extreme webmaster evernerve

Continuing the series of essential skills which were started with my articles on memory improvement, I will introduce you now to speed reading.

Who should learn speed reading for the Web?

Why should you learn this essential skill? Because you will find it extremely useful if you are:

1. A webmaster. You are sifting through tons of information on a daily basis. You need to be able to scan through all this information rapidly and find things of interest to you. You need the speed to go through dozens of articles that will help you find inspiration and reference for your own articles and your websites’ content.
2. A social media user. You may be spending a lot of time on Digg, StumbleUpon, del.icio.us and other social sharing websites. So you need to go quickly through all the articles that your online friends sent you, understand what they are all about and then decide whether to share them, bookmark them, promote them further or bury them.
3. An information junkie. You are probably interested in a myriad of issues, ranging from technology, politics, to humor and trivia. You are just hooked to the Web. Why not learn a skill that will help you cut down the time it takes you now to read all that information? You will become more selective and aware of what you’re reading.
4. An IT/PR/marketing company employee. Your job consists of searching for information, writing copy and/or promoting a website or product via the Web. Your daily activities revolve around information. You need to be more effective at what you do.

First things first: Organize yourself

Before starting to go through all the information you need to absorb, organize yourself. Manage your time better by following these easy guidelines:

1. Prioritize the information. Decide what articles/blog posts/news bulletins you are going to read first. See which ones are urgent and which ones are worthy of bookmarking. Articles that are important, inspiring and that can be used as a reference many times are worth bookmarking. I bookmark the best ones on del.icio.us. Next, decide which ones are ok, but not that important. And lastly, decide which articles are just worth a single look, a scan.
2. Know what to throw away. The bookmark-worthy articles are the ones that you will come back to and the ones that you will possibly link to in your own writings. The other ones are for reading only. You will pick up any bits of information and data that are relevant for your article. But as soon as you extracted what you need, close the page that contained that article and move on. Don’t dwell on unimportant and trivial articles.
3. Store the information. Either copy and paste what you need in Notepad or directly into your blog article-making interface. What I highly recommend, however, is to write things down on paper. Especially ideas. I have a big organizer/workbook into which I jot down all the important and relevant stuff that I come across when I’m scourging the Web for information and inspiration. Your hand armed with a pen works far better and faster than any keyboard could ever do. You can sketch things, quickly write down ideas, create doodles, etc. Don’t think that technology is the be all and end all. Successful and highly intelligent people always have a pen and a piece of paper at their side!

Rules for speed reading on the Web

The essential rules, the ones that will make your speed reading really easy, apply to both online and offline news and articles. Here they are:

1. Crucial information — The message that the author wants to convey to the readership — is contained within the title, subtitle and the first sentence of the article.
2. Recycling — When something happens, the subsequent developments are composed of recycled information from previous articles in the same story. So, 94%-96% of the newest “news” article is made of recycled material.
3. Supporting information — This is what fills the space beneath a title. These are the sentences that explain, reinforce and justify the statement laid out in the title.
4. Eye-catchers and embellishments — Images and the accompanying text, quotes from text. Most of the time repeating what you already know from the title, but sometimes worth a look because they contain some useful snippet from the text.
5. Conclusion — Not so important or reliable, because in most cases, it either concludes that the title of the article is the truth, and nothing but the truth, or it expresses a view, an opinion, or possible outcome of an event as seen by the author of the article.

How to speed read on the Web — examples

And now, let me show you how to do this by example. Open each example in a new tab or window, to be able to follow more easily my explanations.

Science news articles

• Aggression as rewarding as sex, food and drugs

The title says it all here: You don’t need to look any further! Aggression is rewarding as sex is, as food is, etc. As I said, the first sentence contains the crucial information, the most important facts. In this case, it almost repeats the title:

New research from Vanderbilt University shows for the first time that the brain processes aggression as a reward - much like sex, food and drugs - offering insights into our propensity to fight and our fascination with violent sports like boxing and football.

The rest of the article just serves as support — scientific proof in this particular example — to the title. Look at this:

It is well known that dopamine..

