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Slashdot Asks: What's Your View On Speed Reading?
Wouldn't it be great if you could read a novel in an hour or two? Certainly, many people do that. The phenomenon of speed reading is nothing new with plenty of people claiming that they have grown habituated -- or taught themselves into -- reading things in an accelerated fashion. Not everyone -- including yours truly -- is a fan of this. There are several studies that suggest that 'speed reading' result in people missing out on lots of tidbits. A New York Times article, published Friday, also suggests the same. Jeffrey M. Zacks, and Rebecca Treiman, in an op-ed, citing a recent article in Psychological Science in the Public Interest, claim that "it's extremely unlikely you can greatly improve your reading speed without missing out on a lot of meaning." They write: Certainly, readers are capable of rapidly scanning a text to find a specific word or piece of information, or to pick up a general idea of what the text is about. But this is skimming, not reading. We can definitely skim, and it may be that speed-reading systems help people skim better.Which brings us to the question: What's your view on speed reading?
I took a speed reading course where you run your finger down the middle of the page and was able to read 'War and Peace' in twenty minutes. It's about Russia.
Wouldn't it be great if you could read a novel in an hour or two?
I read fiction for relaxation and to enjoy, become mentally immersed in the story, not just to acquire the text in my memory.
To be honest, for me at least, the same often applies to technical material.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
If all you want to do is figure out what's happening, speed reading does what you want - tells you what's going on. You isolate the actual actions and events of the story from the cruft. Writing generally has a ratio of meaningful descriptors versus 'words for their own sake' nonsense, ranging from technical writing to Finnegan's Wake, and speed reading lets you handle most of the former quickly.
Does it help you figure out what's going on in Finnegan's Wake, no, but I find that works on that spectrum of the scale aren't really worth bothering with anyway. If it literally cannot be speed-read because there's not enough clear descriptors (in an attempt to infuse their work with some variant version of 'meaning'), it's just an linguist's mental masturbation on a page
i like speed-reading. i used to read 2-3 sci-fi / fantasy a week, except the 800-1000 page monsters like the robert jordan series, which often took me 4-6 days of continuous reading, and except asimov's detective stories about elijah bailey, which were incredibly dense logical reasoning (necessary for a detective and his partner). the thing i like about speed-reading is that when you come back to the same book in 4 to 12 months time, it's enjoyable - again - because you find things that you missed the first time. so the point that this article is making i see is an *advantage*... not a disadvantage.
Slashdot Asks: What's Your View On Speed Reading?
I think more should be spent on determining the correct limits for different roads, and that red light cameras make things worse. Next question?
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
So Im agin it
Generally, I agree speed reading is skimming, potentially missing important details. However, there is Cliff High's Vortex Machine Assisted Reading System (1995) that flashes one word at a time centered on a small box. By getting rid of line following and other eye-mechanics, it has considerable potential but needs refinements such as punctuation delays and other automagic speed controls. It is relentless but thorough.
The more I enjoy the slower I read and reread and rereread because I don't want to forget any details.
Get a VR headset grandpa!
What's this about? I read too fast.
Achille Talon
Hop!
Circa 1976/1977.
I speed read because I don't care. I read Slashdot because you can speed read it without missing anything!
Speed reading is like downloading data but not indexing it. You get the general gist, but it is NOT the same as reading for comprehensive.
Someone that speed reads a text book has far inferior recall - both immediately and years later.
Note this is something that many people do not understand about AI's either. They won't be able to just download something and learn/understand it instantly. Like humans, they will have to spend a lot of processing cycles integrating the information into their memory.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
But speed reading reduces enjoyment and comprehension, so removes the pleasure from pleasure reading, and the comprehension from technical reading. So there ends up being no advantages.
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that they can use any public bathroom with which they identify.
By default I have two reading rates - relaxed but comprehensive, and "at-work" style accelerated reading. If you set "university level" at 400 words per minutes then the first is just below, and second just above. Each has utility in each situation, not defined by material being read but by the purpose for which it is read. For and at work I read hundreds of technical papers each week (analytics). In my leisure I read primarily business history and related topics. Each is well matched by their respective styles, and together this seems to maximize my retention while minimizing wasted time. Crucial to all of this is defeating perfectionist tendencies in reading. In practice it is not only not necessary to explicitly comprehend every single word and interpret meaning in any situations except two: legal contracts, and trouble shooting / developing customer requirements, attempting to do that wastes time for all parties involved.
