Before you begin the process of improving your reading skills, you need to know where you are starting from. Reading performance is traditionally measured purely in terms of comprehension, but most people want to be able to deal with their daily reading faster and yet recall it effectively when required. Neither of these is assessed in school comprehension tests, yet good recall is essential for better comprehension. A prerequisite for achieving this is to find out what your reading speeds and recall levels are before you begin trying some new techniques. This chapter is therefore devoted to assessing the starting point for this programme of training.

READING SPEED AND POST-READING RECALL

Before you begin working through this book and before you succumb to the temptation to look ahead and see what is coming, you should measure your present reading speed and post-reading recall. It is important to measure the latter because, if recall is not good immediately after reading something, it is not likely to improve later. You will find two exercises in the following pages that will enable you to do this, together with instructions on precisely how to complete them.

You should tackle these exercises as soon as possible because if you are tempted to look ahead at the rest of this book, this may influence the way in which you approach them and prevent you from finding out how good your reading skills were before you picked this book up.

Your reading performance will be tested and recorded by working through two exercises, taking an average of your results and then marking these on the progress graphs on page 110. As you read these exercises, you should try to read them as quickly as you feel you can and still take the information in. You want, after all, to see how quickly you can read before you try new techniques.

When you come to answering the questions of the recall tests, you should avoid guessing answers if you do not know them. If you guess the answers, you may be right and this will make you think your recall is better than it really is.

For the same reason, you should not try to ‘spot’ questions, that is, try as you read to memorise isolated bits of information on the off chance that they may be required. They may, of course, but if they are then all you have proved is that you are a good ‘spotter’. You have not proved to yourself that you have taken in what you have read. You will be the only person who knows how well or how badly you are doing, so why try to delude yourself? You will be much better off in the long run if you are as honest with yourself as it is possible to be. That way you will know accurately whether or not you have improved and by how much.

THE STRUCTURE OF THE PROGRAMME

This programme consists of five stages:

• 1.Review of present performance – finding out where your starting point is.
• 2.Objective setting – deciding what you wish to achieve by working through the programme.
• 3.Methods – exploring the various methods for bringing about improvement and finding which ones work best for you.
• 4.Evaluation of improved performance – finding out how much you have improved by the end of the programme.
• 5.Ongoing – learning what you will need to do to maintain your improvements and to continue your development as a more efficient reader.

THE FIRST STAGE

The procedure for the first stage of the process is as follows:

• You read each passage once only as quickly as you can take it in and time the reading (for this you will need a stopwatch, watch with a timer or a watch with a second hand).
• You answer the recall test, remembering not to guess if you do not know the answer nor to try to work the answer out.
• You convert the reading time into words per minute (using the conversion table on pages 109–110), check the answers to the recall test against the answers on pages 111 – 113 and record both results on the progress graphs on page 110.

Make sure you have your timing device ready and a pen or pencil for recording your answers.

If you are using a stopwatch or watch with a timer, follow your handbook’s instructions for timing an event. If you are using a watch with a second hand, make a note of the time in minutes and seconds when you start. This is easier if you wait until the second hand is pointing to 12. Make a note of the time when you finish and then subtract the starting time from the finishing time.

EXERCISE

Start timing and begin reading NOW.

Stop timing and make a note of the time and answer the following questions without looking back at the passage.

Questions

• 1.What was the name of Henry Clough’s assistant?
• 2.At what time was the last report received from the tanker?
• 3.What was the name of the tanker.
• 4.For how long had the tanker been in service?
• 5.What was Sebastian Shorofski’s position in the company?
• 6.What was his initial reaction to being told of the tanker’s disappearance?
• 7.Off the coast of which country was the suspected oil slick sighted?
• 8.What was the weather like when the tanker disappeared?
• 9.When had the tanker last been in port?
• 10.On which day of the week did the RAF Nimrod think it had spotted an oil slick?

Convert the reading time into words per minute (using the conversion table on pages 109– 110), check the answers to the recall test against the answers on pages 111 – 113 and record both results on the progress graphs on page 110.