You don’t need to go any further. The proof of what you read in the title is dopamine, a chemical in our brains. Or:

For the experiments, a pair of mice…

OK. They found this via mice, the standard lab method. The next 3 paragraphs further describe the fun the people in the lab had with the mice. That serves as support, and that’s it.

And finally, here comes the conclusion, which regurgitates what you already know for the third time, just by using a little bit of support information:

“This shows for the first time that aggression, on its own, is motivating, and that the well-known positive reinforcer dopamine plays a critical role.”

Check out the text beneath the image:

Scientists find that brain rewards aggressive behavior similarly to the way it rewards for ingesting sex, food and drugs.

OK, sex can’t be ingested, but you get it: same info as found in the title and the first sentence. Let’s see the next example.

Current events

• Gang robs Zurich of top paintings

Do you need to go any further than the title? Ok, if you want some additional data, you just need to read the subtitle…

An armed gang has stolen four paintings worth some $160m (£82m) by the great painters Cezanne, Degas, Van Gogh and Monet from a museum in Zurich.

…and the first paragraph:

Swiss police said the robbery happened at the Emil Buehrle Collection on Sunday. The three thieves are at large.

From just the subtitle and the first paragraph you now know the authors and the value of the stolen paintings, plus the fact that the thieves are still at large.

If you take a look at the subheading, it says “Impossible to sell”. And that fact is repeated further down the article. The fact that a member of staff was threatened is repeated twice. There is even no conclusion here.

Eye-catchers are good: A timeline of major recent art thefts and the images of the stolen paintings. Good information for anyone further interested in the subject. But you, as a speed reader, you don’t need those if you are just sifting through the information — you already know the core facts. And based on that, you’ll also know if you deem the article important or irrelevant.

Current events as an example of recycled material:

• Shot East Timor leader ‘critical’

This happened on Sunday, 22:00 GMT (the time zone of Great Britain, home of BBC news). At the time of writing of this article on speed reading on the Web, the last update to the article was made today, (Monday), at 11:00 GMT.

The article was updated a few times in this period, and anything deemed important is once again found in the title, subtitle and first paragraph.

The subtitle has the most important information, expanding on the title:

East Timor’s President Jose Ramos-Horta is in a critical condition and has been put into an induced coma, after being shot by rebel soldiers.

Subsequent paragraphs retell the timeline, as the events unfolded and more information poured in:

Mr Ramos-Horta was shot in a pre-dawn attack on his Dili home, and later airlifted to Australia for treatment.
Later Prime Minister Xanana Gusmao declared a 48-hour state of emergency, including a night-time curfew.
Mr Gusmao, who was targeted in a separate incident but was unharmed, described the events as a coup attempt.
Rebel leader Alfredo Reinado and another rebel died in the attack on Mr Ramos-Horta.

The subheadings within the article tell you all: ‘Under control’, ‘Failed coup’ and ‘Unrest fear’. Everything else is support info.

Speed reading to find the essential information

• Global Telecom: 3 Emerging Market Plays with Massive Upside!

The title is once again the message, but this time, there is a lengthy introduction. Speed read through the first sentences, or first words of each paragraph and you’ll find the rest of the crucial information. It is placed in the fifth paragraph:

This article highlights 3 global wireless telecom companies that will play a key role in connecting our world through satellite based communications.

It is enough to read the words “This article” to realize that you’ve hit the paragraph that will tell you what’s the story about.

Beneath each subheading, the first sentence summarizes what you need to know:

America Movil (NYSE: AMX) is the dominant wireless telecom company in Central and South America.

Vimpel-Communications (NYSE: VIP) is the largest wireless telecom provider by market cap in Russia, and the majority of the former satellite countries from the former Soviet Union.

Videsh Sanchar Nigam Limited (NYSE: VSL) doesn’t quite fit the mold of a pure play wireless provider, but VSL encompasses a growing telecom company in all aspects of a rapidly growing dominant power.

Fine! Now you know how to look for information quickly. But…

What about speed reading non-news articles?

Good question! Let’s have a look at a good example: The Wired magazine. They have a lot of news articles, like this one:

• Netflix Opts for Blu-Ray High-Def DVDs

No need to go any further. You already know the drill.