"There are several studies that suggest that 'speed reading' result in people missing out on lots of tidbits."
For example, properly spelling 'titbits'.
Or have some similar specialized task, speed reading is pretty worthless.
BTW today's version of speed reading are MOOCs where you check your knowledge with multiple choice quizes which basically verify that you weren't offline or asleep when the material was presented. No pain, no gain.
I'm not sure if it's real speed reading but I can "read" a page in about 20seconds, problem it that my brain have serious problem processing that amount of test input. Making the experience of reading a good novel.. Dim.. and the worst case is that I can't help it, i go into speed reading when I read in my native language all the time. Thankfully the problem is not as big in english as in my native language so I prefer to not read books in my native language as I simply forget the content very fast and are unable to enjoy it fully.
But it was very useful in school when you had to write something about a book the teacher told you to read or learn something that you just needed for the dreaded test a few days later.
But once you get out into reality and actually have to learn something it's quite useless unless you searching for information and google is very good at that.
I spent several years trying to get help for dyslexia. A lot of school counsellors assumed it was what I was dealing with.
Right up to the point one caught that what I was actually doing was self taught speed reading everything and couldn't switch the damn thing off.
You have no idea how annoying it is to know a piece of information MUST exist within a passage but no amount of rereading, trying to slow yourself down, will get you to stop skipping over it because your brain has already decided it knows what is said.
As a simple example: Bob has $10. He pays dollars in tax. What percentage does Bob pay?
It's a standard question pattern. You know damn well that there must be an amount of dollars Bob paid in tax. You know the question likely has something like TWO in there and the answer would be twenty percent. But you read it over and over and the TWO never reveals itself because your brain has already decided it knows what the passage says.
It made chunks of my degree miserable. I knew the concepts, could study faster than most others, yet kept missing key parts of often simple questions in the exams.
Once I learned what I was doing, a hell of a lot of practice has weeded most of it back out at the expense of reading slower.
So, yeah, speed reading is great. Until it isn't. And then really isn't when you can't stop it.
Bill Gates recently recommended learning how to speed read during a Q&A on Reddit. Bill's a pretty intelligent and respectable guy, so I decided to check it out. What I found was several sources consistently explaining that serious, magical, life-changing speed reading is an almost savant-like process that only works for a small number of people. The witnesses, who as far as I know are not neuroscientists (neither am I), go into pretty detailed explanations about how it supposedly works for people who are able to retrain themselves and more or less move the reading process from the auditory parts of the brain to the visual parts, eventually encoding and storing information using a visual mnemonic process. Also supposedly, people who succeed with exceptional results tend to be the Aspergers type (Bill Gates is rumored to be an Aspie). It sounds plausible (though as I said, I'm not a neuroscientist).
My eyes were about a sentence ahead of the point I was understanding (comprehending? whatever, not a native English speaker).
At some point I stopped reading a lot and had lost that skill and now I read about 1.5 times slower than back then.
I can't recall any negative side effects, such as rememberiing or missing out things.
Mother told me, one of the librarians, who was suspicious about little kid (10 years old) reading so many books so quickly ("maybe he just skims through for pictures?"), asked questions about stories in them. I gave correct answers to all questions. I don't remember the episode, although I remember librarian that was extremely kind in helping me find something interesting to read.
My wife is a self taught speed reader (basically as a kid she thought everyone could do it). She can also recite passages verbatim from books that she read years ago. Being a speed reader doesn't mean that you HAVE to speed read. For things that are important, you slow down and concentrate on the words, like a normal reader. So how can it be bad? Use it when appropriate, and read normally when not.
The only thing worse than a Democrat is a Republican.
I totally believe in speed reading. I'm a slow reader -- I read at the average WPM. I know because I tested with a book on speed reading, and the score I got was exactly in the mid-range for ordinary subvocalizing readers.
My partner is a fast reader. She read Harry Potter far, far quicker than I did. She LOVED the book. And she knew every detail of it after her one, fast read of it. She was immersed in it.
We would talk about it, and I had a hard time remembering names, sequences of events, and so on, despite having immersed myself in it for longer.
