Very worthwhile – providing essential tools for anyone who has to read for their job,
David Milham, Director of ASC Finance for Business. 
Speedreading
An average reading rate is 150 to 300 words per minute (wpm). Come on our courses and in just 3 hours we will teach you to read 33% faster by the end of the course or your money back. This is our guarantee.
On one of our recent courses delegate David Milham of ASC Finance for Business increased his reading rate from 100wpm to 400wpm, with no loss of comprehension at all. This was tested and measured on different pieces of text at the start and end of the course so that we knew the result was authentic. He can now read work documents in just a quarter of the time and is currently working towards reading even faster - 500wpm or more.
Let's look at how the savings can impact someone's bottom line. Example: you read emails, working material and newspapers etc for, say, 3 hours a day at work. Your fee for 1 hour is £50ph, so £350 for one day. After coming on our course, you get your deskwork done in just 2 hours, instead of 3. This means you are saving £50 a day, £250 a week, £1000 a month, or £12000pa, or can use the saved time to earn £12K more worth of fees from clients. If money is not your thing, think of how else you can spend the time you save: more quality time with the family, hobbies, travel....
The human brain is a naturally fast reader, but the way we are taught to read at school slows us down and most of us never have a true experience of how quickly our brains can really read while maintaining good comprehension.
We are frequently asked to read out loud, which is fine when you are testing pronunciation, but when it comes to developing your reading speed and fluency in general, it is ineffective because it slows down your reading rate and therefore the rate at which text will be absorbed. Research has shown that even when we are not reading out aloud, we are still sub-vocalising - an involuntary movement of the vocal chords - which slows us down, and so we remain forever limited in our reading potential, unless someone shows us otherwise.
What other myths are there?
Myth #1: "You have to read every letter to understand the text"
Your brain is hard-wired to hunt for and identify the meaning of what you are seeing, rather than focussing on the order of the letters or words. Check out the text below. The letters have been jumbled around, and yet you can still read and understand it. Reading fast and accurately is easy without having to read every letter.
Hree is smoe fnuny txet. Can you raed it? As yuo cna ees, teh ltteres dno't vhae to be in the rgiht oerdr, you can raed the txet eevn if the ltetres are a mses. Yes, we can eevn raed tghins taht are witetrn bdrawacks. Tihs is bseucae we dno't raed the idvanidul lrttees, but the wrdos as a wlhoe. Aminzag huh?
The same applies to text that is upside down or back to front. At Blue Orchid Consulting we have even tested this on text, in which half the words have been deleted - you can still read and understand it.
Myth #2: "Reading slowly makes you a better reader"
Another bad habit is our cultivating the belief we have to read every word slowly and deliberately in order to understand the text. In reality the brain does not need to do this in order to absorb information - we have just been conditioned to believe it does. When we do regular reading we make a small pause on each word. The average duration of each mini pause is 0.27 seconds, so in a book of 150 pages, with 30 lines per page and 15 words per line, we are making pauses worth a staggering 5 hours. Add to this any jumps, missed words and lines, and paragraphs that we go back and read twice, and you get the picture of a boring, literally mind-numbing process, when it could be so much more dynamic and effective. If you learn to read by focusing on the sense units that your brain likes, then you automatically eliminate many of the pauses and so can complete reading the book in 2 hours. You can see this is a no-brainer, but how many of us have ever been shown how to do this?
Myth #3: "Reading faster will reduce your comprehension"
The speed of your reading does not define how well you understand the text. It is how you do the speedreading that does. Even speedreading can be done poorly and with low comprehension rates, if you have not been trained to do it well. The term speedreading can mislead people into believing that speed is everything, when in fact it is not. Time is important, but high comprehension is in fact the main goal. In speedreading we always read for comprehension. Speedreading is a technique that enables you to read at a better rate for understanding the text - which most of us have not experienced. Many students experience a rise in their comprehension rates by the end of the course, and this can be proven because we benchmark the starting point of each delegate at the beginning of the course, and check their closing position too. Speedreading develops mental acuity.
Myth #4: "I can only enjoy text, when I read it more slowly"
You may think this is the case because so far in your life this is probably all that you have known, but if you come on one of our courses, you will find that in reality the opposite is true. Scientifically speaking, reading more slowly than your brain goes is frustrating and generates stress. This in turn produces cortisol in the body, and cortisol shuts down the higher learning centre in the brain.
We have all experienced this: fighting a continual battle to maintain focus. On the one hand you get a feeling of boredom, of fatigue, of not wanting to continue. You keep blinking to keep our eyes open and stay alert, while your mind wanders off and you feel that you want to be somewhere else. On the other hand you can experience brainfog or, worse still, brainlock - those moments when you know that nothing is going in at all. This is not productive or enjoyable, and it is a total disincentive. This is not what you need when you have lots to get through and things to do with the material after that, such as write a report, prepare a presentation, study for an exam etc. Efficient speedreading creates fluidity and allows the words to come alive. They become a mini-movie in the mind, making them more meaningful and memorable. It feels like gliding, it's productive, it's fun and it's motivating. You will no longer feel overwhelmed by all the reading you have to do for your job or just want to do for yourself in life. Instead your aspirations, once potentially so far off, will suddenly become achievable, bringing about great stress-relief and a rise in confidence.
Myth #5: "Reading faster means I will miss things"
No, you won't. If you attempt to speed up your regular reading without the benefit of decent training in speedreading, then a drop in comprehension may well be the result - in fact we would say that such a result is to be expected - but with training this will change. When we learn to speedread we learn to read in a way that our brain was born to do, and so relinquish doing the things we don't need to do. These include sub-vocalisation, making unnecessary pauses, re-reading and a number of other things.
Psycho-linguistics shows that our brain is naturally able to group things into sense units in order to understand content, and in doing this it can go through text far more effectively than it does when we regularly read. It does not 'lose' or 'forget' or 'overlook' any words or sense units. It still 'gets' what the test is about with all its inferences, subtle and otherwise. It sees them all, it just does this with fewer pauses and other interruptions, and so is able to absorb them more fluently. Again, this is tested on the course. When the writer of this went on her first speedreading course her speed trebled and her comprehension went up from 8/10 to 9/10. Others started at much lower comprehension levels (6/10 for instance) and went up to 8/10 with speedreading, an even bigger jump.
What you will learn on a course
- How inner speech slows us down and how to overcome it
- What causes us to get distracted and how to eliminate this
- How to focus your eyes more effectively on the page
- How to widen your field of vision to take in more
- How to use rhythm to read faster
- Eye relaxation exercises
- Mental relaxation exercise
- Thin slicing - getting to the core more quickly
The service
- Small courses of less than 10 people with individual attention assured
- Results that are measurable and guaranteed
- Total training time is 3 hours and an optional follow-up phone session 1 week later
Our guarantee
Increase your reading speed by 33% in 3 hours or your money back.
Courses
We run public courses every Tuesday afternoon starting mid May 2010. Course dates, a booking form, and details of where to stay and how to get to our training venue are all on the Courses page. Contact us to enquire about in-house courses or family groups, and to find out about payment methods.
