All entries for Wednesday 30 November 2011

Speed Reading Workshop – 11/11/2011 – Tutor – Ms. Han–Na Cha– First Entry

Workshop: Speed Reading, Masters Skills: 11/11/2011 Tutor - Ms. Han-Na Cha

The Speed Reading workshop at 3pm on 11/11/2011 was probably one of the more useful workshops that i have, and will have ever attended. I knew i was a slow reader but the extent of my slowness was figured out then; a ridiculous 150 words a minute, which is pathetic, considering English is my first language.

As the day progressed, i learnt new and better techniques to improve myself, and to be honest, not all of them worked, but some of them did, to a great extent. The evening proceeded with a series of excercises and test and i definitely did way better than I had expected to.

Ms. Han-Na is a great tutor and she brought with her a lot of bubbliness and enthusiasm into the whole experience, and made a subject as boring as READING (in my opinion), fun and exciting.

At the end of the workshop, we were asked to come up with a few things that we would consciously want to make an effort to improve. Since I didnt follow ANY of the suggestions made for speed reading, I had to literally start from scratch! So these were the few Action Points that I came up with:-

• Sitting upright while reading - While i have managed to make a conscious effort to do that, it is still hard. But the whole of last week, I sat up straight for atleast 2 hours everytime i was reading, so that's an improvent.
• Keeping text atleast 30cm away - Consciously working on that and i have been doing it all week now.
• No backtracking - This is a very crucial issue i need to address as it would eat up alot of my time earlier. When i was reading a few articles for my esay last week, I didn't seem to understand alot of stuff on the first read and so i would keep following that particular line back. Then, as Ms. Han-Na had suggested, I decided to read the entire text once and even though i did not understand parts of the entire concept/paragraph, I got an overall picture, which was very helpful. So, this was a start and now im consciously making an effort to do it.
• Made bullet points of the text i read - I have been doing this for a week now, and even though i initially thought that it was a waste of paper and more time, i found that in the long run, it actually saved me time because i could just look at my notes to recollect what the paper said, rather than having to read up the paper again. I have made notes for three research articles, till date.
• Following these really helpful points, my reading speed has now increased to 183 words a minutes, on a consistent basis!!

So these were the action points i took home from the first workshop and i will strive to achieve each and every one of them, to make myself a better person and make it all worth it, in the long run.

Have a lovely week.

Regards

Abbas

Abbas Siraj Deesawala : 30 Nov 2011 13:54 |  Tags: A7 Portfolio |  Comments (2) |  Close comments |  Report a problem