Chapter 5 Improving Your Reading. Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.5 | 2...

Chapter 5

Improving

Your Reading

Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved. 5 | 2

Ways to improve your reading

• Learn the reading speed limits

• Pick up your PACE naturally


How the eyes read

• Moves (saccades)

• Pauses (fixations)

• Focusing


What eye-motionphotography reveals

• An average of 4 fixations per second

• 1.1 to 2.5 words per fixation


Reading speed limit

• 4 x 2.5 x 60 = 600 words per minute


What reading speedestimates don’t include

• Regressions

• Comprehension and consolidation


Reading expert,Anne Cunningham

• Places speed limit closer to 300 wpm


Hear your silentspeech: Vocalization:

• Most readers “speak” their words as they read

• By whispering their words

• By moving their lips

• By vibrating their vocal cords

• Vocalization is necessary but can slow you down


NASA’s silentspeech breakthrough

• Silent speech used to be measurable

• Now with sensors it can be understood!


How much canyou comprehend?

• Even speedy readers must take time out to comprehend what they read


One word at a time

• MIT research shows we comprehend each word individually

• Fixations continue until words are recognized and understood!


Comprehensionrequires consolidation time

• Words you read must be moved from short-term to long-term memory


Speed readingclaims don’t hold up

• Eye movements, vocalization, comprehension, and consolidation all slow us down


How can you read faster?

• By cutting down processing time and picking up the PACE

• P: Preparation

• A: Altitude

• C: Clustering

• E: Experience


Preparation: The more prepared youare, the speedier your reading will be

• Overview your assignments

• Use Gibbon’s “Great Recall”

• Try Daniel Webster’s Way


Overviewing providesadvance organizers

• Look at titles, headings, subheadings, captions, and key paragraphs


Gibbon’s “Great Recall” assembles your mental tools

• Devote time to recalling all you know about a particular subject before you begin reading.


Daniel Webster’s Wayinvolves making three lists

• Questions you expect the reading to answer

• Knowledge you expect to gain from the reading

• Where you expect this knowledge will lead you


Altitude: Depending on your purpose, reading can be done at a variety of levels

• Scan at 35,000 feet to look for specific words

• Skim at the treetops for general clues or to get the gist

• Read at ground level if your goal is comprehension


Scanning for specifics

• When you know exactly what you’re looking for

• Concentrate and rely on mere recognition to spot what you want


Skimming for general clues

• Guess the form that your answer will take

• Skim closely enough to pick up the proper context


Skimming to get thegist of an article or book

• Helps you to determine if a book or article is worth reading

• Read the introduction, summary, and all paragraphs with pertinent topic sentences


Reading for comprehension

• The majority of reading you’ll do

• Labeled “rauding” by Carver to distinguish it from scanning and skimming

• Rauding rate: 300 standard words per minute


Cluster: Digesting reading more readily but reading words in meaningful groups

• Use intonation

• Think in terms of paragraphs

• Process your reading a page at a time


Use intonation

• Grouping words of a sentence into meaningful, rhythmic clusters will make them easier to manage, comprehend and remember.


Think in terms of paragraphs

• Identify the elements of each paragraph

• Topic sentence

• Supporting sentences

• Concluding sentence

• … and then distill it down to a single, manageable sentence


Reading a page at a time

• Thomas Babington Macaulay improved his comprehension by summarizing each page before moving on to the next one.


Experience: Authors assume their readers share a certain background of knowledge

• To keep up to speed with the writers you read:– Bolster your background by reading good

books and seeing important movies– Beef up your vocabulary by using the Frontier

System explained in the next chapter

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