She was whip smart about it. Remembered everything, big and small. If I had a question, I'd ask her, and she knew it.
So, for myself, I'm completely convinced that people can not only read, but enjoy reading, and remember it all, without the subvocalizing.
I've tried to do it many times, but without subvocalizing, I don't feel like I'm reading anything at all. So I don't get how it works for her, -- but it does.
I took a speed-reading course and read War and Peace in twenty minutes. It involves Russia.
-Woody Allen
I read pretty slowly, and even so I sometimes catch myself having read a few lines of text but haven't really fully processed them so I go back and reread them.
I've also noticed a certain change of the pace of my reading as the scene plays out in my mind, I might read faster if things are happening quickly from a character's point of view.
So I think I'd lose the nuances of both the meaning and pacing if I tried to read faster.
Also, it's quite possible to follow the plot of a movie while watching at 2X speed but I wouldn't consider doing that unless there was some sort of artificial time constraint that required me to know the plot rather than enjoy the experience.
TLDR
I read a novel in French by reading the printed edition while following along with the audio book, which forces you to read at a much slower rate than normal. It was astonishing how much I got out of the book and how much I enjoyed it, far beyond normal reading experiences.
I thought I was a fast reader, but now I know I was wrong.
'nuff said
Did I miss anything?
I learned to speed read in 5th grade about 50 years ago. A few kids were chosen for some sessions that taught us how to skim for meaning and comprehension. There was a special projector that would scroll a column of text while showing us a narrow window of 1-2 lines. I really worked at it and could "read" most novels in a day or two. This worked okay until I ran into All the Pretty Horses. The weird style made me slow down just to be able to read it. I came to really enjoy the lack of punctuation and occasional long, stream-of-consciousness passages. I know it drove a lot of people crazy, but it brought back a love or reading and is one of my favorite books of all time. It changed the way I read non-technical stuff.
Speed reading is great when you're skimming for information, not so much when you're supposedly reading for enjoyment.
For some reason I went on a sort of long hiatus from reading fiction regularly, which has been a thing I've done all my life. I've been into story-based video games, because I wanted to get closer to living the story than just reading it. But right now I'm finally getting around to reading Seveneves, which I bought back when it was fresh on the shelf, and I've been thinking about this very issue again.
When I was in elementary school I was part of the group which met in the library and used the speed-reading machine, the sort which would project some text onto a pull-down screen; a bit of a line at a time, and at varying speeds. Then we'd take a little multiple-guess test to see how our short-term retention was, and move on to the next. Three or four of these, and it was back to class. The machine absolutely did work, and now I can digest most novels in extremely short order.
As the subject line suggests, the obvious problem is that this can make reading an expensive habit, especially if there is a dearth of good used bookstores in your area. I grew up in Santa Cruz, which means I had access to Logos, a genuinely great book store with a really massive used selection. What's more, only the very oldest and most collectible used books are sold for anything other than the usual fraction of the cover price, which makes elderly paperbacks highly accessible.
The up side is that books which would make good movies play out quickly — perhaps not as quickly as a movie based on a book should do, let alone as rapidly as they tend to actually do, but certainly in good time for the emotional to and fro to flow together naturally — and engagingly.
Anyway, short form is, speed reading makes reading more expensive, but it does make it more entertaining. The problem is, that's a little bit like making cocaine more expensive, yet more addictive. It isn't in that it is relatively difficult to OD on books (they can fall on you...) but it is similar in the ability to drain your wallet.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Reading fast is not the same as speed reading. I have a naturally high read speed. If undisturbed, I can read a typical paperback novel in 1.5 - 2 hours, often while eating lunch. I can skim much faster, that's my normal speed for pleasure reading. I honestly wish that books took longer for me to consume, my book habit is fairly expensive. The limiting factor for me is mechanical, not cognitive - my speed is more affected by page and font size (how far do my eyes need to travel, time spent turning pages) than the density of the material. Don't lump in everyone who reads faster than you as somehow cheating or just showing off but not actually understanding the work.
You're just jealous 'cuz the voices talk to *me*
Aoccdrnig to rscheearch at an Elingsh uinervtisy, it deosn't mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, olny taht the frist and lsat ltteres are at the rghit pcleas. The rset can be a toatl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit a porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae we do not raed ervey lteter by ilstef, but the wrod as a wlohe. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wik...