You should, then, have finished up with a speed in words per minute and a recall score out of ten (converted into a percentage by placing 0 after your score, e.g. 7 out of 10=70%, there is a reason for doing this which will be explained in Chapter 5). Make sure you have recorded this on vertical line 1 or in the column to the left of line 1 on the comprehension graph, depending on whether you wish to build up a graph or a bar chart. Either method will produce a picture which develops as you proceed and will later enable you to see where you are, where you have come from and where you might be likely to finish up. It thus provides you with both instant and cumulative feedback on your performance.

EXERCISE

Begin timing the second exercise and begin reading NOW.

Stop timing and make a note of the time and answer the following questions without looking back at the passage.

Questions

• 1.How does the publicist’s claim describe San Francisco?
• 2.Which state had the writer visited before his first visit to San Francisco?
• 3.What was the name of the jazz band that was playing at Earthquake McGoon’s?
• 4.What was the name of the replica of a sixteenth-century English inn?
• 5.What was the brand of beer the writer drank there?
• 6.On which highway did the writer drive on both visits?
• 7.How far south did he drive on his second visit?
• 8.What was the name of the small town he visited on the second trip?
• 9.What did he find in this town that was incredibly good?
• 10.Who was the only other occupant of the bar in Kobe, Japan?

Convert the reading time into words per minute (using the conversion table on pages 109– 110), check the answers to the recall test against the answers on pages 111 – 113 and record both results on the progress graphs on page 110.

Now average the two results for both speed and recall and make a note of them.

ASSESSMENT OF RESULTS

Typically, at this stage, reading speed averaged over the two exercises is somewhere between 150 words per minute (w.p.m.) and 250 w.p.m. An average recall score is about 50-70%. This may not seem very high, but I can assure you that in my experience these are average figures at this point.

There is no evidence of any correlation between reading speed and intelligence, age, education, occupation or anything else. Many highly intelligent people, for example, are very slow readers, especially if they have had large amounts of study reading to deal with. Nor is there much evidence of a correlation between recall and any of these factors. So, don’t worry if your results are on the low side. This simply means there is more to be gained from the programme.

THE NEXT STEP

Now that you have some idea of where you are starting from, it is time to begin to work through the programme. What you will be doing is based on the simple fact that there are people who are quite naturally faster and more efficient readers than others. Research over the years has identified many of the techniques they use. You will be given the opportunity to try them out and see which ones work best for you. The programme aims to achieve improvement in reading skills by:

• developing appropriate attitudes towards reading
• undertaking a programme of work designed to raise maximum speeds in reading
• developing systematic approaches to handling written materials.

You are now ready to move on to stage two of the programme which you should attempt whenever you feel ready. You may prefer to have a rest at this point and resume tomorrow. You will find stage two in Chapter 2 and you are now free to browse through the rest of this book should you wish. You should not look too closely at any of the exercises, though, as they will then not provide you with the right kind of test at the appropriate time.

FURTHER PRACTICE

You will find it helps a great deal if you carry out the following tasks before proceeding:

• Measure your reading speed on a variety of the kinds of materials you normally have to deal with. Do not try to do it too precisely as an estimate of the number of words read will suffice. You should still be able to calculate reading speed with reasonable accuracy. Two simple methods of estimating the number of words read are:
  • Count the number of words in 10 lines and divide by 10 to obtain an average per line. Multiply this by the number of lines on a typical page. Then multiply this by the number of pages read.
  • Measure off 1” (one inch) of text (a centimetre is not enough). Count the number of words. Multiply this by the length of the piece in column or page inches.

Test recall by noting down briefly what you remember from each piece.

• Make a list of the different kinds of materials you have to deal with together with an assessment of how important it is to retain information read for each one.
• Read at least one item purely for the pleasure of reading it (a chapter of a novel, an article of special interest or a chapter of a book on a subject of particular interest to you personally). You may, of course, read more than the specified amount if you wish. The more widely you read from now on, the better. It will not be a question of, ‘Never mind the quality, feel the width’, though. Variety is more important than mere quantity.