How to read faster and learn better — my takeaways from The Evelyn Wood 7-day Speed Reading & Learning Program book

A new year and new books to read! I thought that it would be smart to use the first month of the year to make the next 11 months even better, so one of the skills I wanted to learn was how to read faster and how to learn and recall better. If I can read faster and learn better, it will save me time when reading books and I will get more out of the books I read (and will have parallel benefits at work as well).

The book was written by Stanley Frank. Evelyn Wood is widely known as the person who introduced speed reading to the masses. Her story isn’t covered in the book, aside from how she discovered the method of speed reading. She had heard a lot about other people who had speed read. She gave her professor an 80 page paper and thought that she would give him the night to read the paper over and give her feedback, but the professor sat down, read the paper almost as quickly as turning the page and then provided to grade her paper. The professor was even able to point out key strengths and weaknesses in the arguments and specific details, which made her realize that speed reading was possible. However, despite meeting with other speed readers, she could not discern how they were able to speed read, aside from the fact that they moved their eyes quite…