I was given a speed reading class as a high school graduation present in 1965. It was the Evelyn Wood Reading Dynamics course and at that time it was a very nice and expensive graduation gift and it was in a class room setting at least once and maybe more often per week for perhaps two months. I was a bit cynical about the techniques taught but I did practice and do all the exercises. About a year latter while a Freshman studying engineering I found myself far behind in some of the required non-engineering courses such as History and Political Science. I had not read most of the assignments and was looking at a complete failure on the final exams. One professor even told me that to even get a grade of "C" in their class I would have to get an "A" on the final exam. Using the techniques I learned the previous summer I read the books two or three times in the week before the final. I got a "C" in the class that required an "A" and I think I got a "B" in the other one.
During my career I used this technique to get up to speed very quickly on a new subject and it did work. It was not fun, I never used it for recreational reading, but the time I was told that management had decided to convert our infrastructure from Token Ring to Ethernet and that I was hosting the bidders conference in a week I was able to learn enough about Ethernet to understand what was being discussed and soon thereafter my BS filters were pretty well tuned to deal with the sales weasels that a large contract always attracts.
As always your mileage may vary, but I found it invaluable for situations such as this.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Not with chewing gum, but by reading any serious book, especially including novels, twice.
The first time, which speed reading serves well, is to set the context.
The second time, which involves savoring the interplay of topic (or characters) and context, is for learning (the topic; or the beyond-words experience that a serious novelist attempts to convey.
Learning research suggests a least one night's sleep between the first and second times works best. It seems that we "digest" the first time into our cognitive "background" during the night. It is against that background that the topics (or characters, their actions and relations) stand out.
I'm a case for the exact opposite, I actually am (very) Dyslexic and looked into speed reading techniques as a way to allow me to read at a normal pace.
Also, opposed to you, despite many, many, many warning signs and even threats of being held back (despite decent grades), not one of my teachers realized I was Dyslexic, including one who specialized in reading comprehension problems, someone should have seen it. I enjoy learning, but by 4th grade I was starting to shut down and by 7th grade I was getting almost nothing from going to class and was instead teaching myself. This got me bad grades and trouble in grade school, but I was up for Valedictorian in later education where I was expected to learn on my own.
Speed "reading" is what stupid people do because they cant burn through a novel in a night like people with make brain good.
Without any cool technique, i just read a 200 pages book in one long evening. More than two hours, but still just one evening ...
I have to read a lot of scientific papers and it would be great if I could read them faster. However, this is not possible, because I have also to understand them. Speed reading implies that I can increase the number of words read and understand, but this is not possible, as my thinking device is not getting faster. Sometimes I have consider a sentence for some time to understand all its implications. Therefore, it is not applicable to that type of text. I also cannot use it for technical manuals and standards, as you also need to know everything. Speed reading might work with newspaper articles, as they often do not contain much information, but you can normally decide if it is important to read it at all after the teaser or one or two sentences. That leaves me with works of fiction. Those I read slowly to enjoy the content and immerse myself into the story. Maybe speed reading works with economics papers. Economics is more like a set of cults or religions. Therefore, it is not super important to get every nuance.
It is harder to learn a discipline than pass a test in said discipline. Passing said test is easier if you know it's nature in advance. In the case of speed reading, you may be able to grasp certain salient details of a novel by skimming, but I would like to see that done with a maths textbook: speed read an undergraduate textbook in a subject you have not studied yet, and answer exercise questions on the topic. That kind of thing takes thinking through, as does recognising any subtlety to a novel rather than just the superficially obvious plot. But if the test probes nothing other than the superficially obvious plot, it will not pick this up.
John_Chalisque
Attempted to speed read the slashdot synopsis?
That sounds like the reading equivalent of 'jumping to conclusions' in spoken conversation where the subject believes they already know how a sentence is going to be completed and jumps in with an answer before the speaker has finished.
How did you combat it? Does word-counting help? Does it affect both printed and electronically displayed text? Do you get any other symptoms like headaches?
It reminds me of some of the symptoms of Visual Stress a.k.a. Meares-Irlin syndrome [0].
I helped a friend many years ago (2002) who was thought to be dumb because he seemed unable to absorb written material and after 1/2 a page would switch to light skim-reading ("speed reading") and/or distract himself in any way possible. Being questioned on the material later he would be unable to answer many questions due to skimming over the material, leading to the 'dumb' tag.
