Who is the author of 10 Days to Faster Reading?

The author of 10 Days to Faster Reading is The Princeton Language Institute and Abby Marks Beale.

10 Days to Faster Reading Book Summary - 10 Days to Faster Reading Book explained in key points

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10 Days to Faster Reading summary

Name: 10 Days to Faster Reading
Rating: 4.4 (569 reviews)
Author: The Princeton Language Institute and Abby Marks Beale

The Princeton Language Institute Abby Marks Beale

Zip Through Books, Magazines, and Newspapers – Understand and Remember Everything You Read

4.4 (569 ratings)

14 mins

Brief summary

10 Days to Faster Reading by The Princeton Language Institute and Abby Marks Beale is a guide that teaches us how to read faster and enhance our reading skills. It provides effective techniques that can help readers to concentrate better and boost their comprehension.

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10 Days to Faster Reading
Summary of 6 key ideas

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Key idea 1 of 6

What’s in it for me? Read faster, and remember more of what you read.

If you could have a personal genie grant three wishes, you might start by asking for a trillion dollars and the power to fly. But some people, especially people who love to read but never have enough time to get through all the books they want to, might use one wish to gain the power to read with superhuman speed.

There’s no guarantee that these blinks will give you superhuman reading skills, but you don’t need a genie to become a faster and better reader – you just have to learn how to shed some bad habits and practice a few techniques.

10 Days to Faster Reading explains that we can become faster readers in just ten days. These blinks compile the best of the book’s methods, tips and examples. Start practicing them right away with your daily newspaper, or any non-fiction material you might have lying around, and you’ll be on your way to becoming a faster reader, while remembering more of what you read.

In these blinks, you’ll learn

why we think about reading in the wrong way;
how to get 40 percent of a book’s information without even reading it; and
what happens to your brain when it’s not processing as much information as it could be.

People put too much pressure on themselves when they read.

Too much to read, too little time. It’s a problem we can all relate to. Every day you find more interesting reading material, and every day the pile of “to-read” books grows taller and taller.

But the problem isn’t necessarily time, per se. Rather, it’s that you’re not reading efficiently due to a few classic misconceptions about reading.

First, you don’t actually have to read everything in a book or newspaper to understand it. In fact, it’s impossible to read everything that passes over your desk. Instead, you should get in the habit of selecting and prioritizing what’s actually important. We’ll come back to that point later, but as you’ll see, it’s quite easy once you know how to preview the material and efficiently determine the parts that actually interest you.

Second, you don’t have to remember everything you read to get something from the material. We develop this misconception about reading in school, where we’re under pressure to remember everything we read in our textbooks because we’ll be tested on the material.

However, memorized material is stored in your short-term memory and is forgotten after only a few days. If you want to retain the information for the future, you’ll need to create an easy retrieval system.

Try writing down the crucial information (electronically or on paper), or make highlights and notes in the margins. Then, simply file the materials away. This way you can find the information easily, and it will also take away the pressure of memorizing everything.

Finally, people have the misconception that they shouldn’t be reading during working hours. However, the opposite is true! Reading is actually part of your job description.

Businesspeople tend to think that they’ll appear to be slacking off if they read on the job. Relevant reading materials, however, can help you come up with new business ideas, stay up to date on the market and find ways to beat the competition.

So never be afraid to read at work – it’s crucial!

Becoming a more efficient reader is as easy as kicking a few bad habits.

If you do something enough times, you form a habit around it, and the same goes for reading. So what are some of the classic bad reading habits, and how do you fix them?

A common bad reading habit is passive daydreaming. While we read, we’re thinking about a million other topics, none of which are related to what we’re actually reading.

You can read faster by taking shortcuts.

So now you know the bad habits. But how can you become a faster, more efficient reader? Start by following these three simple steps.

First, have a clear purpose in mind and a sense of responsibility for what you read. This will help both with organization and concentration.

To speed up your reading, try only reading the keywords.

The third step in becoming an efficient reader is learning how to actually read faster. For most of us, reading training ended in elementary school, so our reading methods are quite outdated. These next blinks will provide you with new reading strategies that you can try out for yourself. Try them all, and see which ones work best for you.

The first technique involves focusing only on important words and skipping over the rest. When we read, our eyes tend to jump around in stops and starts instead of a smooth flow.

Other techniques you should try are “reading between the lines” and “indenting.”

Here are a few more great tricks to becoming a better reader:

One way to overcome the habit of subvocalizing is to focus on the white space just above each line. This way, you can still see the top half of the letters and can thus easily understand them without becoming fixated on the words themselves.

Use your hand or a pen to lead your eyes and create fast reading habits.

When we learned to read as children, we always used a finger or another object to pace our reading and better understand the words. Why should we stop training that skill once we know how to read? We shouldn’t, and in fact it can be very helpful.

Eyes naturally follow movement. For example, when there’s a fly in the room, your eyes notice it immediately. Likewise, pointing and moving your fingers can be used to guide your eyes more quickly through a text. Simply place your finger to the left or to the right of a line, and as you read across the line, move your finger slowly yet steadily down toward the bottom of the page.

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What is 10 Days to Faster Reading about?

10 Days to Faster Reading (2001) sets out to help you get through your ever-growing pile of must-read books. By breaking down the mindsets and bad habits that inhibit effective reading and replacing them with highly efficient reading techniques, you’ll be reading faster and retaining more than ever before.

10 Days to Faster Reading Review

10 Days to Faster Reading (2011) is a guide that teaches practical techniques to improve reading speed and comprehension. Here's why this book is worth reading:

It offers clear and practical strategies that can be applied immediately, enabling readers to read faster while still retaining information effectively.
With its step-by-step approach, the book guides readers through a ten-day program, making it easy to follow and implement.
In addition to speed, the book also focuses on improving reading habits and critical thinking skills, making it a comprehensive guide to becoming a better reader.

Who should read 10 Days to Faster Reading?

Anyone who wants to read faster and remember more of what they read
Educators looking for new reading strategies for students
College students and bibliophiles

About the Author

Abby Marks Beale is founder of the corporate training organization The Corporate Educator, author of Success Skills: Strategies for Study and Lifelong Learning and creator of Rev It Up Reading, a program that helps people hone their speed-reading skills.

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