How To Read For Maximum Efficiency

By Michael Kellett and Steve Alfano

Creative Learning Services, Inc. has taught reading and concentration skills at hundreds of instituions including schools, colleges, business firms and government agencies. We feel that our reading program is the most practical and comprehensive course in the field. Now, we have packaged our step by step instruction format in this beautiful, easy to follow, guidebook. It will allow you to practice and progress at your own pace and convenience.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Frederick Fell Publishers, Inc.
• Release date: Jan 1, 2019
• ISBN: 9780883913673

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Copyright © 1976, Creative Learning Services, Inc.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction

Part 1 How To Read Faster

I   Determining Your Starting Point

II   The Mechanics of Good Reading

III   Increasing Fixation Span

IV   Reducing Subvocalization

V   On Progress and Expectations

Part 2 How To Approach The Printed Page

VI   Using All Our Mental Faculties

VII   Reading For A Purpose

VIII   Generate Your Own Thoughts

IX   The Principle of Organization

X   Organization of Chapters and Articles

XI   A Method Of Organization, Discrimination, and Recall All Rolled Into One

XII   Skimming

Part 3 Techniques For The Efficient Reader

XIII   Varying Reading Speed

XIV   Words On Motivation and Concentration

XV   Memory For Reading Material

XVI   How To Study

XVII   Progress Test

Appendix

Answers To Pre-Course and Progress Tests

Converting Time Into Words Per Minute

Records Of Progress

Sources

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

INTRODUCTION

Do you remember your early years in elementary school when first learning to read? Perhaps you remember the teacher using her pointer while the class recognized and recited each word in unison, See… Dick…run… here…comes… Jane. Having mastered these words you gradually increased the number of words you could recognize. You even learned how to use phonics so that you could sound out words that you had never seen before. Then in grade four or thereabouts your reading progress was measured by how well you could read aloud to the rest of the class. If you were successful, you received your praise and were placed in group I, as opposed to group II or III which was for those who were still struggling. You were progressing steadily up until that point. Then you stopped improving. After you attained group I status you did not improve your reading ability to any significant degree.

You may have increased your reading rate and comprehension somewhat because your vocabulary expanded and you gradually attained more background knowledge. As a consequence, new ideas that relate to the prior knowledge could be grasped more quickly. Thus, if you are an average reader, it may seem that your reading skills have improved since the fifth grade, but you are nowhere near your full potential.

Now we find ourselves in the space age with technology and science expanding at a rapidly accelerating pace, where more thought is being written and published than ever before, where modern methods of transportation and communication have made these ideas more accessible than ever before, and where advances in the printing and reproduction industry have made large-scale publications more feasible than in the past.

The amount of reading material is voluminous and it is increasing rapidly. Every career field, from the heart specialist to the grocer, has its own specialized journal and many fields have far more than one. All this points to one absolute truism — that group I reading rate is not good enough anymore. We have come a long way since the wise man was one who had read Plato, Aristotle, the Bible, and nothing else.

This book is not for anyone who has remedial reading difficulties. It is not for the person who typically cannot understand what he or she has read. Rather it is for the great majority of people who fit somewhere in the group I category. In other words, it is for the business man who can read a five-page article with complete comprehension and full retention as long as he has five hours to read it. It is for the person who brutally pounds his fist, grits his teeth, and says, I must not let my mind wander. It is for the college student who leaves written essay type examinations and realizes that he left out a large chunk of information.

EDUCATIONAL OBJECTIVES

Improving Reading Speed

You should use this book to increase the rate at which you can digest material. This does not mean that you should expect to read at 4,000 words per minute or other such preposterous rates that have been advertised. It is physically impossible to read at such rates. When one covers material at such a rate, that person is not actually reading. He is skimming. He is getting the idea perhaps, but without seeing all the words. When I use the term reading, it entails seeing all or at least most of the words. Upon completing all the exercises and tests in the book you may not be able to actually read at 4,000 words per minute, but you could double or even triple your speed without losing comprehension.

All this, incidentally, is not to say that it is wrong or self-defeating to skim material at 4,000 words per minute or more. On the contrary, the ability to come up with the main or most sought-after idea in a relatively short time is valuable and essential for the skilled reader and learner.

