An “adequate” rate ofwords read aloud per minute is between 100 and 130 words. Thesilent readingis faster, and usually develops at a rate of200 words per minute.
However, according to Ramón Campayo, considered “the best memorizer in the world”, in his bookDevelop a Prodigious MindReading at this speed means wasting time, losing concentration and making retention difficult, since the data is too widely spaced. He proposes an alternative technique that, instead of following the words of a line linearly, makesReaders jump very fast by making stops in groups of 4-6 wordsevery 0.25-0.75 seconds. At each of these stops, Campayo explains, a “photograph” of the set of words is obtained instead of having to successively add the meaning of each word to the next until a meaning is found. If it is done by the traditional method “we feel a premature fatigue, caused by making six times more fixations with our eyes on the text, as well as by that unconscious effort that we make when we have toretain isolated words in memory“.
To practice speed reading technique, which allowsread at a rate of 1,000 words / minute, Campayo proposes to start practicing by pointing with a pen to each group of six words that we want to “read or photograph”. And it recommends that the text we read be placed horizontally and not twisted, to facilitate rapid eye movement, and at a distance of at least 30 centimeters from our eyes.
“Reading so fast is possible becausethe mental speed we have to retain the data of any information that we perceive is much higher than the speed of reading“, says this world champion of memorization and speed reading. And gives an example: in the cinema, we can capture information equivalent to about 60,000 words / minute. Therefore, reading at 200 words / minute” we slow down the memorization process ” .
