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Tricks of the trade (or, so I suspect): If you want to encourage people to buy your book or software or take your seminar on speed reading, just convince them that they read too slow. Do this most effectively by testing their reading speed by having them read either poorly written text, text with lots of difficult words, text with lots of numbers or statistics (e.g., the ReadingSoft test), or a speech (e.g, the MindBluff test). For the JFK speech, I could sense my reading speed slow as I could almost hear the Kennedy delivering the speech in my head. What a gimmick! I once took a two-day speed reading course that my employer paid for. The pre-test was to read a portion of The Diary of Anne Franck which was filled with names, dates, and places in an unedited diary entry of a teenager - not the easiest thing to read. After four hours of "training", we took a test to see how much we had improved. The text was a selection from a Jack London novel - no "hard" info, just a lot of feelings of cold, wilderness, isolation, etc. Needless to say, everyone did lousy on the pretest and wonderful on the second. I walked out and never finished the course. I have always wished for a good way to improve my reading speed, but I won't go near most vendors because they all seem too slimy to me.
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