on the page, the amount of time readers spend on the page increases.

However, for each extra 200 words of text, users stayed on the page for only 8 additional seconds. Too bad for us (writers).

In reality, users will ONLY read 20% of the text! It’s a good thing to keep in mind while coming up with an article or a web-page, but how can you benefit from this knowledge?
Imagine if you could read 2-3 times faster than an average person? Do you think it will help you grasp twice as much information in the same amount of time?
In fact, your table will look like this:
We stayed on the safe side and simply doubled the speed from 250 WPM to 500 WPM, but it’s not unusual for our graduates to triple their current speed after the class.

You would be able to spend the same amount of time on the page and cover far more material, consequently have more thorough knowledge and have a better understanding of the material. You will be going back to the window less often!

Since everybody else around you is only covering 20% of the material, it’s so easy to be ahead of the game. You can spend the same amount of time on the page as you were spending and get twice more value. You will cover more quality information that will stay and may be get a promotion that you always wanted! Being able to read faster helps you achieve more with less effort and time.
Which fits your information needs? Please leave your comments below.

I will also promise to keep my word count diet and finish my blog by congratulating you on getting through the article. You can now award yourself with the title of a Persistent Reader!

*Harald Weinreich, Hartmut Obendorf, Eelco Herder, and Matthias Mayer: “Not Quite the Average: An Empirical Study of Web Use,” in the ACM Transactions on the Web, vol. 2, no. 1 (February 2008), article #5.

Our Quick Research Team the face of

Katya Seberson

1. Reading faster will lower comprehension. It’s very easy to understand why this myth exists. By simply trying to read fast without understanding the mechanics behind how we read, we will notice a sharp decline in comprehension. But however, when we take the time to understand what causes us to comprehend information, we can then revamp our reading style to become more effective. This allows us to not only read faster, but increase our ability to comprehend the information better. The mechanics of comprehension are covered in detail within my article Reading Comprehension Strategies.

2. It will be hard to retain the information if you speed read. This is very similar to myth #1. Our style and knowledge of how retention works or what I like to call, “retention technology”, needs to be revamped before we can gain the benefit of improving retention. In our classes we cover reading strategy. There are many things that can be done to improve retention such as Mind Mapping. Just like myth #1, we really need to dig into the mechanics of retention before we attempt to learn how to read faster. After all, we do want to make sure that we retain the information as long as possible.

3. Speed Reading involves skipping words and is therefore not effective for studying or reading non-fiction material. When you improve your reading speed, comprehension and retention ability, there will be no need to skip over words. This myth derives from the truth that you should skip over what I like to call “filler words”. These are words put in by the author for grammar reasons. It is however not encouraged that you skip over any other words. There are many words and phrases in non-fiction or study materials that have important information to aid in comprehension and we DO NOT want to skip over them. There are strategies for being able to read faster with study or non fiction material which we cover in our classes. The goal is to increase speed, comprehension and retention. Knowing the difference between filler words and words that carry more meaning, is essential for improving reading speed for study materials. Again, this myth only rings true if we do not take a strategic approach towards reading.

After studying Speed Reading for over ten years, I tend to forget that these myths exist until they are brought to my attention by my students. These myths exist due to lack of understanding behind the mechanics of reading. The good news is that in the last few years, I have found that there is a lot more emphasis put on taking in information at a higher rate. More and more people are looking for a strategic approach towards reading rather then the more traditional style. Understanding the mechanics of reading allows us to come up with better reading strategies. Traditional reading style causes us to plateau on speed, comprehension and retention. The secret to reading faster is to read with strategy in mind. It is in my opinion, the single most important bit of information that I teach in my classes. It is a bit of a paradigm shift but it us required if we want to read faster, comprehend better and retain information longer. Thank you for reading my post, if you have any questions or comments please leave it below and I will be more then happy to answer.

