Can you improve your reading? Do you want to read better? Do you want to read faster, with greater comprehension? You need the know-how that will help you master the printed page quickly and conclusively.

I mprovement in reading is the result of improvement in a number of areas, all of them more or less directly related to the specific act of reading itself. For the person who reads well calls for more resources than are at first apparent. The person who reads well has a vast fund of incidental general knowledge: all sorts of miscellaneous facts and bits of information that find a familiar and responsive echo in the material that he reads. This "general-knowledge" is, in fact, so important that it might almost be said that as a person's general factual knowledge background expands, the satisfaction which he derives from reading proportionately increases. Clear analytical thinking is another fact which affects in no small way the ability to read well.

In short, effective reading is the result of the acquisition of a set of skills and habits -- reaction patterns to the printed page -- which makes "reading" the page more rewarding and less laborious. Good reading habits are those immediate responses to a page of print as a result of which the thought comes off the page faster, easier, and more clearly. They save the reader time and effort. Yet, the establishing of good habits of reading is no different from forming any other habit patterns. Repetition and practice largely turn the trick.

Topflight readers are not born; they are made. And into the making of a good reader goes a lot of dogged persistence, some simple sincerity of purpose, a willingness to try some new approaches and to change the old ways of doing things, to break faulty but tenacious habits of incorrect reading, and to look at the printed page in a new and different light.

We can learn to read better than we do. For reading is knowing what to do with a printed page. Reading is knowing where to look to discover main ideas and supporting details. Reading is knowing how to appreciate the organization of thought and how to interpret and evaluate that thought as it lies open on the page before us.

It is amazing how little most of us see at a simple glance. And of that little that we do see, it is even more amazing how most of the time we see it inaccurately. And yet, in reading, glance absorption of visual data is a very valuable aid. Our eyes race across a line of print. Combinations of letters, each with its distinctive profile and characteristic shape, become for us in a split second of time a word, a thought, a concept.

Good reading is more than rapid reading. To read well means to engage in a complex activity, partly visual, partly psychological. It's basically a process of translation. The reader must translate the printed symbols which lie before his eyes so that the writer may communicate to him ideas -- ideas which the writer had in his own thinking originally but which, in order to be communicated to others, was cast into words and sentences.

As there is a limit to the amount of information that can be digested in a given time, the reader must vary his speed of reading. When the meaning is difficult he must take more time by reading more slowly; when the meaning is easy he needs less time and can read faster.