There are many instances where skimming should be applied. Learning how and when to skim can even be considered an objective in itself. However, we must not confuse the terms reading and skimming. Reading implies seeing all the words, skimming does not.

Concentration

How often have you found yourself midway down a page and suddenly realizing that your mind is way off in left field. We are all victims of the devastating time wasting activity of lapsing into daydreams without consciously making a decision to do so. It should be your objective to learn and implement methods that will reduce the tendency to drift into daydreams while reading.

Communication

How often has this happened? You finished reading an article and felt that you fully understood it? You certainly could have answered true-false or multiple-choice type questions on it. But then you are presented with a rough question such as Oh, I meant to read that article, what did the author say? Perhaps you found that communicating the proper information in a manner that could be understood and remembered by others was considerably more difficult than it should have been. There may have been a tendency to come out with several isolated facts rather than an organized structure of ideas, and this approach in turn caused the listener’s mind to wander. It should be your objective then, to be able to describe an article by saying, The author said…. and he said that because… in other words, saying as much as possible in the fewest words.

Memory

This book will also contain techniques for improving retention of reading material. You will be shown how to read an article or chapter rapidly and then go back and commit the key ideas to memory so that when you are in the written examination or giving a speech, or whatever, the ideas should return in proper sequence.

Extension to Technical Material

We shall extend these skills to technical material. Our exercises will include selections from a variety of business and academic areas. In other words, this book shows how to deal effectively with information that is communicated in printed form.

HOW TO GET THE MOST OUT OF THIS BOOK

It is not sufficient to simply know and understand the contents of this book. You would like to improve your ability. One improves by thinking, reacting, and doing.

This book must be experienced. In other words you should do all the exercises and try to do your very best on each of them. I hope you find this book to be interesting and well presented. If you do, fine! Nevertheless, this factor will not determine your degree of progress. Nor will there be any magical, sensational new gimmicks that will provide easy and immediate improvement. Your progress depends on you and what you put into it. We will provide the guidelines, the psychological reasons behind a certain technique and a system of feedback so you can be aware of your progress. The rest is up to you. Hopefully you will find the experience a pleasant one which will lead to far greater enjoyment and knowledge in the future.

Once the skills are learned, the reader must be constantly alert to the opportunities for applying the principles and techniques in daily life. If you learn to read, for example, in a certain way, then you should look for some reading material and apply what you have learned in all of your reading and learning situations. Any skill becomes better with practice and use.

PART I

HOW TO READ FASTER

Chapter I

DETERMINING YOUR STARTING POINT

Whenever you undertake any program in which your ultimate objective is self-improvement in some area, you must have some method of measuring your progress. The knowledge that progress is being made is a great motivator which will lead you to practice and use the skills you will acquire in this book, and that in turn will lead to still greater development.

Throughout this book you will measure your reading ability through our testing method. Each of the major tests will be approximately equal in length and level of difficulty. You will keep records of your scores, and if you practice and do all the exercises, you will see a significant, if not dramatic, improvement.

So let us see how you are reading at present.

PRE-COURSE TEST

Part I

In this first portion of the test, you are going to get an idea of your ability to recall and communicate information. Take four minutes to read and study the following article, and prepare for a general-type question. Of course, it would be nice and easy if you were asked to recall immediately upon finishing the article. However that would not be anything close to a real-life situation. After you go through the entire test, then you will be tested on your memory for the contents.

Mobil believes the nation’s energy goal can be simply stated: In the coming decade, to produce a larger proportion of the energy we use; in the longer term, to achieve a reasonable energy surplus. Since nobody can forecast exactly how much energy the U.S. will need, it will be prudent to end up with too much rather than not enough.

But before we talk about surpluses, or even improved self-sufficiency, we have to ask: Why the present crisis? What went wrong?

The questions are necessary, because a nation should be able to learn from its past mistakes.

• Mistake #1 is 20 years old. In 1954 the U.S. imposed price controls on natural gas shipped across state lines. In its eagerness to protect the consumer, the government focused on low prices for the short term. It gave short shrift to the consumer’s long-term stake in security and adequacy of supply. The artificially depressed price of natural gas has produced today’s shortage of natural gas, by stimulating demand while reducing the incentive to look for new supplies. Even under the best conditions, this shortage will be with us for years, and it will probably get a good deal worse before it gets any better.