He would also sometimes complain of severe headaches that could last days. Since childhood parents, teachers and doctors had tried to find a cause and subjected him to all sorts of tests with no result.
One day whilst we were focused on some programming he complained of a headache. Being the first time I'd witnessed his symptoms I asked him to describe exactly what he was experiencing. It turned out the printing would begin to swim around and blur in and out of focus and get worse the longer he tried to focus on it. He'd never been asked this question before and had assumed everyone experienced this and had not mentioned it.
After some research I discovered Professor Arnold Wilkins at Essex University, U.K., had developed a diagnostic test that identified the cause and possible counter-measures. Meares-Irlen syndrome is a visual acuity abnormality that can be partially or fully re-mediated with the use of colour filters, with each sufferer needing filters tailored to them - rather like a lens prescription for glasses.
We visited the university and my friend undertook the test and immediately noticed an improvement once the correct colour filter was identified. These tests were done whilst placing permutations of coloured transparencies over printed material (black text on white paper).
As a result I wrote a program that detected and applied the correct colour overlay to the computer screen and it worked as well as the transparencies but the colour required was quite different - due to the differences between reflective and transmissive light.
[0] "Colour in the treatment of visual stress" http://www.essex.ac.uk/psychology/overlays/
[1] "READING THROUGH COLOUR" http://www.essex.ac.uk/psychology/overlays/book2.pdf
Hold on, I'm not done with the headline yet
Table-ized A.I.
You can not speed read physics, economics, and "Wat and Peace"
However for many of the texts in school, much of the internet, and other "lighter" subjects it works with full comprehension and it saves time.
I've tried speed reading: It great on the lessons, not so much on real books. Trial passages are simple in structure and concepts and linear in flow. Real books tend to use technical or multipurpose words, with changes in flow (eg. asides), and the concepts discussed are large and complex. Plus the speed doesn't allow one to analyse the point of the sentence and compare it to surrounding sentences. That built-in reinforcement is lost and so is the opportunity to memorize the concept discussed.
http://dilbert.com/strip/2003-...
I wouldn't want a speed reader to be my doctor!
Speed reading is a fairly popular bit of pseudoscience. There's no evidence that people can actually read at superhuman speeds while retaining comprehension. At best, you can skim. Sure, skimming can be useful, but don't call it "speed reading".
I regularly read technical works just to learn more about the world.
I think speed reading is a hoax. It *may* be an ability of those with some weird cognitive ability, like photographic memory or some such. But for anyone other than that, I think it's a hoax. My reading speed and comprehension has always been towards the top of the class and I've scored very highly on standardized tests. And I'm not a spring chicken. These are my conclusions on the various types of reading:
1) There's skimming - that's not reading. If I were skimming a document, looking for keywords, I'd miss a lot of meaning but see my keywords. Were I tested on the document I'd "speed-read"/skimmed, I would fail. Apparently some people are referring to skimming as speed reading. Very low comprehension level reading.
2) There's reading for long periods. That's not speed reading, that's just sustained reading. Like I've done when reading thick fiction novels over a weekend.
3) There's pleasure reading, where the concepts are not complex and one is not tested on comprehension, one is doing it for pleasure. This is a faster rate of reading.
4) Then finally there's dense academic reading. Reading the Dragon book, for example, or some other information-dense tome. That's the slowest pace, and the pace at which one attempts to uptake the most detail and absorb complex concepts.
As best as I can make out, skimming is being sold as speed reading, in a most generous scenario. And it's not really even reading, other than scanning for keywords or scanning every third sentence or some such. Information uptake in such a scenario would be absolutely minimal.
The ability to uptake information at a pleasure reading level, while moving through the document at skimming speed is what, as best as I can tell, supposed to be speed reading. And that is simply not possible for anyone, perhaps barring those with some very unusual cognitive capability along the lines of photographic memory and the like.
Trick memory, I used to be able to store the pages and in the short term retrieve the images then re-read the images on top of the already 'fast reading speed'.
A novel in a few hours isn't a challenge.
And just because you can't do it, doesn't mean someone else can't.
