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- How well do you read?
Pretty well to excellent, but I've had 50 years of practice.
- How fast do you read?
Usually 100 to 1,000 wpm - most of the time around 300 to 600 wpm, but often much faster and frequently much slower. I speed up and slow down depending on what I want from the material. I don't read at just one speed.
- How many books have you read?
A large bookstore full.
- Have you understood any of them?
A few, I hope. Like everyone, I often gain a deeper understanding when I read a book again; it's something I love to do. For example, when you read a classic, such as Plutarch's biographies of the Greeks and Romans, and then read it again later, say a few months, years or decades later; all the life experiences you've undergone and all the things you've learned add and deepen your understanding of the challenges faced by those people. Your new life experiences give you more potential areas of connection. These new connections can increase your understanding and enjoyment of the material and affect your appreciation for how important their choices and actions were and how they helped shape the world we live in today.
- What do you like to read?
Everything, but mostly nonfiction these days.
- What are you reading now?
4 books on physics and optics, in a few hours I'll be reading something else. Perhaps the NYTimes or the WashPost on the Internet or a book on history.
- Why is a dictionary so vitally important?
It's everyone's road map; it shows us how to get more meaning from our reading and leads us to deeper understandings based upon wider perspectives. Words have many meanings and histories; the more you know, the more you can know and the easier reading becomes.
- Does Power Reading make it easier or faster to study and does it show you how?
Easier sometimes, faster sometimes and better all the time because of the easy step by step methods that you can customize and adapt to your own reading needs. You will also learn what is recommended by other leading experts.
- Can you Power Read work materials?
Yes, you can learn using your work materials - both paper and online. If you use the techniques as given, you will begin to increase comprehension, speed and productivity the very first day.
- Can anyone become a Power Reader?
Yes, if they're willing to use the Power Reading methods for 30 days, which includes reading at least 10 minutes a day and practicing for 5 more.
- How much can you expect to improve?
Most people will double their reading speed and increase their comprehension. After Power Reading, they will be able to read twice as much or cut their reading time in half.
- Is there only one way to learn Power Reading?
You can take any of the 5 paths through Power Reading and achieve a 10% to 100% improvement. These paths can help any level of reader and allow a self-chosen pace for progress.
- Do you get to read a lot of good books?
Yes! - you can choose whatever books you wish to read and there's a great recommended reading list included with 1 to 5 books to choose from each week.
- Is Power Reading the same as other speedreading or study programs you've taught or studied in the past?
Power Reading is completely unique from all other speedreading programs; it is based on my lifetime of teaching others, experimenting with many methods and evolving my own system which focuses on improving reading comprehension first and then working on increasing reading speed. I started tutoring others in High School and have been helping others in this area for decades. For years I was the most successful instructor for the world's largest private speedreading instruction company, Evelyn Wood Reading Dynamics. I left them, as others, to freely pursue my own continuing exploration and research to create the most effective methods for teaching high comprehension reading to everyone for business, school or technical materials - methods that emphasized a reader's understanding over speed. I wanted to teach people with natural, comfortable methods how to become the best, most powerful readers in the world. That's why I created Power Reading.
In the Power Reading Course you spend the first half of the course, the first 2 weeks, working on improving comprehension and the basic reading process (comprehension drills are included that work in any type of material you choose - you are not forced to read passages that may be of no interest to you - see comprehension drills Chapters 7 and 10 and look in the index under comprehension). To increase your reading abilities you need to use some techniques and drills to get you to speed up. In the Power Reading Course, I recommend you use a pen, pencil or finger as a regulator and that you spend your time using my comprehension based approach in material that you have to or want to read for school, work or pleasure. Comprehension is what we concentrate and drill on every day during the course and you will see that your speed will also increase quickly. We then go on to a third week of learning the most effective methods for work, study and technical reading. Only during the final week, when you are trying to learn and practice to do high speed previews and reviews and how to skim over and scan reading material at higher speeds, do you work at "speedy speedreading".
Power Reading covers most of the other well-known modern methods and books on speedreading and gives you the references so that you can practice at comparing different alternatives and methods and coming to your own educated opinion in this most important subject of increasing reading and study skills as well as other subjects in your life.
Early speedreading methods are covered such as Pitkin in The Art of Rapid Reading, 1929, in which he tells you to try to read a line with one glance if possible, others recommend 2 or 3 glances per line and you will learn about machine based courses and the history of speedreading and reading. You will learn how Power Reading is different and why it's easy, successful methods are used in the course the way they are. Plus there is an outstanding list of recommended reading, a full bibliography and an extensive index, all of which help make Power Reading to be what I believe is the easiest, most effective, up-to-date course and book for productivity-increase in reading and study for school or for work.
Some modern speedreading courses still use machine pacers and many have adopted the Wood approach of trying to greatly increase reading speed quickly. They try to push you to double or triple your speed within the first few hours or days, often using the finger and hand as a fast pacer to push you down the page. This method was based upon Wood's idea that she could learn to speedread if she moved her hand quickly across the page in the same way she had when she was brushing some bread crumbs off a book she had been reading earlier; her approach emphasized high, fast increases in "reading speed" and used much drilling with limited comprehension and hoped for comprehension to catch up weeks or months later. (See machines and other approaches in Chapter 14 or the Wood, Berg, Moidel, Kump, Marks-Beal books or other speedreading books and methods listed in the Bibliography and Index; also there are leading study-methods books by Armstrong, Fry, Hanau, Green, Luckie and Robinson and others).
Power Reading is unique in its emphasis on comprehension first and speed second and while it shares some techniques in common with many other methods, it uses them in an individual, natural, step by step approach that increases everyone's ability to read during the one month course.
- Do you always have to use a Regulator in Power Reading or even learn with one?
A regulator is only a tool to help you get started and make sure you achieve your goal by the end of the one month. If you choose not to use one, as explained in the book, you will probably have to concentrate and work harder to achieve the goals you set.
- Why is the most active reading mostly thinking about the meaning of what you're reading and less about the vocabulary and number and structure of the words and just going along "listening" to the author?
When you're actively, creatively reading, you need to mentally stretch out and search for new connections and patterns. When you read something deep, you need to persist in trying to think about it and turn it like a jigsaw puzzle piece to explore possible new ways you can make it fit and to see what else you can relate it to and what else it's different from. You are looking for other examples, exceptions, contradictions, applications or some new and different connections or uses that you haven't already been told or may have forgotten or may have been in another subject or book. You need to work at thinking about the ideas and information and not just try to understand, remember, memorize and just unquestioningly accept whatever you read. For example, here is something that is easy to read but gives you a lot to think about:
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