Free Reading With the Right Brain: Read Faster by Reading Ideas Instead of Just Words by David Butler Page B

practice. I discovered something unexpected when analyzing students’ metadata on ReadSpeeder. I found that speed improvement correlated more closely with words per day of practice, than with days per week. This seemed counter-intuitive, but by studying the millions of words read by thousands of students, I found that—on average—it turned out to actually be more productive to cram extra time into each practice than to practice more often. The results of this analysis showed a sixty-four percent correlation between reading improvement and minutes per day of practice, but no correlation (actually a negative 0.4% correlation) between successes and practice days per week.
    On reflection, it seems this discovery might be in line with the latest science. According to Nassim Taleb’s book Antifragile , the fastest growth of any type, whether physical or mental, occurs when an organism is prompted to overcompensate for significant stressors; it could be that longer practice sessions create this productive stress.
    This is interesting because cramming more practice into fewer sessions is the opposite of how people are generally taught to study. I can’t be sure this is what will work best for you, but these are the results I’ve found from other students, I’d at least like to offer the information for your consideration.
    In the end, even though there are plenty of interesting theories and data on how to study, the best thing to do is to pay attention to what works for you. Pay attention to when and how you make the most progress, and then try to accommodate your own learning style.
    Persistence
    Homer : Hey, how come you never play your guitar anymore?
    Bart : I’ll tell ya the truth, Dad. I wasn’t good at it right away, so I quit. I hope you’re not mad.
    Homer : [sweetly] Son, come here! Heh heh heh… [Bart sits on Homer’s knee] Of course I’m not mad. If something’s hard to do, then it’s not worth doing! You just stick that guitar in the closet next to your short-wave radio, your karate outfit, and your unicycle, and we’ll go inside and watch TV.
    Obtaining a basic reading skill is a complex enough task on its own. Although achieving superior reading skills is even more difficult, the advantages are worth the effort. In the long run, not having good reading skills will end up costing you more than the effort needed to acquire them. Those without good reading skills are exiled to a land of ignorance—a boring wasteland, isolated from much of life’s fascinations and excitement.
    So how can you persist with the necessary effort to expand this skill? When you work on any goal, your motivation is bound to rise and fall over time and change with your moods; sometimes you will feel motivated, and sometimes you won’t. But results don’t come from motivation—they come from action .
    Sometimes, when you don’t feel like doing something that you know you should do, it helps if you fool yourself into taking action. Tell yourself that you are only going to practice for a few minutes, just enough to refresh your memory, and that if you feel like quitting after that, you’ll allow yourself to go ahead and quit. However, you’ll often find that once you overcome your initial desire to do nothing and instead get moving, the law of inertia works both ways; once a body (or a mind) is in motion, it tends to stay in motion. As a result, you may end up getting more done than you expected.
    Patience
    Although practice, consistency, and persistence are important ingredients for learning a skill, it can be a bitter mix without patience. Be patient with your progress. Allow time for your skills to develop. You may make great progress in the beginning when you first adopt this new perspective on reading, but don’t get impatient when you get stuck. If you never got stuck, then you were probably pursuing a goal that was too easy.
    When you do get stuck, slow down and concentrate more on the meaning of what you’re reading.