Quote:
Originally Posted by DWarrior  Does anyone know of these "authorities on reading"? It's interesting to read in one book how it's possible to achieve 2,000WPM, then in the same night pick up a different book and read that it's impossible to read over 800. |
Perhaps the eyes can't visually see and process every word at a rate faster than 800wpm, but that's irrelevant even to regular speedreading.
Here's another version of that last sentence with most of the unnecessary words removed:
eyes can't process faster 800wpm, irrelevant to speedreading.
It still conveys the meaning, but with 8 words instead of 23. With regular speedreading you learn to scan chunks of words, training your brain to skip the fluff.
In the PhotoReading course, Paul Scheele says the actual information content is carried by only 4-11% of the words.
How many words you can process in a period of time isn't a great metric. What matters is how quickly and solidly you can extract the ideas that are valuable to you.