Whether you’re the CEO of a multinational, or the department intern, you qualify as a business professional.  Needless to say, that title entails the possession of a broad set of skills that includes leadership, communication, practical knowledge, and yes–reading.  Reading may not seem like a significant part of your day-to-day work.   You may have abandoned the notion of reading with the concluding chapter of your college textbooks.  Quite the contrary, in fact.   If you are a serious player in the competitive job market of today, you already know that simple tasks that may not seem to take up much of your time actually eat up more of it than you’d think.  But you already knew that.  You’re a clever professional.  You know that cutting down on time spent doing menial labor–like reading–means more time doing work that relates directly to your job.

Here’s a question you’ve probably asked yourself in the past: “Am I using my time wisely?”  This boils down to whether the time you spend at work is equal to the amount of time you spend actually doing work.  And no, they’re hardly ever equivalent.  For example, you have an eight hour work day.  You spend ten minutes getting to your office, five minutes talking to the receptionist, eight minutes by the water cooler, two minutes to straighten up your desk, and that’s a grand total of twenty minutes spent just getting situated.  That may not sound like a great deal of time wasted, but it adds up.  Ever wonder why you find yourself sticking around the office past eight some nights?  Small tasks and bad time management skills can take up a lot of precious time.

Fortunately, Iris has developed a small but useful tool for measuring your efficiency at work:  your Professional Productivity Quotient.  It’s kind of like your efficiency IQ.  You can calculate your personal PPQ by using the following formula: P/Q, where Q is the amount of time you spend at work and P is the amount of time you spend doing work.  The closer your quotient is to 1, the more productive you are at work.  Let’s say you spend 10 hours at work.  Your Q would be 10.  Alternatively, your P would be 10 minus the time you spend for your lunch break, filing documents, reading emails, etc.  Let’s say your P is 8 hours.  Your Professional Productivity Quotient would be 8 divided by 10, or .8.  Not bad, but there’s room for improvement.  The purpose of having a personal PPQ is to keep your time management in check.  This method can help you work towards a perfect score of 1 and alert you if you’re wasting valuable time at work.

So how does speed reading relate to an individual’s PPQ?  You can now measure for yourself the increased amount of time you spend doing tasks related to your work by spending less time reading for work.  Try it for yourself!  Iris can help you do that.  By reading and comprehending material five times faster, you can create time for yourself that wasn’t there before.  Make use of your Professional Productivity Quotient to improve your scheduling skills and get your work done faster.  If you cut down the amount of time you need for work, you’ll be spending less time at your job.  This means a perfect PPQ and getting to go home on time.  That’s a win-win for sure!  Ultimately, you can kiss your office good-bye at 5PM on the dot without the guilt of leaving a job unfinished.  With a little help from Iris and some quantitative thinking on your part, time management will never be a struggle again.

Growing up, people like Aesop, Big Bird, and our parents gave us life lessons we lived by till this very day. “Choose a career you enjoy”, “You don’t have to get along with everyone”, and “Slow and steady wins the race” may all sound eerily familiar to you. However, it’s time to realize that while these aphorisms struck gold during childhood, adulthood is all about being productive. And being productive follows a whole other set of golden rules. So it’s time to forget what you learned about success all those years ago and relearn the fundamentals of productivity as they apply to you now.

“Choose a career you enjoy.” This may come as a shock to you but not everything you’re good at is something you enjoy. The same applies to the reverse: you may not be so good at something you like to do. Take karoake for example. We all enjoy it, unfortunately we all can attest that not everyone is blessed with golden vocal chords. The same way, statistics show that about 60% of workers are unsatisfied with their jobs. If that’s the case, then why do we stay at our jobs if they don’t satisfy us? The reason is that we’re good at them. We are number-crunching machines so we become accountants. We have a knack for creativity so we go to art school. We have an eye for detail so we become interior designers. This does not mean that all of us don’t enjoy our careers. In fact, there are millions of Americans that have a passion for what they do as a living (twenty percent of the workforce). For the rest of us, being good at what we do is rewarding enough to make us stick around.

“Slow and steady wins the race.” Yes, the only reason this cliche rings true is that in the fable, the hare made a huge mistake and became so overconfident with his speed that he took a nap in the middle of the race. Being slow and steady is not the real moral of the story, it’s more like being able to swallow your ego. However, when it comes to productivity, you’ll achieve more by picking up the pace, as long as you don’t sacrifice the quality of your work. Procrastination, lethargy, or sheer laziness may turn out to be the fatal flaw in the production machine that is you. In a world that lacks enough time and is exponentially more focused on speed, you’ll win the race if you can keep up.

