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Why Speed-Reading Apps Don't Work
sciencehabit writes: "Does reading faster mean reading better? That's what speed-reading apps claim, promising to boost not just the number of words you read per minute, but also how well you understand a text. There's just one problem: The same thing that speeds up reading actually gets in the way of comprehension, according to a new study (abstract). Apps like Spritz or the aptly-named Speed Read are built around the idea that these eye movements, called saccades, are a redundant waste of time. It's more efficient, their designers claim, to present words one at a time in a fixed spot on a screen, discouraging saccades and helping you get through a text more quickly. But that's not what researchers have found."
the first time i read it
The reason speed reading apps don't work is because you either know how to read fast or you don't. The average human should be able to read well over 200 - 1000 words a minute, any less and you have much bigger problems, more then an app can solve. This should be the chart for reading speed:
1. Fast: 1000+ words / minute
2. Normal 200 - 1000 words / minute
3. Slow 100 - 200 words / minutes
4. Unacceptably slow less then 100 words / minute.
People who read at less then 100 words per minute have a completely different problem that can't be solved from a simple app on a phone.
When I read a page, I can actually see multiple words in a sentence, context from the line(s) above, and generally can access a context of about 10-15 words at a time. While speed reading (as in, actual speed reading a page), you read by going down the center of the page, which preserves a good chunk of the context, and assumes that missing a few words here and there is only going to minorly impair your understanding of the text.
This, on the other hand, provides a minor speed-up at the cost of context, the ability to back-track and no ability to skip words that don't help much with understanding like various particles or flowery prose.
Yep, this approach is idiotic.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
When I was in high school, they had machines that presented text one line at a time at a set speed. The idea is that we were to gradually speed it up to force us to read faster. There would be a brief comprehension test after which was more of a short term retention test.
Then there was reading texts normally (free reading) and seeing how fast you were reading without the machine.
The result of that was that I could read much faster than natural if I pressed it and my natural speed improved by about 10%. I find that I rarely care to press it as it gives me little time to think about what I'm reading and so poor long term retention so it's good mostly when I need to do more than skim but just need to find a bit of information for immediate use.
Of course, the far more useful 10% increase in natural rate doesn't make as big a bullet point.
Though the article does note that this is the case for a lot of people, but the big advantage of reading over other media (e.g. audio or video) is that reading is self-pacing. When reading information rich texts, it allows me to gloss over details that I already know while focusing upon details that I don't. When I'm in a lousy state of mind (e.g. having difficulty concentrating due to lack of sleep or external concerns) it allows me to slow down. When I'm in a good state of mind (e.g. I'm motivated to read the text or am well rested) it allows me to speed up.
Simply put: I read rather than watch or listen because my mind is in control of the flow of information.
Perhaps someone can pick apart a speed reading idea I've had for awhile and tell me what's wrong with it:
I envision a system where you have a physical book and an audio book. You would read the book while listening to the audio book. Slowly, you would increase the speaking rate of the audio book and work to match your reading speed. Double re-enforcement. Ultimately you would no longer need an accompanying audio book.
This is effectively how we learn to read as toddlers.
Brought to you by Carl's Junior.
tl;dr
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
It was shown quite some time ago that adults "read" by recognizing the shapes of words, not their spelling. If this is true then it would explain the problems described in TFA.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W...
http://www.dummies.com/how-to/...
-1 Troll, but I've got some troll-chow handy so what the hell:
Maybe because you are one of the beneficiaries of a completely artificial system (a.k.a. a society) which creates a soci-economic "quicksand" that's easy to get trapped in? Don't yank away the social safety net away whenever people try to climb out of it, and you'll get a lot fewer people who decide to languish in it. We may disagree over whether having a safety net at all is a good idea, but I suspect you can also recognize that having a wide gulf between when the safety net disappears and when you can actually provide a similar amount of security for yourself presents a *huge* disincentive for people to try to improve their situation.
