How to speed read the Chilcot report
The full Chilcot report consists of 12 volumes and contains 2.6 million words. Thank God, a 150-page (Chilcote report 2016) executive summary is being published as well and that’s where I would start to get an overview of the whole document.
Once I’ve got the big picture and overview of the whole document and how it’s structured (hopefully it’s well laid out with good TOC/table of content and index, etc) I would ask myself some basic question such as: What specifically do I want to know? and What will I do with this information?
2.6m words
It’s about 4.5 times bigger than War and Peace (587,00 words) and about three times bigger than the Bible (775,00 words) and the complete works of Shakespeare (885,000 words).
Speed reading is information extraction so there is no point of reading the Chilcot report, from cover to cover – just for the sake of it. It would take a long, long time. Just think, if an average, educated person reads about 240wpm (word per minute) – it would take about 180 hours to read it from cover to cover (that is about seven full 24-hour days of non-stop traditional reading).
Hopefully, the whole document will be published as a pdf (a 150-page (Chilcote report 2016) executive summary is) which will help tremendously because one could just search the info one was looking for. Also, once I know what I’m looking for, by searching it I would make sure that I’m not missing any vital information.
How to speed read the Chilcot report from cover to cover
If I had to speed read it from cover to cover (the person/s who summarised it – must have done it to some extent) I would:
1) speed read the executive summary in two 20-min sessions and build a timeline of the events to get a good overview of the whole document
2) set a SMART purpose for speed reading
3) download it to my non-conscious mind at a rate of 1 second per 2-page spread – this might take a long time to do it manually so I’d try to do it on a computer screen at a rate of 800 000 wpm
4) rapid read from cover to cover at a rate of 20-30 sec per page
5) take notes in the form of mind-mapping and rhizomapping to remember the key facts
6) search the relevant info afterwards to double check if I haven’t missed anything.
7) work in 20-min sessions with short breaks until I finish
And how to really read the Chalcot report – a message
It doesn’t matter if you read the Chilcot report fast or slow it won’t bring back all those lives lost during the Iraq war. All politicians, intelligence and military personnel should read it slowly and many times so they can learn from the mistakes. The message of the Chilcot report is that the Iraq war was wrong (unnecessary because the regime didn’t pose an imminent threat to Britain), badly planned and ill-executed. War is the most terrible state and we don’t need reminders but if people won’t read and reflect on the Chilcot report those precious lives will be lost in vain. And if we as human beings don’t feel shame that wars are still going on this planet, the people who come after us (if they come) will wonder why we couldn’t figure out how to live peacefully.