Table Of ContentS R
PEED EADING
W T
ITH HE
R B
IGHT RAIN
Copyright © 2014 David Butler
Praise for
SPEED READING WITH THE RIGHT BRAIN
Unlike many other “speed reading” strategies available, Speed Reading with the
Right Brain is not a gimmick; it’s a unique method that allows you to more
effectively assimilate what you read in a shorter amount of time.
Amanda Johnson, M.A.,
Assistant Professor of English, Collin College, Plano, Texas David Butler and I
have been friends for five years and have enjoyed many interesting
conversations about reading and comprehension. I have always found his
thoughts on this subject to be incredibly unique and insightful. Speed Reading
with the Right Brain has given David a place to collect these ideas in one place,
and make them easy to understand for anyone wishing to improve their reading
skills.
This book includes not only original theories and techniques for reading
improvement, but also a totally exclusive method of presenting practice
exercises that makes it extremely easy to begin reading whole ideas at a time.
Pick up this book and start reading with your whole brain.
Richard Sutz, CEO,
The Literacy Company, www.EfficientReading.com,
Author of “Speed Reading for Dummies”
I strongly recommend David Butler’s new book Speed Reading with the Right
Brain as one of the most innovate new approaches to speed reading on the
market today. For the past year, Dave and I have discussed in email exchanges
crucial issues about reading comprehension and the history of speed reading
instructions. Dave’s unique approach emphasizes the importance of reading with
the right side of the brain which helps the reader quickly comprehend a text by
converting groups of words into images and concepts.
It is amazing to me that so much could have been written in so many years since
Evelyn Wood about speed reading and no one came up with the idea of “speed
comprehension.” All the other programs emphasize rapid eye movement over
text, promising that comprehension would follow, which it usually didn’t. The
concept of focusing on comprehension first has been the missing link.
Speed Reading with the Right Brain, is a “must read” for peoples interested in
improving their reading comprehension and speed.
Dr. James Young,
Professor of English, Weber State University, Ogden, Utah In the last few
thousand years, reading has gone from a mystical ability of the few, to a way of
experiencing the world beyond people’s local existence, to a method of self-
improvement. But with today’s accelerating pace of information, reading has
truly become an essential survival skill.
Speed Reading with the Right Brain demonstrates how to improve your reading
by thinking conceptually, which means thinking about what things really are
rather than just their name. This is a powerful method for improving this most
important factor in education and success.
All skills require practice, but some practice is more effective than others. This
very unique method of displaying text makes learning to read faster so much
easier.
Austin Butler,
President and Founder, Teaching.com David Butler gets to the core of reading
comprehension in Speed Reading with the Right Brain, with effective techniques
and exercises to focus your attention on meaning versus words. This book will
speed up your reading, increase your comprehension, and make reading a
pleasurable pursuit of new worlds of knowledge rather than slow torture that
only leads to confusion. Read it and learn!
Danielle Ellis,
Mother, editor, and 6th grade teacher
Table of Contents
Introduction
Chapter 1: Getting Started
Chapter 2: How Can You Read Faster?
Chapter 3: Your New Reading Experience
Chapter 4: The Basics
Chapter 5: Skills
Chapter 6: Ancient History
Chapter 7: Modern History
Chapter 8: Texting the Brain
Chapter 9: Reading with the Brain
Chapter 10: Mindset
Chapter 11: Comprehension
Chapter 12: Habits
Chapter 13: Visualizing
Chapter 14: Conceptualizing
Chapter 15: Reading Speeds
Chapter 16: Comprehension Speeds
Chapter 17: Techniques
Chapter 18: Mythical Exercises
Chapter 19: Mythical Stories
Chapter 20: Reading on Your Own
Additional Resources
Introduction
I slammed the book shut. Why was I such a frustratingly slow reader? And why
couldn’t I remember what I read?
I was sitting in my yard, in the shade of the tall white birch trees, beneath the
blue summer sky, reading a book I was very interested in. But I couldn’t help
getting angry at how much time the reading was taking me and how poor my
comprehension was. How could I enjoy a book if I had to read it in slow motion?
And then just forget it all?
This was me several years ago. And if this sounds like you, read on. I can show
you how to read faster and understand more, by reading with more of your brain;
specifically, the powerful, intuitive, big-picture right hemisphere. Although not
normally associated with reading, this side of your head has a unique capability
of quickly visualizing and conceptualizing entire complex ideas.
Reading with the right brain is a technique which opened the doors to reading for
me. This is not like any other technique you may have already tried; believe me,
I’ve tried them all. This is different.
This book is about learning to read conceptually and imagining and visualizing
what you are reading. Reading conceptually is not just another speed reading
trick, but a different way of thinking. By learning to use your right brain’s
visualizing abilities, you can end the lazy habit of merely reciting words, and
learn to really think about the ideas.
