8Imagine that you have just been given the assignment of reading a book with hundreds of pages. You have only two days to complete this task and produce a written report about the reading. Would you be able to accomplish this in a timely and effective manner? The truth is, not many people are able to leverage such an accomplishment. In fact, it is assumed that only expert readers can do this, leaving the average reader struggling to get through even a few pages of a work at a time. To compensate for this, researchers have long debated that speed reading, or the ability to read rapidly by combining phrases and sentences all at once, is the key to acquiring vast amounts of information in a shorter period of time. It has also been suggested that this technique is able to improve reading comprehension when implemented effectively. Today, you can find several online courses and applications that train individuals on speed reading. These courses aim to help readers improve their ability to comprehend materials without spending extensive time on the text. A strategy such as this one is truly effective for individuals that are required to read a great deal of material. Consider college students or graduate students. The work load is almost certain to be overwhelming; and professors are less inclined to sympathize with a student simply because she is required to read many books at a time. Instead, it is up to the student to develop methods and strategies that will enable him to move through the material much more quickly while still being able to grasp the information's content effectively. Thus, speed reading is a key element in producing these types of results. This is not to say that this concept is widely accepted among all those who have studied this phenomenon. As you will learn in this book as well as throughout your continued study of speed reading, there are many researchers who believe that speed reading is ineffective in its ability to help a person retain information. For many experts, those who oppose speed reading are considered to be old-fashioned, myth-based researchers who have not fully understood the positive effects of speed reading. To these individuals - the ones that oppose speed reading - the reader can and will miss important details that are often grasped by those who take their time in reading a text. Theoretically, it would be impossible for a reader to comprehend the material effectively if time is not taken to focus or fixate on each word. This idea, however, could not be further from the truth. In fact, there is substantial evidence to validate that one's inability to speed read greatly hinders his progress in acquiring the information presented in a text. Quintessentially, and for the sake of this book, we will explore the many benefits of speed reading, and will discuss various strategies that one can use to improve reading comprehension and completion.