Speed ​​reading tactics: the role of "eye lapse" and how can it catch you to fail

When learning to speed read, the saying still applies that a little information can be a dangerous thing. Consider the term “eye lapseAlthough I’ve been teaching people from all walks of life how to speed read for 30 years, it’s only recently that I’ve gotten a lot of questions about it. For new students entering my programs, the question keeps coming up early in the training .I don’t even use the term in my training.The new student has read something about it somewhere.There is too much concern about it though.

“Eye lapse” refers to the amount of text someone takes in with their eyes for each stop or “fixation” of the eyes. By saying “view span”, someone has already done a bit of research on speed reading. There is a lot of misinformation on the subject. It is true that part of the goal of speed reading is to allow the eyes to absorb more for each stop of the eyes (fixation). A traditional linear reader typically takes one to three words per fixation. That’s inefficient when you consider the total area of ​​clear focus that eyes have at normal reading distance. This normal area of ​​vision is between one and three inches in diameter. The view is always dimensional, that means there is both a horizontal and a vertical field.

The problem with learning to speed read and “eye span” is made apparent by marketing and the fact that many programs try to teach you to extend the horizontal span. In fact, many programs, especially speed reading software programs, train well beyond the natural limitation of visual experience which is about 3 inches using only the horizontal field. These types of training exercises attempt to stretch that span to six inches or more by telling the student to move directly onto the page with a line-by-line fixation.

Remember how I pointed out that sight is dimensional? Try this experiment. Take a mostly text page that has a printed area of ​​six to eight inches and large paragraphs. Now focus your eyes somewhere in the middle of the text. Close your eyes still. Take a pen or pencil and draw a circle around the amount of print you can clearly see. Don’t worry about understanding the text, just focus on the clarity of the visual experience or how much you see. Measure the area. It is probably between one and three inches in diameter. This is your natural “cone of vision.”

When you speed read, you are trying to move this “cone of vision” across and down the page. However, you don’t want to worry about how many words you’re seeing. You want your mind to search for the meaning of the text. However, without training your mind to respond and understand with these jumbled words, it will be quite frustrating because you won’t understand.

Please know that you cannot read if you do not understand. Understanding is the key. Understanding is getting meaning out of impression. Too often I get students who say that they learned to read the material at 1500-2500 words per minute, but they don’t understand it. They have gone through visual training, but not cognitive or comprehension training.

With this focus on “the breadth of the eyes,” the student becomes overly concerned with the technical aspects of the eyes, or the mechanics, and misses the meaning of the text. The mind becomes overloaded because there is competition for what it is doing. You cannot understand if you are so focused on the technical aspects of what the eyes do. So forget what your eyes do. Push for meaning!

Throughout our years of teaching speed reading, we’ve taught students to open up that 1-3 inch diameter and look for chunks of ideas or meaningful groups of words. It is not about “groups of words”, “groups of words” or the number of words that is important. It is about stopping the eyes on the “groups of meaning”. Speed ​​reading is a process by which the reader searches for meaning in print more efficiently. Eye-span only plays a part of the reading process, but it gets almost all the attention in most speed reading training.