Speeding Through Your Studies

    

 While reading the online version of the Daily Campus, I stumbled upon an article about a man named Howard Berg. Howard Berg, the Guinness Book of World Record’s “World’s Fastest Reader”, has the amazing ability to read up to 80 pages of text in a single minute. Berg claims to have completed a four-year psychology program in one year, a graduate course in educational psychology in seven hours, and a six hour test in 50 minutes all due to his ability to read at such a fast pace. Because of his obvious success in using his technique, Berg has started his own speed reading program, which he claims will improve reading speed by 100%.

     Ever since I can remember, I have been a slow reader. I can do math problems quickly and with ease, but it will take me months to complete a novel of 500 pages. It’s not due to my lack of interest, but my inability to read at a quick speed. I have found this to be very frustrating in my first months in college. Studying and learning in college requires a large amount of reading, no matter the subject or class. In hopes of improving my ability to speed-read, I enrolled in Oracle at the beginning of the semester. I quickly learned that the class was focused more on improving study habits than the ability to read quickly. I ended up dropping the class, but I was still curious about potentially finding a way to teach myself how to quickly pick up information in order to better my college studies. I have always been skeptical of these speed-reading courses because I don't understand how something can completely alter the way someone has been reading for their entire life. I was excited to find a link in the article to a list of Berg’s introductory tips, and I plan to go over them soon. It will be interesting to see if these tips are beneficial. Faster reading will lead to better learning, something I know we could all use.


    Does speed reading seem like a scam to you? I never believed that a class or a tutorial could actually improve my reading speed. However, I see no harm in trying it. As they always say, "practice makes perfect!"