Seminar Revs Up Participants' Reading Speed

By Mary Ellen Godin
Record-Journal (Meriden, CT)
December 5, 2007; Business section, page 15

FARMINGTON, CT - There were five of us on the same mission. The mountains of reading material required for our jobs had grown unwieldy, and we needed to process them and move on.

Abby Marks Beale, of Wallingford, is the author and facilitator of Rev it Up Reading. Her mission Tuesday was to guide us on how to be faster more effective, readers. Beale has been teaching speed reading to adults for 20 years. She has also developed a curriculum for teens starting around seventh grade.

"Think about how old you were when you learned to read," Marks Beale asked the group. "Now take your age and subtract six. That's how long it's been since you've had any reading training. People have such old skills, all you need are a couple of strategies to add to what you're already doing."

Group members included a grants writer and reviewer for the state Department of Labor; an engineer for Pratt and Whitney; an attorney for the Connecticut Business and Industry Association; an informational officer for Webster Bank, a researcher and analyst; and me, a business writer and editor, whose morning e-mail can crash a server.

Unlike many of her groups, most of us didn't loathe reading and felt fairly good about our skill level.

Marks Beale took us through a baseline test for speed and comprehension. I was at 300 words per minute and 90-percent comprehension. I needed to get the speed up.

After some exercises, using our fingers to move down the page, using a white card to travel along, and identifying key words and phrases, we were starting to move along.

Marks Beale is the author of "10 Days to Faster Reading," published with the Princeton Language Institute, and her newest book "The Complete Idiot's Guide to Speed Reading," due out in May.

She gives her seminars to professionals in all fields who need to absorb large quantities of information in a short time. People take the course to improve speed, concentration, comprehension and retention.

By the end of the seminar, I was at 450 words per minute, at 100-percent comprehension. Practice will make me even faster, she said.

"If you can double your speed or triple your speed, look at how much more you can read," she said. "The goal is to be efficient."

Here are some tips to becoming a better reader:

  • Review your work space for distractions. Move to a conference room for projects that demand full attention.
  • Rate periodicals on personal and professional value. If one is of little or no value, toss it out.
  • If you move your mouth or read out loud, stop it, and learn to close your mouth. You're slowing yourself down.
  • Distraction and decoding are the biggest stumbling blocks. Practice at your comfort level before trying technical or advanced writing.
  • Move your eyes to see phrases and key words.
  • Do more reading on the computer screen to save time and paper. Use your cursor on the left and right margins as a pointer.
  • When evaluating e-mails or periodicals, ask yourself "Why am I reading this?' "What do I need to do with this?" Pick and choose.
  • With nonfiction writing, try to learn the author's outline by reading introductions, subtitles, headings and the first sentence of each paragraph. Often, that's all you need to understand the article.

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