Visualizing is central to this technique and therefore will be mentioned
repeatedly in different contexts throughout the book. But this book also explains
how stronger comprehension leads to faster reading, how the history of reading
developed, and how the brain manages to accomplish this miracle. Plus, there’s a
discussion of how to side-step bad reading habits and an examination of popular
speed reading myths.
The jewel of this book though is the set of 20 unique reading exercises, which
make it easy to learn to read with the right brain by guiding your attention to
each of the short, meaningful pieces of information which sentences are made of.
These specially formatted exercises will give you an easy way to experience how
it feels to read faster and to read with better comprehension. By spending a little
time practicing with these exercises, you can discover the power of reading with
the right brain.
Frustration
I had always wished I was a better reader. I wanted to read more but I was so
slow. I was interested in non-fiction books, especially history and science, but if
the point of reading non-fiction was to acquire and retain knowledge, then this
was probably the single least effective activity I ever engaged in. Not only was I
slow, but after spending dozens of hours getting to the end of a book, I only
retained the foggiest idea of what I had read.
I had always been frustrated by how much time my reading took. And no matter
how much I read, I was still slow. I wanted to improve but didn’t know how.
Nothing I tried worked.
As a young boy, I would see advertisements that promised to teach me to "speed
read." I don’t remember what these courses cost, but it must have been more
than I could afford on my allowance.
In high school, I finally had the chance to take a night course on speed reading—
one night a week for ten weeks. An impressive looking machine displayed text
in short segments, one at a time, with a control for speed adjustment. It seemed
like this should work for sure, but in the end, it had no real effect. The faster the
text displayed, the worse my comprehension was.
I tried several speed reading books and courses during high school, college, and
beyond, but was always disappointed.
Reading well should have been in my genes. My father and mother were
excellent readers. My mother loved to read fiction and my father loved non-
fiction. My father was self-taught since 8th grade, but because of his passion for
reading, he could speak intelligently on practically any subject.
But it didn’t look like I had inherited my parents’ reading skills. I also found it
difficult to maintain concentration and I had a horrible memory. What was
wrong with me? Maybe I just had a slow brain. Maybe I could never read faster.
Discovery
Then one day at the age of 49, in the summer of 2000, I was sitting in my yard
trying to get through a book on the interesting science of fractals. But again, it
was a struggle.
I couldn’t stand it anymore. It seemed stupid to spend so much time reading with
so little to show for it. I shut the book.
I sat holding the closed book, wondering if I should force myself to continue
reading. I didn’t know what to do. I would be a quitter if I gave up, but a fool to
waste so much time on a beautiful summer day.
I reopened the book and stared at the page… and then something interesting
happened. As my mind idled, I began to notice patterns in the arrangement of the
words. The rows of spaces seemed to form horizontal, slanted, and vertical lines
that outlined blocks of words.
I played with this illusion for a while, but then this mental rest stop led me to
wonder if there were patterns in the ideas too. Just as these clumps of words
formed visual patterns, there were probably clumps of words that created
patterns of ideas. What if reading in “idea clumps” would make reading faster?
Grouping letters into words is easy because of the spaces between words, but
what about ideas? Ideas usually require multiple words; shorter than sentences,
but long enough to form complete pieces of understandable information. What if
I tried to concentrate on these complete ideas instead of individual words? I
grabbed a pencil from the house and started marking off groups of what I
thought sounded like meaningful chunks of words with slashes like this:
But before we go into an introductory discussion of what chaos theory is trying
to accomplish, let us look at some historical aspects of the field. If we look at the
development of the sciences on a time-scale on which the efforts of our forebears
are visible, we will observe indications of an apparent recapitulation in the
present day, even if at a different level.
And wow! Suddenly when I read these phrases as complete units of meaning, the
ideas seemed to jump off the page, straight into my mind!
I marked up and read several more pages. This looked like a breakthrough. I
could read the text faster, plus the text was easier to understand.
This was the solution I had been looking for. There was one problem though.
How could I read like this without needing to first manually mark up the text?
As a design engineer, it was difficult to leave a problem like this alone. In fact, it
was more like the idea owned me than vice versa. It was an interesting challenge,
and it also looked like it might help me overcome my long-time struggle with
reading.
A few weeks later, I came up with an interesting idea for a computer program
that could automatically divide text into meaningful phrases. After learning a
little programming, I put together a test of this idea and tried this automatic
phrase-parser on some text from an online news story. I displayed the phrases
one at a time and I was immediately convinced that I was on to something. The
results weren’t perfect, but it definitely made the text faster to read and easier to
understand.