•Mistake #2 was the failure in past years to allow oil companies to press the search for oil and gas fully enough on the U.S. outer continental shelf. Reaction to the Santa Barbara spill caused too many people to lose their perspective. We must work to prevent spills and at the same time move ahead to try to assure adequate supplies.

Britain will be self-sufficient in oil about 1980, because it has actively promoted exploration under the seas around it, while the U.S. still puts off limits signs on thousands of square miles of outer continential shelf waters.

•Mistake #3 was the failure to permit construction of the Alaska pipeline to begin much earlier. The pipeline raised legitimate questions about the environment. But scare tactics led to overreaction. Result: the line —designed to safeguard both terrain and wildlife on the basis of probably the most detailed ecological analysis ever made—was unnecessarily stalled in the courts and in Congress when it should have been pumping oil into the American economy.

•Mistake #4 was the nation’s snail’s pace development of other energy sources. Construction of atomic power plants has been delayed for a variety of reasons. Coal—our country’s most abundant energy source—was clobbered from all sides. It couldn’t compete with the artificially low prices imposed on natural gas (which in turn held down the price of another competitor, home heating oil), nor could it compete with low-cost foreign oil in the Fifties and Sixties. Finally, a lot of coal was made unusable by tight limitations on sulfur content.

Ironically, too, the expectation of cheap atomic energy discouraged investments in new coal mines—so that the country got the worst of both worlds. There were and are legitimate environmental concerns with both atomic energy and coal. But the nation has let itself be steered away from the basic question: How much energy do we need, how soon, and at what economic and other cost?

•Mistake #5 was the naive belief by many that we could rely indefinitely on getting all the foreign oil we wanted at the price we wanted to pay for it—so that we could continue to waste energy and avoid correcting mistakes #1,2, 3, and 4.

It could have been worse, of course. Remember the people who wanted to make the U.S. even more dependent on foreign oil, while assuring you that national petroleum security was a fiction devised by oil barons to keep domestic petroleum prices up? Remember the people who said not to worry about balance-of-payments problems, because these always righted themselves? And the instant tax experts eager to make sweeping changes, with little concern for the consequences? Fortunately, we didn’t go all the way down any of those primrose paths.

Even so, for at least another 10 years, the U.S. is going to be heavily dependent on imported oil (coming increasingly from the Middle East), because of the long lead times that are unavoidable both in conserving energy on a large scale and in developing additional supplies.

To make a substantial reduction in energy use will require large investments by industry, new building standards for structures of all sorts, large numbers of low-horsepower cars replacing higher-horsepower cars year after year, the development of adequate public transportation systems, and other efforts.

It will take years, and very substantial investments to discover and develop a new offshore oil field, or to get a new coal mine into operation or a nuclear power plant built.

Remember this when anyone tells you we can wait 10 years to even initiate any major effort.

Part II

In this portion of the test, you will be measuring your rate of comprehension to see how much you can comprehend in a given amount of time. There are a total of four excerpts. Your overall objective is to answer as many questions correctly as possible. Read each excerpt and then record the answers to the questions that follow. You have a total of 10 minutes.

One advantage in placing a wheel under a load is in reducing what we call friction. Friction is the resistance which the surfaces of two objects have to being moved against one another. If a surface is rough, it offers more resistance than a smooth or polished surface. Usually a heavy object presses on its lower face until it produces more friction against the surface below than a light object would. A roller or wheel offers less surface for the drag of friction at any one time. A box three feet square offers nine square feet of surface as friction against the floor, if someone tries to drag it. If two rollers two inches in diameter are placed under this box, about how much surface offers resistance at any one time? If wheels are mounted under the box, the bearing surface at any one time is reduced to the parts of the wheels that touch the floor and the parts of the wheels that rest upon the axles.

The fact that a wheel rolls or turns adds to the advantage gained in reducing the bearing surface exposed to friction. In turning, the wheel acts as a lever with the fulcrum at the center. The length of the lever is the radius of the wheel, or the distance from the center to the rim. The advantage in the leverage of a wheel fixed to an axle is the relationship of the radius of the wheel to the radius of the axle. This relationship is expressed as a ratio, R/r. R is the radius of the wheel and r is the radius of the axle.