The nature of your brain circuits makes recall the inverse of the original input so you can't learn at any greater speed (or volume) than you can recall information. This basically proves that beyond a certain point that "speed reading" is impossible. However one can prime the brain with information at a high rate so that when related but more structured input is received it is better able to retain it. In other words speed reading could improve recall if you then read the material at a normal rate the next day after a good sleep.
The big tradeoff most people get with speed reading is lack of the ability to actually retain the information beyond cursory information (see the War and Peace joke above).
While my reading speed is accelerated, it's not as fast as it possibly could be. But my general retention is quite high.
There's also the fact that, with my preferred material, I tend to re-read books over time. So my overall retention of material tends to increase with subsequent exposures.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
Just read a lot - you'll get better at it.
Attempting to just hunt down key words will lead to disappointment in the long run.
I taught myself speed reading without any courses. Basically you get the gist of something by reading the key words and skimming. But later when you try and read normal, you'll find yourself speed reading and missing out on a lot of stuff.
I took several more years than normal to read. Once I did, I read with great abandon. When reading I stop seeing words after a time, I imagine the words being said, the places the events. Because of this, I read very fast. I can finish a novel in a day.
However, I miss pieces. I lose bits and when reading technical papers, I must slow down by several factors.
You cannot have your cake and eat it too. You trade depth for speed. Always.
Speed reading is awesome, but there's more than one speed. There's at least "speed with full comprehension", and "skimming to get the gist". I strongly recommend training yourself, overtime, to increase both speeds. You CAN'T do this all at once, but you can train your brain to recognize words more quickly. I used a training device so that I could recognize individual words more quickly, and that really helps you to read more quickly with full comprehension. Basically, as brain gets faster recognizing individual words, you'll naturally read faster with full comprehension. (You should also know how to sound out unfamiliar words, but familiar words should be recognzied quickly.) When you're skimming to get the gist, it's more about strategy - figuring out what parts of the text you need to read first (in most technical documents you read the abstract carefully, then skim the conclusions, then skim the introduction if looks like it might be useful.
I also recommend training listening speed. I listen to lots of podcasts, and I've slowly increased my listening speed by +10% over time. I can now listen to podcasts, with full comprehension, at 2x through 2.5x (depending on the original speed of the speakers).
Your brain can be trained to do things more quickly, but you have to train it. It's worth it.
- David A. Wheeler (see my Secure Programming HOWTO)
"Wouldn't it be great if you could read a novel in an hour or two?"
You used to be able to. Reader's Digest used to publish Reader's Digest Condensed Books. In effect, they did the speed-reading for you. I have to say that they did a very skillful job of the editing, too. Very impressive. But not really that enjoyable to read.
They don't seem to be around any more.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
As a slow reader - my own perception compared to others - increasing my reading speed is something that I have always desired and felt would be advantageous. But I have found that the reason why I am a slow reader is because I focus on comprehension. I want to thoroughly understand what I am reading. This causes me to read slowly and reread some lines several times, this is especially true when reading technical stuff. I'll also say that my reading has further slowed with age. As my glasses get thicker, my reading speed declines.
I'd love to be able to read faster, but if I can't have the same level of complete comprehension there is no point whatsoever. I read to understand, not to simply pass words through my head.
Humans can read in both directions two-three lines at a time with absolutely equal results of reading word by word. I've successfully done this and passed exams as well as being able to read aloud. It's an issue of memory. You can easily remember 3 lines of text.
My brother has hyperlexia. He can read novels in hours. I envy him. I would kill to be able to read that way.
I have dyslexia. It takes me an hour to read the first page of divided-by-decimal (/.). In order to cope with the volume of reading necessary to program computers, I have to commit huge amounts of information to memory as I read it -- I am never going to get the opportunity to read it again because there is so much more to read. To paraphrase one of the talking Barbies, "reading is hard!"
I wish I could learn speed reading in a reliable fashion.
Here at Slashdot, no one ever RTFA at all. It's much faster that way.
Left MS Windows for Linux Mint and never looked back!
Vote for Bernie in 2016!
I learned how to speed read in high school. For me, it only works on straightforward fiction, and (a) I miss stuff and (b) The effort involved spoils the enjoyment of reading. It had some limited value in lit and history classes, but now that I'm no longer in school it's useless to me. And I get annoyed if I catch myself doing it with a book to get to the "good parts"
THANK YOU!
