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Mark, I thought you were using the photoreading step... along with your speed reading ability you probably don't find you make the leap like people with moderate or slow reading ability started off with.
With your accounting background you keep looking at it in a WPM basis (an interesting trait amongst accountants ) You realise of course that not all reading materical is ment to be speed read. When students learn from books they can speed read, sure get the job out of the way once... at least 90% of the time they have to reread the material... how does that total up. If you have to reread the material at 1000wpm to improve your comprehension from 60% to 70% then your actual reading speed was only 500wpm on the book it is radically worse if you have to reread a third time, 250wpm. Nearly all students will tell you that they have to reread the material because the information from speed reading only goes into the short term memory. If you read a book from beginning to end using speed reading your overall memory of what you read deteriorates rapidly. Spending more than 40 minutes reading becomes redundant no matter what the speed if you are studying, brain research shows that after 40 minutes the learner stops learning and starts forgetting, hence the need for breaks. Even with speed reading for studying you have to keep stopping and making notes... this not only affect your overall speed but can actually reduce the persons reading speed, it is one factor that causes speed readers to go backward on their reading speed. The stop start process... like on a car it uses more energy than if you can keep going.
This is where the photoreading system is different. While you may make more passes on the material you are able to make them much more rapidly than with speed reading. The additional passes input (or rather pull out) more information than only one or two passes of the book.
From a student point of view if you're using speed reading and it takes you 3 hours to make one pass. Knowing that you'll have to reread most of the book (perhaps a number of times) to make your notes, winding up spending 6 hours (or more) reading the book. Whereas the student using the photoreading system will make 4 passes of the book in 2 hours and gain in many cases better comprehsion of the material... because it was placed into the inner mind in the first place and s/he is really drawing the information out of his or her mind, using the book as the trigger. Who really has the advantage? It is a system that is flexible for the reading material and what you want out of it. If you consisently want to get an average of 1000+wpm at 70% comprehension regardless of how simple or complex the text is... no method will work for you. You need to be flexible. The more complex the material is for you the more time you'll want to spend gaining understanding. The less complicated and just wanting one piece of information from the text 1000wpm is probably too slow.
Thats why we keep imploring you to activate a couple of books using the layering method and drawing mind map... you won't need to do that for every single book. In the beginning its that training that helps you find the information even faster and while your WPM reading speed may not seem consistant, your comprehension will no doubt start falling more consistently in the 80 - 90% range on books that are really meaningful too you. I personally am surprised how much my comprehension has improved... if I were still taking the same amount of time as I used to with regular reading I'd be happy. I was never able to accept the inital backward step one had to take in comprehension to succeed with speed reading.
I have no idea if it would be useful to you but you can email me for a copy of my article on activation and comprehsion.
Alex
[This message has been edited by AlexK (edited September 16, 2002).]
