Ralph Castle - Speed Reading: Strategies to Read Faster for Accelerated Learning in 12 Hours or Less!

When you think of reading, you no doubt think of reading the alphabet that you are accustomed to.

I n the case of the English alphabet, reading is the process of interpreting groups of letters used to form words. These words are usually quite unique one from another, although there are several cases where the same spelling of a word may in fact have more than one definition. Despite these occasional causes of confusion, the alphabetic system of writing is still regarded as one of the most efficient forms of written communication.

Writing has not always been so efficient, and there are several societies today which still use other forms of writing that require a mastery of several thousand different characters. These systems have their roots in the most ancient forms of writing which used pictures rather than alphabetic words to express thoughts and ideas.

One such writing system that is fairly well known is that of Hieroglyphics. This was the writing system used by the Ancient Egyptians some 4,000 years ago. Known as pictographic writing, this system employed images to represent a particular idea. Thus, while today we would write the sentence the boy pet the dog, the Ancient Egyptians would have virtually drawn a boy petting a dog. This writing system has one huge benefit over alphabetic systems in that anyone can usually make sense of what they are reading. Even if you cant understand the spoken language, if the pictographs are fairly well represented then you can probably make sense of the written language. This was also handy for representing ideas to a largely illiterate society. While you could argue that the Ancient Egyptians were literate in the sense that they could read their pictographs, this isnt really the same as literacy in the modern era.

A major downside to pictographic writing, however, is the sheer number of symbols that are needed in order to convey the nearly infinite number of ideas and thoughts a person can have. Instead of having an alphabet consisting of 22-26 letters that can be arranged in a virtually limitless number of variations , a pictographic script will need a picture for each concept, resulting in an almost endless number of pictographs. Thus, while this form of writing might be easier to read, especially by illiterate persons or anyone not fluent in that particular spoken tongue, it is infinitely more difficult to write as you have to memorize an immeasurable number of symbols to be able to communicate well.

Another form of writing used is the ideographic form of writing. This is essentially the evolutionary child of pictographic writing. Languages such as Chinese are considered ideographic. The premise of this writing style is that it takes a pictograph and creates a sort of shorthand version of the picture, meaning that a symbol using lines and other easy to write characters can be used in lieu of an actual picture. The images in an ideographic writing system are not so easily understood by those who are illiterate or unfamiliar with the spoken language, thus it is harder to read than its pictographic forebear. Even so, this style of writing uses symbols to represent ideas rather than words, meaning that a single symbol can convey an entire word or thought. While the symbols of an ideographic system are easier to write, they can still number in the thousands, meaning that a lifetime of study is required in order to master the written language.

Lastly there is the alphabetic style of writing, the one which most of us use today. This system replaces symbols with words, each written with a unique collection of letters. The main advantage to alphabetic writing systems is that they only require you to learn a handful of symbols, commonly referred to as letters.

Once a person can draw the letters, all they need to do is learn what letter corresponds to the sound of the word.

Thus, if a person can speak English they can write the language simply by knowing how the letters are pronounced. They may not spell everything correctly, but if a person was to read their writing out loud they would probably understand the written words. This writing system uses letters to represent sounds rather than ideas, meaning that you have to learn the language of the writing system in order to understand the writing itself. In a sense this is the final stage of evolution which has brought writing from pictures representing ideas to symbols representing sounds.

The significance of the different writing systems is important in understanding the challenges of reading in this modern age. While ancients could read an entire sentence with only a few symbols, today numerous words are required to convey the same thought. This can best be summed up by the old saying a picture is worth a thousand words.