Retention rate has always been somewhat of a sticking point for opponents of speed reading. Retention is a term that means “How much of something you can recall after having been exposed to it,” in this case, through the text you have read. It is a fundamental fact of life that not everything you read will stick in your mind, even moments after you’ve read something, and murder mysteries are often littered with great examples of this – small clues in a person’s description or in something they said which you don’t notice right away that leads to the resolution of the plot.
Poor readers will have less than a 50% retention rate on anything they read, meaning that if they were asked 10 questions on the passage they had just read, they’d get around five of them correct. Right now, this is the primary way to grade retention, though other groups are trying to incorporate an ability to summarize or repeat what was written as a method of testing retention, with mixed results.
Speed readers often start out with a higher comprehension and retention rate than poor readers, or even average readers, and can typically score between eighty and one hundred percent on these tests. At least, arm chair speed readers can. There are many “professional” speed readers who claim to be able to read in the tens of thousands of words per minute, though their comprehension suffers incredibly, and is said to be around 20 or 30%.
Speed reading retention is so strong because the techniques you learn in your average speed reading course are designed to help you become a better reader first and foremost, and a faster reader second. The reason is simple; if you can understand something better, you won’t have to re-read, and you won’t have to puzzle out scenarios and situations as they arise because they’ll be more clear in your mind.
Therefore, when you first start a speed reading course, you should notice that your reading speed increases, but also that your reading comprehension and retention rate go up as well, usually in equal measure. There are many speed reading programs, such as Speed Reader X which come complete with a memory improvement module as well, which some have cited as being a good addition to the main program.