What You Can Learn From Speed Reading

Together, Jan Cisek and Susan Norman have produced Speed Reading Faster – Maximize Your Success in Business and Study – a book which leads you to use the various techniques on the book itself. You learn to speed read faster by speed reading the book itself. Why ‘speed read faster’ rather than just ‘speed read’? Because speed reading, technically (and according to many books and courses), is just reading faster. But in this book Jan and Susan offer many different individual techniques (previewing, setting a purpose, opening your peripheral vision, using patterns to find hotspots of key information, and more).

They have spent many years running courses together, successfully teaching thousands of people to speed read their way to increased success in their studies, their personal development and their business endeavours.

But it didn’t happen overnight.

How it started
Jan started the whole thing when he went on a (very expensive) course in the US to become an instructor in Photoreading (an American branded version of speed reading). Which he did. He was the first registered instructor in the UK. And Susan was a participant on one of his first courses.

Susan:
“I was already a good reader, but always keen to learn new skills, and I went home from Jan’s course inspired to follow the instructions (do one exercise a day for 22 days to build the habit). I lasted about three days, didn’t see any great improvement and then it went on hold. About three months later, I started feeling annoyed with myself. I’d paid the money, I was already an intelligent reader, why couldn’t I master this thing? So I picked up a book I needed to read, followed all the instructions I could remember, and something clicked. I could do it. Something had clearly been percolating in my brain in the background and all became clear. It wasn’t rocket science, it was just reading to get the information I needed. But it did feel a bit like magic.”

Jan:
“Susan and her husband Hugh were the Directors of SEAL (the Society for Effective Affective Learning) and we’d all met on one of the amazing conferences they organised on leading edge learning in 1999. We all became friends, and when I went round to their rabbit-warren of a home, I was very impressed with the huge number of books they had. I immediately rented a flat from them and stayed long enough to speed reading them all. Then I moved to Barbados.

“After a year I’d read everything on the island and had dengue fever (I don’t recommend it), so came back to the UK and stayed (‘just for five days’) with Susan and Hugh. Susan was already an established author (at the time of writing now she’s had more than 50 books published – mainly on learning and teaching English to non-English speakers) and a world expert in accelerated learning, so I asked her if we could write together the definitive book on some version of speed reading. She said it would probably take longer than five days, but was quite keen.”

Susan:
“For me, writing a book about something is my way of consolidating my own learning. As part of the process of writing, Jan and I started running speed reading courses together, and after each course, we’d evaluate who’d picked up everything quickly, and (crucially) why other people had found it more of a struggle. What could we do differently to make the learning process easier for everyone? In 2010 we produced our first book together (The Speed Reading Bible) which has been translated into five European languages. We used it as the workbook for our courses – but continued to note ways in which we could help people learn more easily.”

Essential reading technique
One thing we realised was that some of the people who came on courses were not confident readers. Some of them actively hated reading. One judged books on how big (thick) they were – he wouldn’t read big books. When we talked to these people, we realised that many had missed an essential part of ‘learning to read’ in the first place. In school, they had been taught letters and sounds and how to build and decipher words. But after that they’d been left to work out the second stage for themselves: how to derive meaning from what they were reading. They were still reading one-word-at-a-time-which-is very-slow-and-boring-so-your-brain-switches-off-and- you-lose-concentration-and-get-to-the-end-of-a-page-and-realise-you-don’t-know-what-you’ve-read. The answer … is to look forwards … and read words … in meaningful groups. This is not a speed reading technique, it’s a basic reading skill, but it can make a huge difference to some people in their ability to understand what they’re reading – and we include it in the book because it makes everything else easier if you can do it.

We’re confident that after a quarter of a century, our new book, Speed Reading Faster, is as good as we can make it.

How we’re using Speed Reading now
These days Susan reads a lot of novels for pleasure (at ‘normal speed’, two or three a week), and speed reads as many as she needs to get information for the next book she’s writing. Jan is finding his speed reading skills invaluable for dealing with the sheer volume of academic research as he works towards his PhD.

This blog was written by Jan Cisek and Susan Norman. Their book Speed Reading Faster – Maximize Your Success in Business and Study is available to pre-order now.