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Tanisha Kathuria is a girl with a plan. This year’s Boards, she hopes, will give her a chance to implement that plan. The key words — speed reading. So, what, exactly, is speed reading? “It’s the process of reading blocks of words at one time and putting down the gist of them,” she explains, “I learned the habit from my older brother. He took up speed reading while he was preparing for his engineering exams. He ex-plained the tricks of the trade to me.”
It’s not just Tanisha; it’s also people like Presidents John F. Kennedy and Jimmy Carter who have used the trick. For instance, did you know that Anne Jones, five time winner of the World Speed Reading Championships, can read 4,700 words per minute with 67 per cent comprehension?
Kathleen Hawkins, a speed reading expert and the author of Speed Reading Strategies learned to speed read when she was 23 and studying for her second Master’s Degree in college. “I was so overwhelmed with reading assignments that I didn’t know how I could possibly finish them all. It taught me how to read faster, improve my comprehension, and remember more of what I read. It saved me hundreds of hours of reading time and helped me to earn my Master’s degree,” she says.
And her tips to you are: choose a book, set a timer, and read comfortably for one minute, and then mark the place where you stopped. Set the timer again and read for another minute into the book from where you just left off, but this time, move your hand smoothly and quickly under each line, as fast as you can and still understand what you’re reading. “When you get comfortable with this technique, you’ll start to see your reading rates climb,” she says. The benefits of speed reading are many — especially if you have a paper to submit the next day, or exams around the corner. The theory behind speed reading is that you read more and understand more as well — you don’t lose out on matter either, and (the biggest plus) it helps you get better at studies!
So, don’t worry about being under pressure as far as deadlines or exam papers go — speed reading is a guaranteed way to get through all that workload in one fell swoop!
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