Speed Reading : Fact or Fiction

Speed reading has been part of big business and government for years. It has been taught to executives of many major companies such as IBM, Microsoft, Xerox, and Hewlett Packard. Even presidents have been speed readers including John F. Kennedy, Richard Nixon, and Jimmy Carter. President Carter took speed reading lessons while at the white house and he read two books per week even with his Presidential duties. According to SpeedReaderX.com, the average person reads around 250 words per minute. This is the speed of the little voice in your head that pronounces words as you read.
Speed readers can read from 600 to 1500 words per minute or faster. It is not uncommon for people to immediately double their reading speed when first learning speed reading techniques. Children eight years and older are the best candidates to learn speed reading. At this age they have a fairly large vocabulary and are familiar with reading. Speed reading becomes more difficult for adults. Just like learning a foreign language comes easy to children, so does speed reading.
Adults have been reading the old fashioned way much longer so it takes longer to learn a new reading technique. Adults can still benefit from speed reading. They simply have to put a little more effort into it. Speed reading can provide many benefits. It makes children want to read more. Speed reading fills a child's short attention span by fully immersing them in the material. They actually enjoy reading. This makes children much more likely to read for pleasure. Many studies have shown that children who read perform better in school and to have fewer behavioral problems.
Is this a dream or science fiction? Can someone actually read a book in 30 minutes? First, let's ask where the idea of speed reading originated. A woman named Evelyn Wood turned in an 80 page paper to her college professor expecting him to read and return it the next day. To her surprise he read the entire paper in seconds and graded it immediately. She was stunned. How could anyone read so much so fast? Her professor was one of a select few people at the time. He was a natural speed reader. Evelyn Wood went on to study this phenomena and eventually founded a speed reading institute in Australia. That was 40 years ago. Since then, speed reading has become popular in many countries. However, the technique is almost unknown in the USA.