But, they also have columnists who write lengthy articles that span several pages. Let me show you one example of this. Remember that you can apply this technique to other big articles. Here goes:

• Welcome to Cyberwar Country, USA

Speed reading a long article is done like this:

1. Search the top and bottom of the page to see if there is a link to the full article. All articles on Wired have this at the bottom (the link says “Full Page”). Some websites have a link to the printable version of the article, which is again a one-page version of the article. This is important, because speed reading through many pages on the web doesn’t work if you have to wait for them to load. It’s much, much better to have all the content in one place.
2. Read all the subheadings. This will give you an excellent overview of the article. You will grasp the important concepts and understand what the content is about. Use the Page up, Page down and the arrow keys on your keyboard to this. When speed reading, I found them much more effective than using the mouse for page scrolling. Here are the subheadings for this article:
   • Russian Hackers and Chinese Cyberspies
   • Location, Location, Location
   • Built-In Force Protection
   • “Tell the Nation That the Age of Cyberwarfare Is Here”
   • Unified Command, Single Commander
   • Cold War Sites Compete for the Code War
   • No Geographic Edge
   • “We Are Our Own Worst Enemy”
   • Hoping For Too Much?
3. Read the text beneath the images and any bolded text. This will further expand your understanding of the article. There is no bolded text here, but some websites use this often to stress some important points. If you spot them, read them and move on. Don’t dwell on the text surrounding them.
4. Rapidly read through the article. To do this, you have to:
   • Relax.
   • Sit comfortably, but upright.
   • Don’t cross your feet, they must be apart.
   • When you are ready and relaxed, state the intention in your head. You can even speak it aloud if you want. I usually say: “I want to rapidly read through this article and understand its content”. In this way, you are telling to your brain that you mean business. This is a must for motivation.
   • Now begin rapidly reading through the article. Just go. Don’t go back. That’s the single thing that can stop you from reading rapidly, speedily. If you don’t understand something, it doesn’t matter. You’ll get back to it later. Just move on, concentrate on what you are reading and don’t stop until you reach the end of the article.

After you have done this a few times, you will realize an interesting thing: Most of the information is irrelevant. Most if it serves to fill the paper. Most of it is bla-bla. The main concepts are laid out in subheadings and a few sentences in each section. All other content serves to “fill the emptiness of the paper”, to say so.

Have you noticed in this article how many people are interviewed? I don’t know the exact number, but each one of them serves to reinforce some piece of information that the author of the article already wrote. Most of it was useless to me. I grasped the main ideas, and that’s it.

I could tell anyone a summary of the article now that I’ve speed read it. If I haven’t used this method, I would have spent at least three times as much time on it as I did now. This method made possible for me to read and absorb the article in 2-3 minutes. Otherwise it yould have been 10 or 15. And I wouldn’t have remembered all that I did now, and it would be boring. And I also wouldn’t have realized that most info contained within the article is useless to me.

Pick up Newsweek or Time magazine, and you’ll see that they use the same style. Nearly every magazine on the planet functions in this way. Unless you are reading something highly specialized, like a medicine publication that deals with, let’s say, neurology, or anything else, philosophy, etc.

Speed reading — exceptions to the rule

Of course, there are some things that can’t be read like the news or long articles described above.  These are:

• How-tos, tutorials and other educational material (like this one)
• Personal stories, blog entries

How-tos require your participation more often than not and they are made to explain a concept, a procedure, or a way to create something. So they require slower reading and all the details are usually important.

That’s why you still should preview them (title, subtitles, subheadings, bolded text), because you will become more familiar with what’s at hand. Then, you should begin to read them at your own pace.

As for personal stories and blog entries, they are usually read out of pleasure, like you would read a novel. So if you feel like it, you could speed read through them. But if you are interested in details and want to savour the atmosphere, read at your own pace.

Conclusion

Practice this and you’ll get better at it and you will become faster at it. You will also notice that your filters will improve: You will immediately be able to spot the difference between relevant and irrelevant data.

Well, I am happy to share my knowledge with you. Post a comment below, spread the story and let me know how it works for you!

If you enjoyed this post, consider subscribing to my RSS feed or leave a comment. Share and bookmark: