I read the shortened version of this. There is some good advice in there - just enough to make it worth reading the full edition although on the negative side I thought the exercises were poorly laid out and not really good measures. In the first it said choose any text you want so I picked the trashy novel I was reading at the time. The second exercise uses a piece of non-fiction which is obviously going to take longer to read. This is the only explaination I can come up with for having a slower reading speed at the end of the course than at the beginning :-)

I've just seen a good quote in the (completely unrelated) book that I'm reading over lunch:

"I took a speed-reading course and read War and Peace in twenty minutes. It involves Russia" - Woody Allen.

Buzan would tell you otherwise but my gut feeling is that speed comes at the cost of comprehension and retention... ( )