I have exactly the same thing: I normally read very quickly. I can still recite the entire first chapter of "The Hobbit", which I read in 5th grade, from memory, or the Edward Gorey poem "The Wuggley Ump", which I read in 7th as a dramatic reading exercise on cold reading text.
250 pages in 1.5-2 hours, depending on grade level.
I can speed-read as well, but I tend to get that number down to about 15 minutes. I don't enjoy speed reading, since it tends to blow my book budget, and I miss things -- but as I said, I don't normally speed read, unless I'm getting dropped into a meeting in place of someone else, and they are likely to try to "pull one over on the substitute person" (then I enjoy it immensely, but not for the reading itself).
Please don't lump people who read quickly with those who speed-read. It's not my fault your teachers taught you "whole word reading" in school.
It's about as good as anything else. Speed eating. Speed cooking. Speed sex. It's one thing to race to the finish and say you're done. It's another thing to say you actually had the experience and savored it. Practice practice practice will get your reading speed up. I finish the typical paperback in 8 hours or so because I've been reading for years. My wife can't believe the amount of books I go through in a month. I can read faster, but I end up missing bits. When I reach a well written passage, or when I read technical documents, I read slower or re-read to be sure I understood.
But if you're the kind of person that has to say the words you're reading out loud... no, just.... no.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
OK, (self-directed pointer ALERT!), 3 years ago I wanted to learn a little about WordPress, and I I wrote my first and only (to date) blog article; http://rocomai.com/wordpress/ I criticize Blio for not being as good as it needs to be. It does not meet the needs of modern learners, and all the apps I've tried preclude decent speed reading.
Speed reading works especially well for gathering information, but not so well for absorbing skills or know-how.
Reading and learning are different, but related and overlapping, skills.
My experience is simple: When I'm in practice, I can absorb huge amounts of information and facts very rapidly using speed reading techniques. I get out of practice because my use of speed reading is not totally relaxing and stress-free, and I tend to do it only when I need to.
"The mind works quicker than you think!"
Funnily one time I was paging through a log file at full terminal speed. My boss came in and said "There is no possible way you could be reading it that fast." I said "I'm not reading it. I'm looking for a change in the pattern." and then stopped and showed him how the exception I was looking for clearly stood out from everything else in the log.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Public library is not a good place to take meth oh wait
In many ways, speed reading is everything wrong with modern education summed up. It's all about how to cram facts in quickly so you canm regurgitate them 30 minutes later and forget them by tomorrow.
If you really want to know the material you have to relate it to what you already know and that takes thinking going on in parallel with reading. Otherwise, it's only slightly less ephemeral than last night's dream.
It can somewhat improve your base reading rate if you allow yourself to fall back to an unhurried pace and stay there, and if you need just a few bits of information out of a poorly formatted manual, it can help you skim for the bits you need so in that sense, it's not a total loss.
it's extremely unlikely you can greatly improve your reading speed without missing out on a lot of meaning."
So many articles today are padded, just to make the word-count.
When reading these, it is frequently annoying to have to wade through paragraphs of irrelevant material, searching for the few lines of new information, or the single insight. For texts like this, skimming, speed-reading, or going sraight to the conclusions makes a lot of sense and saves a great deal of time.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
...your spelling will suck.
Since I'm a 'natural', my spelling sucks since I'm reading words like they were Chinese ideograms ("I think this word starts with a 's', has a 't' in the middle, and end with a 's'") and since most application spell checkers use a "suggest nearest 'edit distance' neighboring words" algorithm, they really don't work for me (Google is your friend in this situation (and Chrome's 'use Google for spelling suggestions' option)). And since I'm reading entire words in one go, I've never heard aloud some words I know, so trying to sound out words while spelling doesn't work either. (I leave it as an exercise for the reader to guess how many spelling mistakes I made while typing this post.)
I am a slow reader, but a usually read scientific text. I once tried speed reading and was amazed. I focused my eyes on every three lines once in first third and once second third part of the middle line. My brain added all three lines together at the same time and extracted the information. It took just a few second to read two pages. I thereafter reread it and could not find that I missed anything. I had felt completely immersed into the story. But I am hesitant to use it with science books. It also demanded a lot of concentration, at least during the learning/training phase. I would love, if I could take me the time to make it a habit.
