No, it's not a book about photography. I followed a link from one of my favorite bloggers (stevepavlina.com) to learn more about a very different sort of speed reading course. Steve Pavlina related how he'd used the techniques in the course to plow through material and to organize it with ease and good comprehension. So I picked up the discount coupon on the site and ordered the course.
In a nutshell: the course made an incredible difference in how I read non-fiction - even in reading complex material. Rather than attempt to gain excellent comprehension in a single pass through written material, PhotoReading encourages a multiple pass approach, with a most unusual step in the middle:
- List the keywords of interest to you, and define why you're reading the book. Now I've been reading the index of books for a long time to understand what the book focuses on, but I've learned some tricks. I keep note cards by my side and I list words that trigger something in me. After scouring the index and table of contents, I leaf through the book - maybe sampling every twenty pages or so - to find other words that trigger me. Then I write my understanding of the book's purpose, and I note what I expect to get out of the book.
- PhotoRead the book - and let it rest 24 hours. This is the weird part. Rather than read the book, the course shows techniques for forming a mental image of each page. I'll flip and image each page - at about two seconds a page. Then I'll sleep on it. If this sounds too strange to be real, the course opens with a convincing test of imaging pages from a dictionary, and then recalling the physical location of words on a page. It works.
- Begin rapidly reviewing sections of interest. After my overnight stewing about the content, I'll begin skimming through sections of interest to me - at very high speeds. I'll make several passes, staying relaxed as I do so.
- Build a mind map of the material. I've loved using mind mapping as my primary note-taking approach for more than a decade. The course gave me ideas for new ways of using mind mapping while I skim to outline the book's content.
Result: I've been reading with excellent comprehension, greater ease, and with a lot more fun. At first I didn't think I'd really been understanding what I'd been plowing through at a break-neck pace. Then one evening John asked me what I'd been looking at. I'd just finished part three of the approach above on The Stillborn God. Without even thinking about the book I rattled off a pithy summary of the book, and detailed my issues with it. After I finished, I thought, "I usually can't summarize stuff like that. Maybe there's something here..."
Check it out!
Comments