From Understanding Science, by Ralph Watkins and Winifred Perry. Permission granted by Macmillan Company.

Questions:

1.  Wheels are used in machines to

a) propel objects.

b) reduce friction.

c) reduce heat.

d) reduce speed.

2.  Friction is

a) heat generated by motion.

b) the motion of heat.

c) resistance between objects.

d) weight.

3.  With wheels mounted under a box, the bearing surface is reduced to

a) parts of the axles.

b) parts of the wheels.

c) parts of the box.

d) none of the above.

4.  In summary, a wheel acts as a

a) fulcrum.

b) lever.

c) radius.

d) motor.

5.  The relationship of the radius of a wheel to the radius of the axle gives

a) advantages in leverage.

b) an off-center fulcrum.

c) weight.

d) velocity.

EYES CLOSED, HEADS NODDING—BORING CLASS? NO! HYPNOSIS CLASS AT SCHOOL OF DENTISTRY

Enter one of Benjamin Fabrikant’s classes at the School of Dentistry and you’ll see a group of senior dental students with eyes closed and heads nodding.

A boring class? Never. The students are simply under hypnosis.

For the past three years, Dr. Fabrikant, professor of psychology, has been teaching future dentists to use hypnosis, rather than drugs or anesthesia, to decrease patients’ pain.

Helping the patient relax is one of the most important points of hypnosis, says Dr. Fabrikant. It’s difficult to work on patients with tense muscles. Through hypnosis, you can help the patient relax his muscles. And when he relaxes, his fear and perception of pain diminishes.

Diminish is the key word. Dr. Fabrikant says a dentist must explain to the patient that pain will not be completely eliminated under hypnosis, but he will be able to detach himself from the discomfort associated with pain.

Dr. Fabrikant’s students experience for themselves what their future patients will feel. For a part of every class, he hypnotizes his students, suggesting feelings of weight and anesthesia in various parts of their bodies.

The procedure is not complicated. Dr. Fabrikant tells the students to close their eyes and relax. He describes a scene to them, and then tells them to imagine themselves walking down a carpeted stairway. To instill a feeling of security, he tells them that he will accompany them down the stairs.

Then he tells them to imagine a scale ranging from one to 10. One is the point of total alertness; 10 is deepest relaxation. The students concentrate on the scale until one number stands out in their minds. That number indicates the degree of each student’s relaxation.

Now Dr. Fabrikant suggests a feeling of anesthesia in one part of the body, such as a finger. During one class last spring, a student was convinced she had lost all her feeling in her finger.

Dr. Fabrikant’s brand of relaxation seems better than taking drugs to reduce pain. But he cautions patients to seek a dentist who has formal hypnosis training, since hypnosis can be dangerous in the hands of an amateur.

6.  When under hypnosis

a) pain is eliminated.

b) the patient is detached from the pain.

c) the patient perceives pain as pleasure.

d) even severe pain is usually eliminated.

7.  Dr. Fabrikant suggests feelings of anesthesia

a) in the mouth.

b) in the jaws and gums.

c) in the arms.

d) in parts of the body.

8.  To instill security, the doctor wants his students to imagine

a) he is with them.

b) a loved one is with them.

c) they are on a beach.

d) a friend is descending the stairs with them.

9.  On a scale, deepest relaxation is represented by

a) two

b) fifteen

c) ten

d) twenty

10. Hypnosis is

a) proven to be more effective than drugs.

b) easier to use than pain killing drugs.

c) only occasionally better than drugs.

d) none of the above.

Apparently, high unemployment makes trade unions less likely to strike, but loss of real income makes them more likely to strike. What does this imply for the current situation of rising unemployment and also rising inflation and falling real income?

Douglas Hibbs, a political scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has established a clear link between high unemployment and low union militancy in ten major western industrial nations in the decades 1950 to 1969. In a recession, workers worry about losing their jobs and are reluctant to call strikes; employers are more ready to face a long shutdown because sales are low.

Dr. Hibbs finds an equally clear and far longer lasting link between strikes and falling real pay. His equations suggest that a 1-percent drop in the rate of growth of real wages produces an average 59 more days lost in strikes per 1,000 workers spread over the following 5 years; generally the loss in man-days is greatest in the second and third year following the drop in real wages. The losses have been highest in Italy, the United States,