And it's completely stupid to boot. Take something like food stamps - it would be rather trivial to adjust tax rates such that you could give everyone $200/month in food stamps with minimal change to any self-supporting person's total government tax/benefit balance. And by doing so you've not only removed one of the disincentives to pulling yourself up by your bootstraps (losing food stamps just as you leave the ground), you've also virtually eliminated all the bureaucracy associated with validating eligibility. Ditto with something like socialized medicine. Go ahead and limit it to cheap, well-established treatments - broken bones and easily treatable infectious diseases cover the vast majority of conditions most children and working-age people face, and having free treatment for such would take a lot of the profit out of the medical insurance scam. Leave insurance and huge private medical bills to those few who are wish to protect themselves from the expensive long-shots.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
Skip the reading entirely and go straight for the POST button.
As someone who discovered Spritz when it started making headlines, and tried out a similar RSVP app with the novel I'm currently reading, I can tell you that my comprehension didn't suffer. I tend to adjust the speed while I read, ranging from 500-700 wpm, and I can still clearly recall and describe the plot and detailed events of the book over the sections that I read using the app.
I do agree that it's not an ideal way to read, as the flow of text tends to be robotic and lacks some of the conveyance of emotion. In this regard, it's probably better for reading non-fiction or purely informational texts. I can't say it hurt my comprehension, though.
Unlike porn, which yada yada rimshot hey-ooh!
I was fortunate to be given a speed reading class that took several weeks as a high school graduation present back in the dark ages (1965). I took the course and practiced as I was told, but I never did believe it was doing any good and it was definitely not a fun way to read anything for pleasure. Fast forward to the next year and I am a freshman in engineering, but having to take an "elective" political science course in which I had no interest at all. Since the purpose of the freshman year in engineering is to cull the masses I concentrated on what, to me, were the far more important classes I had. A few days before the final exam I realized that I was not going to pass that polysci class unless I could pull off a near perfect score on the final. The professor was kind enough to confirm my calculations on that point. For two days before the final I read the entire text book through cover to cover TWICE. I scored in the high 90's on the final and passed the course with a C+. When I was taking the exam, I really was just sort of zoned out. Much of the test was essay questions and I would just write whatever came into my head on the subject, not really knowing what I was saying or where it came from.
Now, I would have put this down as a fluke except that I was able to do very similar things for the rest of my career in engineering. Although trained in systems engineering I started out working with computer systems when computers were big iron and I worked on both IBM, Univac, and DEC systems. Then I successfully made the transition to PC's and networks and retired as a Network Engineer and Security Officer. Often I would have to learn enough to get started in a new area about which I knew almost nothing with little time to do so. I would get 5 or 6 books on the subject and absorb them over a weekend and could then get up to speed pretty quickly after that.
I still don't understand how it works, and I am still not sure I really believe it works, but for over 40 years the speed reading class I took in 1965 saved my bacon many times.
Its a balance, speed and comprehension. You can't have both be high at the same time. If you are reading faster, you are thinking less about what your reading.
I have a cousin that can read a book in a day, I often find her reading the same book a few months later, she forgets enough of it to enjoy reading it again. I read much slower, but I remember the book for around 10 years just by looking the title of the book.
I'm sure for a few this works, we are not all made the same.
i suggest we use slow reading apps instead at least for important readings we could start by eliminating punctuation blank spaces and why not grammar as well for a better comprehension the next step would be also using abbreviations like the ancient romans did yes i know better comprehension wasnt their only goal but who cares
The article is exactly right from my experience, and I'm not going to speed read a book I enjoy. However, there's a lot of times where you need to pick up an idea quickly or in it's general form where that comes in handy. Great example is classroom material. I'm not reading four or more 600+ page textbooks each semester, especially when I don't need 98% of the material.
What I do need most often is a general grasp of what is going on in a particular chapter, then I might go back, work out how to use formulas, go over a specific table or case study, etc.
Speed reading the entire thing leaves out almost all of the trees, but it allows me to get a quick view of the forest.
