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Speed Reading?
Chacham writes "Anyone here have success with Speed Reading? I've seen complaints about less comprehension, that it is uncomfortable, and that it's just plain hard to do. I've also seen people say it is invaluable. What are your experiences? I am particularly interested about reading technical resources, but I am curious overall as well." We've actually asked this before, but it's been three years, might as well take a second look at it.
The "forgetting what you've read" thing, that makes you reread it over and over again is a sign of Attention Deficit Disorder (not to be confused with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder). You may wanna talk to a physciatrist about it.
(BTW - I have ADD, and drugs help out quite a bit).
You might want to read The Straight Dope about speed reading...
Recently, I tried out GnomeRSVP to find out what that is all about...
Much to my surprise, I must say that, for texts which are available on the computer, it is a very convenient and fast tool to quickly absorb huge amounts of text.
I can read somewhere around 1000 to 1200 words per minute and remember about 90% of it for about 12 hours.
That is more than enough if you have to get a quick overview about a subject.
It is not enough to write a paper about a specific topic as you loose most abbreviations or references to other texts. You also can't really enjoy the experience.
I ran a test and held a talk about a topic I know exactly nothing about, just based on the texts I read... and my recall was comprehensive and precise.
After 12 hours, the rate of recall was down to about 60% though... so, in my case, the data is not permanently absorbed, as the context is lost and I can't recall longer paragraphs as a whole...
If by speed reading you mean that you are reading like the guy in the infomercials, it's impossible. Cognition has a property called 'attentional blink', where by the systems that are responsible for transfering information between different regions of your brain are busy for a finite ammount of time. For more information on it check here and I think you'll agree. You may also want to check out the articulatory control unit and iconic memory. If you ask anyone who is worth their salt in the field of psychology or neuroscience they will agree that it's just impossible to do.
1) Find a book with a fairly heavy amount of text-per-page ratio.
2) Pick a page that starts with a complete sentence and ends with a complete sentence.
3) Start stopwatch
4) Read page
5) Stop stopwatch
6) Count the number of words you read
7) Using simple algebra, divide the value you got in #6 with the reading you got in #5. Adjust to figure out WPM.
For extra credit, read the selection again and time yourself again. You should be able to retain more information on the second reading and improve your reading speed simultaneously. But, really, you'd expect that since you can mentally skip over stuff that you retained on the first go through.
The other way...
Read your usual reading material for a minute and count the words. The speedreading class texts had numbers at the end of each line counting the total words, so it was easy to check. Of course, you could have this rescaled - read for 5 minutes and have the numbers represent 1/5 the number of actual words.