“You don’t have to get along with everyone.” Wrong. If there’s someone in your office that you don’t see eye to eye with, there is no reason not to be able to have a working professional relationship with him/her. You can’t be best friends with everybody, but there’s a way to be civil with everyone. Especially in a working environment, its important to be likeable. If you antagonize the wrong people, it can lead to a closed window of opportunity. It really helps to keep the avenue of advancement for yourself clear of any obstacles. When you least expect it, bad references can rear their ugly heads at the wrong time, like when you’re up for a promotion or new job. If you have enough willpower, it’s not impossible to get along with everyone.

Above are only a few revisions to age-old productivity commandments. Not everyone follows the same protocol and often finds success in other ways of getting the job done. Keep in mind that in the new Millenium, speed, networking, and talent are what makes the man/woman. Of course, there are exceptions to these rules, but in the long run, it helps to remember that you invest your time and skills at work. You deserve the output of the resources you put in. Your personal output is your productivity–maximize it to reap the benefits! Just keep in mind that these skills won’t be found in any hand-held employment manual.

2011: a year full of promise and positive changes. However, it seems to be that no matter how cutting-edge technology is nowadays, no laptop, smartphone application, or hand-held device can break the cyberspacial wall of impossibility. Some tasks just simply can’t be done by technology alone. But this is for a good reason. Technology is there to aid us–to help users adapt, organize, develop, share, edit, communicate, and perfect their work. It’s a tool to help our feeble, bumbling human minds remember and carry out our tasks at the next level. Nevertheless, it’s a tool that most of us 21st Centuryists can’t live without. Having said that, I’d like to introduce you to a slew of neat widgets from Google. They’ve been around for some time now, but in case you haven’t had a proper introduction, meet Google Docs, Google Calendar, Google Reader, Google Fast Flip, and Google Tasks. All of these programs are intended to be used for better communication, organization, collaboration, and much more.

Are you an avid web-surfer or blog-hunter? If yes, then Google Reader is for you. Keep your favorite news sites, pages, web subscriptions, and blogs in one inbox that you can access at any time. You’ll be sent a notification each time your favorite website features updates or new content. You can even share you personal content or links with friends online or on your own public forum. Use the sidebar on your page to display the latest items in your Google Reader inbox. As always, Google does not fail to keep your on-the-go needs in mind. Access the Reader from your phone, any PC, or other internet device.  Click here to watch Google unveil the Fast Flip at TechCrunch.

To all you list-makers, don’t sweat. Google hasn’t forgotten about you. Get acquainted with Google Tasks. It allows you to make a schedule of important daily duties by chronological order. Forgot a task? You’ll be sent automatic reminders and notifications to keep you on your toes. If you add due dates to your tasks, they will appear in your Google calendar as well. Synchronization between your Google tools helps keep things organized and gets you to tackle your to-do list smoothly and efficiently. Convert emails into tasks from your Gmail account as well and access Tasks from your iGoogle iPhone app. Say goodbye to your conventional pen-and-paper lists and try something a bit more…motivating.

Last but not least, Google presents the Fast Flip program for your online speed-reading needs. Ever wish that browsing magazines or articles online was as easy and fast as browsing them in print? With a tangible magazine or book in your hand, you can flip back and forth through the pages without interruptions. There’s no loading time or advertisements to circumvent. Make your online browsing experience just as easy as the real thing. Fast Flip filters through dozens of search results that other search engines let slip through the cracks of key words. Avoid the loading time of conventional searches so you have time to do more important things…like read more.

Had enough of an introduction to all of Google Labs’ new features? Take them for a test drive. See if they live up to all of your wildest organizational dreams. If not, we promise they’ll make incremental changes so you can go ahead and make that New Year’s resolution possible. Clean up your cluttered to-do lists and time-consuming tasks with Google’s help. Mark your Google Calendars for some real positive changes this year!