digest
Short Summary
Main recommendation: Use a hand-pacing technique (your hand moves left to right across the page, with your eye following it) to speed up reading at your peak comprehension rate, then preview the text for five key elements before reading so comprehension stays high. Howard Berg says this can improve reading speed by 10 to 20% within minutes, and that a normal person could double their speed in about two and a half hours.
Key Points
- Berg argues that reading slowly stems from "visual regression" and an internal voice pronouncing words one at a time, so vision should be used more like a camera than like hearing.
- Information doubles about every six months, so he frames faster, more comprehensive reading as a practical necessity for work, school, and home.
- Comprehension depends on "schema" (what you already know); he shows that adding a title ("Laundry") to a confusing passage makes it instantly understandable.
- Before reading a text, look for five things: vocabulary (bolded, italic, underlined, colored, or tabled words), names and what those people did, numbers/dates/statistics/formulas, the five main ideas in each heading/subheading section, and end-of-chapter questions.
- He claims a group of students aged 11 to 15 used these methods, and that 15 of them passed the CLEP exam for college credit after one week with a 30-chapter college-level psychology book, though these are his own reported results.
Details Worth Noting
- Concrete instructions:
- Pick a book you have already read and understood, so any confusion is due to speed rather than content.
- Time yourself for one minute reading at your normal comfortable pace, and mark with a pen where you stopped.
- Start the next chapter by moving your left hand from the left margin to the right margin across each line, with your eye following your hand, reading as fast as you can comprehend.
- Keep increasing speed until comprehension drops, then slow down just enough to restore it, and practice this for about 10 minutes.
- Return to the first chapter and read for one minute with your hand guiding your eye; expect a 10 to 20% gain. Reaching full potential takes about two and a half hours.
- Before opening a book, scan for the five elements above: highlighted vocabulary, names, numbers/formulas, section headings with their five key ideas, and end-of-chapter questions.
- Berg says the method works partly because vision processes large amounts of information at once, while hearing handles one sound at a time.
- He compares the common reading experience to driving: reading a book in one direction at about 200 words per minute, with recall of roughly 10% the next day, versus taking in a whole scene at once.
Bottom Line
The core payoff is a quick, low-effort hand-guided reading drill combined with a pre-reading preview of key elements, which Berg presents as a way to read faster while retaining more, though his claimed results come from his own program and testimonials.
