What is reading?

Great Expectations

You are beginning a program of reading improvement. This program can help you in many ways. First, through better reading, you can become more efficient in your work. This means that you will be able to learn more quickly, more easily, and more thoroughly. In today's highly competitive economic and scholastic world, who could wish for more?

But there is more. Reading helps us adjust to many new situations. The experiences of others, learned through reading, teach us important lessons - lessons we could not otherwise learn without costly trial and error. Finally, reading contributes to our relaxation and enjoyment. The efficient reader can bury himself in a good book and temporarily transcend his tensions and troubles. Pity the poor reader, hampered by inefficient reading habits and skills, who is unable to gain such rewards from reading.

You have taken the important first step on the road to reading improvement. The very fact that you are reading these words testifies to your interest in and concern over your reading. But interest and concern are not enough.

Sustained reading improvement depends on three conditions:

1. You must be serious in your intention to improve. Like the horse in the adage, this book can only lead you to water; you must choose whether or not to drink.

2. You must practice your newly acquired skills. There is no educational substitute for thoughtful, intelligent practice.

3. Most of all, you must be willing to change. We are all creatures of habit. We resist changing our habits because they are too much a part of us. You have been reading for many years now, and you have formed many comfortable (but inefficient) reading habits. You must be willing to forgo these for the greater good of more efficient reading. These changes will be uncomfortable - like new shoes - for a while until they break in and become new habits. Expect this initial resistance, it is a sign that you have begun to improve.

All this probably sounds like hard work, and it is. Fortunately for us, we value highly that which we work hard to achieve.

What is Reading?

Perhaps we should begin by saying what reading is not: It is not simply the ability to call out words on sight. It is not simply the ability to answer correctly comprehension questions following a story. It is not simply the ability to race down a page reading thousands of words per minute. These skills are all part of reading, but reading involves many other skills, too: skills such as (1) seeing, (2) moving the eyes, (3) recognizing words, (4) understanding word meanings, (5) interpreting the author's words, (6) following a series of statements to their logical conclusion, (7) comprehending the author's intended meaning, drawing conclusions and making inferences, appraising ideas, agreeing and disagreeing, etc., and (10) reacting to ideas, following directions, and so on. In addition, these skills must be employed efficiently and coordinately for successful reading.

Eye Movements in Reading

Because reading is partially a visual skill, it may be of interest to explore how our eyes operate when we read. If you've ever watched a reader's eye movements, you've probably noticed that his eyes do not move along the line in a smooth, even motion. Rather, the eyes actually move in short, jerky motions making a series of starts and stops along the line. These stops are called fixations, and these pauses are the only periods of clear vision. Fixations total on the average about 94% of our reading time. The eye moves from one fixation to the next with a quick jerk. These inter-fixation movements are so rapid that clear vision is impossible. These total 6% of our reading time. During reading, therefore, our eyes are motionless a large portion of the time.

Sometimes as we read, our eyes move back to the beginning of the line to reread something which was not understood the first time. The backward movements are called regressions. At the end of each line the eyes make a return sweep to the beginning of the next line. Naturally, for efficient reading, the return sweep must be rapid and accurate.

As you would suspect, poor reading is characterized by many fixations and regressions, indicating word-by-word reading and poor comprehension. Good readers, on the other hand, make fewer fixations (they read two or three words during each fixation) and rarely regress. These facts about the eye movements of good and poor readers were confirmed by eye-movement photography. We are able to photograph a person's eye movements while he is actually reading, thus indicating his fixative or regressive habits. This knowledge led to the development and refinement of projectors and mechanical devices which are used in the POWEREADING Program in which you are presently enrolled.

In addition to the many skills involved in reading, there are also many kinds of reading. Most everyone reads a telephone book differently from a newspaper, a dictionary differently from a novel.

Selective Reading

Let us now examine the kind of reading which this lesson encourages. The skills presented in this lesson develop the reader's ability to analyze, select, and extract vital facts and essential information. The late President Kennedy was said to have read 1,200 words per minute. This rapid rate was attributed to his ability to pick out the important facts in the material he was reading. This is Selective Reading. It is most useful on informative, factual, well-organized materials, the kind of writing encountered in textbooks, reports, business literature, and trade publications. Selective Reading can be employed on almost any kind of reading matter when the reader wants the essentials without the embellishments.

This text will teach you the necessary skills of paragraph recognition, identification and analysis. Using these skills, the reader can quickly and rapidly isolate the all-important main ideas. Also you will learn how to exploit clues the author gives to help the reader bypass the bulk of illustrative data in his search for important supplementary information.

The art of skimming will be covered. This vital reading skill, erroneously pictured as careless, haphazard reading, will enable you to whirl down a column of print at thousands of words per minute, getting a good overall impression of the material. Skimming is a complementary reading skill to be employed, as occasions arise, along with your other kinds of reading. Some programs of reading improvement are based solely on the skill of skimming which, although their students skim at phenomenal speeds, shortchange the reader on the other essential reading skills.