The way I taught myself to speed read is to skim rapidly across a paper and get the gist of what they're saying. I read in major word concepts and understand what they're trying to say while skipping lesser words. It is dead on that you can't comprehend as much, but you can give yourself a personal TL:DR summary. I don't recommend others to learn speed reading because sometimes it engages itself without trying. It is almost a bad habit that it engages when I have impatience with what I'm reading. I mean there are places it is good to have speed reading, but sometimes its hard to control and can be a bad habit. I mean the pros out weigh the cons, but not by much.
Speed reading isn't as useful of a skill as people think it is when they first hear it. It even ruins things designed to capture your imagination at a certain rate of time like Tolkien. If you speed read Tolkien, it is comparable to watching LOTR in fast forward. I mean you can get the gist of what happens by watching a movie in fast forward, but if you want to sit down and enjoy it, you watch it at the rate it was intended for. Where speed reading is really good is focusing a page of all sorts of information like Reddit, and getting to the stuff you want to read more rapidly.
God spoke to me
I can read the entire slashdot page of comments for this article in 10 seconds. Why? Because I know all I'm skipping is uninformed BS. It seems no-one here has the faintest clue to the reading process. I have first hand experience in psycho-linguistic experiments, and I can tell you that saccades are quite probably an essential part of the reading process: eyes just don't wander around at random, they fixate quite precisely to recognize groups of characters or short words in their context. Very short words, like articles and prepositions can sometimes be skipped altogether (leading to a certain class of reading errors). And in experiments where you show subjects one word at a time, it's obvious that information gets lost when you present the words too quickly.
It might be possible to speed up reading a bit, but the faster, the more it resembles skimming. And when you try to force that onto the reader by presenting every bloody word (something skimming avoids), the reader is going to get tired from the effort, and confused since he's got no way to go back. Very lousy idea.
Many years ago I got pulled into a scam around speed reading. A good friend (at the time) was in the thrall of a conman with an interesting proposal. The elevator pitch went something like this: "Imagine a system that flashes words at you subliminally and when it detects you haven't understood a word (via a biofeedback mechanism) it then flashes the dictionary definition of that word. You could read an entire book in minutes and have complete understanding of the content."
Even though I was young I still could smell bullshit. A small group of similarly-minded people tried to pop the bubble, but when the true believers had invested so much time and emotional energy there was no turning them around. The was more to it than this: crazy mind games, a three-car pile up and other weirdness (including an impromptu cover of "The Rainbow Connection" in an upmarket restaurant), but I won't bore you with the details. The end-point is it soured a friendship which never recovered.
Maybe I'm biased by that experience, but any technology that promises to solve problems by getting people to read faster - instead of, say, with better comprehension - leaves me with the taste of snake-oil in my mouth.
Something about speed reading being great? Right?
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
I am German, so please excuse me, if my English isn't that good. There once was a study in Germany, what effect almost exclusively lower case in german texts would have. The result was, that texts are better understandable with nouns written with an upper case first letter. They serve as anchors, especially, when reading fast. Furthermore, in English it is common, that the same word is used as a verb and a noun. This actually would be a damn good reason to write nouns with an upper case first letter. When you skim through an English text, and notice, for example, the word "jump", you don't even know, if it is the verb or the noun. This can also be a source of ambiguity. Another big source of ambiguity is the usage of "it" to refer to almost everything, because most words don't have a grammatical gender. You have to be aware of that, when you are creating relative sentences in English. Even people are not always gendered in English. Is the tennis player female or male? You often have to read a fair bit into a text, until he/she (see?) is referenced as "her" or "him". I have seen some discussions between native English speakers on the internet, were someone wrote sth. like "Ah, so the teacher was your mother!" or "I thought, the cat was chasing the car, not the dog." Oh, this last example has another ambiguity. I should write "I thought, the cat, not the dog, was chasing the car". This ambiguity does not occur in German because articles are declined dependent on the gender and relation. http://de.wiktionary.org/wiki/... To put it in a nutshell, it seems logical, that speed reading is especially hard in English. The more possible ambiguities you have, the more likely you will have to stop and think about, what is really meant.
Like he covered everything else, RIP
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rbKFgIxv5nU#t=02m31s
ARTReader is a completely different approach to speed reading; check out www.advreadtech.com