Raise your arms straight out in front of you at shoulder height and point your fingertips toward the ceiling. Slowly move your hands and arms apart to the sides without moving your head or your eyes.
Your hands are not in focus but they are visible. When you are at the point where you no longer see your hands while staring straight ahead, since they are now too far out of your periphery, bring them back in just enough to where you can see them again. Now, look at how far apart your hands are. This is your peripheral vision ability.
Method 2: Discovering your eye span. Choose a letter in the center of a line of text and place a finger on the left and right of it. Stare directly at the letter without moving your eyes or head. Slowly move your fingers apart, exposing more letters and words. Look at how much you see while still focusing on the letter. This is your present eye span ability. With practice, you can widen your eye span.
Turbo Comprehension: Start to Widen Your Track
In Day 4, you will learn how to widen your eye span with two specific strategies: reading key words and reading phrases. But right now you can get a jump start on learning to widen your eye span.
The Eye Span Pyramid
Focus carefully on the number at the center of each line. Start with the top number and slowly jump your eyes to stop on the next number down. By focusing hard you will see the numbers or syllables at both ends simultaneously. It will be more challenging as you go down. Come back to this from time to time to gauge your peripheral vision ability.
4 1 6
26 2 57
44 3 60
38 4 16
92 5 11
47 6 15
81 7 66
94 8 12
80 9 28
j 1 r
This exercise is designed to help you develop a quick and accurate perception of phrases as thought groups. It also serves as an introduction to a faster reading technique called phrasing. The objective of this exercise is to glance at each phrase, completely reading the phrase as a whole.
With a blank 3 x 5 index card in your hand, cover the column of phrases with the card. Then with a quick flick of your wrist, move the card down to reveal just one phrase and immediately cover it back up again. This exposes the first phrase of the column for an instant. Keep the rest of the column
covered. Predict what you believe you saw by saying it aloud or writing it down. If you're not sure, take a guess. Then check yourself by uncovering the phrase or column. Quickly move down each column, repeating the procedure for each line. Return to this exercise from time to time to retest your skill. Keep track of how many phrases you get correct by putting the number at the bottom of each set.
Set 1
success story
Number correct out of twenty: __
The more phrases correct out of twenty, the less help you will need with this technique. However, if you didn't do well, there are other ways to improve. For example, the next time you are at a light or stuck in traffic look at the license plate in front of you and then quickly look away. Can you accurately predict what you just saw? Also try this with road signs, billboards, or writing on the sides of trucks.
An Important Word About Your Brain
Your eyes act as a window to your brain. If you have been an untrained, passive reader, your eyes have been open only a crack. In the process of learning to read faster, your eye muscles have to stretch in order to get more information to your brain in a shorter amount of time. Initially your brain will have a difficult time handling the extra load. You can almost hear it say, "Whoa! What are you doing? I'm not used to all this information at once!"
Find comfort in the fact that your brain is constantly seeking meaning for everything it registers. It is always looking to comprehend even though at times you may not think so. It takes the brain a little time to figure out what your eyes are doing and, before long, your comprehension is back, or even better than before.
Start Your Engines: The Left Side Pull
In Day 1, I described the reasons and uses of "Adding a Stick Shift to Your Reading." You might want to go back to this section to refresh your memory about pacers. Initially, you may experience some natural discomfort as you adjust to using each pacer but with practice it will become more
comfortable.
When trying the eye span flashing exercise earlier in this chapter, you might have noticed that you were more accurate on the left side than the right. This is because you have learned to read left to right.
The Left Side Pull — today's new pacer — helps you focus your eyes on the beginning of the line as well as keep your place reading down the text. Choose a page in a magazine, newspaper, or this book to experiment with. With an empty hand, either left or right, point your index finger next to the left side, or beginning of the line. As you read across a line, slowly but continually move your finger down the left side of the column. As you get more accustomed to using it, try moving it a little faster.
Gauge Your Attitude
Let's take an attitude check. Mentally fill in the blank of the following statement:
I am a(n) ________ reader.
Is your reading attitude changing?
Pit Stop: Tip of the Day
If you are like most people, you have no idea how much time you actually spend reading on a daily or a weekly basis. You may know, however, by looking at your piles that you need more time. To really make use of the information in this book, you need time to read and experiment with the new
techniques. Otherwise they won't work for you. It doesn't mean you have to read a specific amount every day. It doesn't mean you need to spend hours at a time. You probably read every day. Think about it. You read your mail. You check your e-mail. You peruse memos, reports, textbooks,
newspapers, or magazines. You can use these times to practice without making any extra time to read.
Whatever you do, you need to figure out when you can fit in more practice reading.
Look at your schedule. Decide when you can add a little reading to your day or use your cur rent reading time to experiment. Be flexible with the time. Just do it!
Day 3 will focus on learning how to improve your concentration, which is one of the most important skills to reading quickly with better comprehension.