Reading Skills and Modern Literacy Requirements
It is no longer enough to be just able to read. In our professions many of us are drowning in material that must be read. ISO imposed notifications, OH&S reports, inter-office memos that are often several pages long, and if that is not enough - the actual reporting directly related to what one is qualified to do. When was the last time you brought yourself up to speed in your profession by reading one of your industry journals? An unbelievable number of people simply don't have the time.
Professional Competency Implications of Present Web Quality Standards
The last time I surveyed professionally built web-sites I found that over 67% of web developers do not know what CSS is used for, and more than 90% of professionally developed websites have serious errors in their mark-up - whether it is the misconception that XHTML is a fashion accessory for your site (ironically one that your visitors never see!) or simply neglecting to include the "ALT" attribute with images so that people with severe visual impairment can get an idea of what is being communicated through the image. More than half don't even have a document type statement on their pages to ensure that the browser interprets their page using the correct one of over a dozen possible mark-up schemas.
Web developers are hired using the same general techniques as in all other professions and are subjected to the same management practices as everyone-else. It stands to reason that the same level of competency exists in all other professions as well. For example, most well-site geologists don't know what adularia is despite its fairly common occurrence in basin sediments of volcanic provenance. I'm sure we all have examples in every profession of just how common professional ignorance has become.
My point here is that people no longer have the time to keep up with new developments in their profession because the volume of information we must process as part of our work has increased astronomically but our reading skills have not kept pace. In fact, reading practices that are up to the demands of the Information Age are labelled as "speed reading". I'm tempted to point out that in this day and age, 400 words per minute is not fast at all.
Speed Reading: Gaining the Competitive Edge
Speed reading is not simply a matter of forcing your eyes to move faster across the page. This only helps if you already have the ability to comprehend large chunks of text at a glance. The first step towards faster reading is the shift from reading one letter at a time to one syllable at a time. Most of us were taught to do this when we were very young. The next step is the shift from reading one syllable at a time ("Phonic reading") to reading an entire word at a glance ("Sight reading"). Those of us fortunate enough to have good literacy teachers will no doubt remember the flash-cards that the teacher used to force us to recognise entire words at a glance.
This level of reading skill is rarely taken further as basic sight reading skill allows one to read at the same rate as speech (around 100 words per minute). With time and regular reading, I've found that most people gain 200 words per minute and information workers around 300 words per minute. This is nowhere near fast enough to keep pace with the demands of the Information Age. Pointing out that industry and professional competency generally suffers as a result of this will do nothing to change things. However, this information presents you with the opportunity to gain an easy competitive edge in the workplace.
Train Yourself to Speed Read. (See FieldCraft's speed reading software for professionals)
Skimming, scanning, "photo-reading" and suppression of skip-back are not speed reading techniques. They are just pretend, because they fail to train comprehension to keep pace with reading speed.
The next logical step in the quest for higher reading speed is phrase recognition; learning to recognise a phrase or entire group of words at a glance. The sheer number of possibilities is prohibitive for flash cards but ideal for computer programs. This does not diminish comprehension. If anything, it improves comprehension for the same reason that sight reading has lead to marked comprehension improvement over phonic reading. There are many training systems available, but as with other industries, most of the techniques implemented neglect important findings reported in the academic literature.
This site hosts a number of articles summarising the peer-reviewed research on speed-reading. You will find that FieldCraft's speed reading software for professionals, Stretch, is the only speed reading training utility currently available that conforms to all the findings on reading speed and extends vocabulary, comprehension and drills the user in real speed reading.
