Power Reading and Power Writing

Nowadays, when we are living in the age of information we are facing tons of various useless information every day. It’s strange, but even without trying, we read hundreds of words from various advertisements on the streets. The key to successful learning in the age of information lies in the ability to identify useful information. Only when you identify information, which will be useful, you can learn fast and efficient learning. These simple 20 rules will give you the basics of speed and power reading and writing.

Power reading and Speed Reading

Basics of speed reading:

1) Review the book – analyze the title, read the information at the back of the book;
2) Review the book’s content, chapter by chapter;
3) Use a marker to mark important points and to guide your sight;
4) Use this exercise to  gain speed: read a page of a book or a magazine in 5 – 10 seconds
and try to find the most important key words, which would summarize the page. Read this way for about 20 minutes daily.
5) Use the latter exercise to read a book as fast as possible and then review the book to see how much did you missed.

Basics of power reading:

1) Read only important material for you;
2) Make a general overview of a book or a magazine. Look at the table of contents, skim through the pages and find the most important information for you;
3) Skip the unimportant information or speed read it;
4) Write down your aims – what you want to learn or find out from the book, magazine or article;
5) After reading a chapter or a decent number of pages summarize and review what you already learnt and found out;
6) Summarize relevant information into mind maps and review them in a couple of days, a few weeks later and a few months later;
7) Collect the important material like articles and important pages. Copy them or print them out and keep them for memorization and later use;

An example of a mind map:

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Power Writing

1) When writing anything, firstly make a draft and only then edit it;
2) Make a mind map of your ideas. Write your ideas on notes or a page and gather them to subgroups. These subgroups will be the chapters, and the main subject written in the middle of a page will be the title;
3) Rewrite the subject as many times as you want to make it good and fluent;
4) Open your text with an attention-catcher fraze or a sentence. For instance write how this article or speech will be beneficial for the readers;
5) Use simple but colorful and expressive language;
6) Remember that the beginning and the end are the two most important parts of the book. So write the most important ideas at the beginning or close to the end.
7) Close your text with a bang. That is save a great sentence for an end. Most likely the readers will remember the last sentences of the book . So use something eye-catching, for instant a quote of a great philosopher or something similar.
After writing your article or speech, put it away and do not publish it or use it for a brief time. This way you will have sometime to make sure that you didn’t forget something, also you will have some extra time to add if you missed something.

Thanks for reading!

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