I started today trying to teach myself how to speed read. I decided that I would take ten minutes everyday and try to read fast.

How do I do that? I pick up a book (for me that is going to be The Stand by Stephen King. The reason I chose this book is because I already know what the story is about. I am not worried all that much about my comprehension. It is a great book and I would like to be able to say that I have read it to my peers. It is a sad thing to have a life long Stephen King fan who has not read The Stand).

Then I use a bookmark or some other kind of strait edge and follow line by line down the page. The object of this exercise is to try to read faster than I normally do (about twice the speed or as fast as I can while at least seeing every word.

My thought is that eventually I will be able to train my brain to see more than one word at a time. If I can do this, I should be able to read a lot faster.

I also found a small program on download.com called Rocket Reader. I am going to give this a try as well. I am not sure how efficient this program will be. I will let you know my progress as time will tell.

Note: If you are a Stephen King Fan, You should be reading his collumn in Entertainment Weekly. You can save 80% on a subscription when you click here!

I was up late this past week after work. We are talking really late. It was 4:00am and I had yet to go to sleep. I was surfing the channels on the boob tube and came across an informercial about the product called EyeQ. They claim to be able to speed up your reading 2-10 times your current speed.

I have always been interested in learning how to speed read. I know that I read a lot slower than what my brain can process. This makes reading rather boring and will normally put me to sleep. If I can train myself to process blocks of text instead of just one word at a time, I could read so much more. I believe that if I can do this I would enjoy reading much more than I do today.

I wondered around online looking for the program called EyeQ. The infomercial said that they would let you try the product for $14.95, but they never said what it would cost once you decide to purchase the program. I found the real price online. It ranged between $200-$250 depending on where you bought it from.

I changed my tactic a bit and began to search for free information online about speed reading. Wikipedia had a lot of information about it. Then I came across the following Wikibook:

How to Make speed Reading Actually Work

I am planning to attempt the skills that are outlined in this wikibook. As I do the research and put the information into action, I will post my results here on this blog.  If you wish to join me and want to exchange links about speed reading, please feel free to leave a comment.