Liberty Unchained

Remember Everything You Read : The Evelyn Wood 7-day Speed Reading and Learning Program

I picked an older version of this book up a while back as the words speed reading caught my eye…and I always have more things I want to read than I can shake a stick at.

The first part of this book demonstrates how a few simple changes in the way you read can drastically increase your reading speed by having you time your reading pace, teaching you a few tricks, and then time your reading pace again.

All told, that introductory section took me under an hour and doubled the speed at which I read. Needless to say, I became rather interested in the rest as the authors note that with practice, people can read upwards of two or three thousand words per minute. Personally, I am only at about nine hundred words per minute without losing comprehension…but that is almost three times faster than I read before I went through this book. And I must admit that I have not practiced the methods that they denote on a regular basis.

The second part goes through and explains how to go about reading faster by teaching yourself to quelch your subconcious voice and trust your eyes. If you do not do so, you limit yourself to the speed at which you can speak, which the authors call the sub-vocal barrier.

From there, some time is spent displaying various reading patterns to allow your eyes to take in all of each page quickly.

A pattern of reading is then shown to read books multiple times in a patterned order so that you retain the information better and ask questions of the materials you read and answer them as you go. I have found this to work quite well for me.

Some time is also spent on methods of taking notes while reading, what the author calls slash-patterns. These are basically diagrammed listings of information put together in such a way that the lists make sense. A quick review of a slash pattern is used to bring back thoughts and their relationships quickly and easily. I use these in my studies, and they help quite a bit. I even use them with my shopping and task lists these days.

I highly recommend this book to anyone who has not read it, if only to get the reading speed increase from the first section and the information on slash patterns. The rest is excellent as well, but takes some dedication to put to good use.

If you read the entire book ( I read it in one sitting…it goes quickly and is very well written ), you should:

• be able to read books quite a bit faster
• retain more of what you read
• be able to take compact, detailed notes
• be able to finish your own research and writing more quickly