One of the most informative, worldview changing books I have ever read was Voltaire's Bastards. It took the author 10 years of research to write it. While very well written it took me much longer than normal to read it as the book is not only information dense but you really have to give your brain a while to digest the information almost like learning math; there is no speed reading a math textbook, unless you already know the material.
So I would argue that speed reading might be possible where the author has done the classic: why use one word where twenty will do. But for any real information or learning I don't think it will be of much help.
I read "What's Your View On Speed Dating?"
Speed reading works.
I was trained in highschool and greatly increased my reading speed. But it took 90 days of practice and training.
But it's real.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
"Not everyone -- including yours truly -- is a fan of this. There are several studies that suggest that 'speed reading' result in people missing out on lots of tidbits."
I'm not a fan either for recreational reading, but for work or science stuff, where most of the words are 'filling' and not much of it real information, it's OK.
And now for a joke that you can't speed read.
Last week I was in a zoo, where they had just a single animal, a dog.
It was a Shitzu.
Most people can not speed read; it's just not possible for them and they'll never be able to understand what it means. For the fortunate ones - it's not skimming or skipping words or anything like that, it's reading - just faster. I get all the meaning and pleasure from a book, it just takes more books to keep me happy. If you're running a finger down the page, using cards, or applying any other tricks, you're faking it. And if you can't do it, that's OK. The important thing is being able and willing to read.
Try Speed Writing to double the fun
... and yes, you can write with your fingers
"speed reading" by most involves skipping things - Why? because they read a word at a time.
When my vision was better, I was counted as a speed reader (between 60-100 pages per hour of text, and I remembered the diagrams included). I read fast not by reading a word at a time, but a phrase at a time - between 2-5 words at once. This resulted in the words being translated to images in mind rather than words. Much faster... It also implies I don't think in words - but images.
The disadvantage is that I can't spell worth a hoot. Some words can be spelled three different wrong ways... and all look the same.
I knew somebody who said that he read the sixth Harry Potter book in 3 hours. I quizzed him. He failed. You cannot read faster than your mind can process information. My girlfriend reads creepily fast, but that's because her mind works very fast. Not even she would claim to be able to pull off a feat like that.
I don't understand why people think it is a either or situation. Depending on exactly what you consider to be speed reading of course ?
1. Being able to speed read allows you to take in a lot of knowledge at a rapid pace but just like regular reading you need to go back and read the book again if you want to retain more knowledge.
2. Speed reading does not mean that you lose the ability to read slowly and carefully.
3. Even when doing regular reading the amount of knowledge retained are not that great.
4. Speed reading when used correctly and effectively allows you to decide how much knowledge you wish to retain per reading and overall decrease the time you site passive while reading.
I am a lawyer and I have to read a great deal of material, sometimes just to find a select phrase or case cite. I guess maybe this is speed scanning versus speed reading (like the comment). I failed to register in time in college for English, so they said I should take Reading 101, which turned out to be speed reading. It was life changing and I credit this class for my success in law school. The ability to speed read on demand makes me a much better lawyer. For personal reading, I read much slower, to gain comprehension. I think speed reading a novel is a mistake. The pleasure is in getting deeply involved in the characters and plot, not just to get through it. It is a great skill to be able to read quickly when needed. And speed reading leads to much better ability to speed scan.
A lot of people think that speed-reading is diagonal reading or such.
Be aware that when you bike through a street, your eyes and brain process all numbers and texts that you pass.
Your conscience, which is basically a data-liver, takes a few tenths of a second to discard all such details, and to only keep what could hurt or help you.
I read full text pages in a blink of an eye, and can read a story while scrolling through it pretty fast.
And I assume that most people can, if only they would let themselves.
I've always been a fast reader. I actually started reading English books as an adolescent to reduce my reading speed (I'm not a native speaker of the English tongue). Even as a kid I did not need my members passes at the local libraries (they all knew me), and I was exempt from rule "children may only borrow two book at a time". In university, I attended a course on speed reading for fun, and my initial test was way faster than the tutors, and I still managed to gain an additional 10-20% boost by the course.
So I read about 100-200 pages per hour in English and 600-800 pages per hour in German. All while remembering a lot of details and enjoying fine points that even 'normal' readers might miss. I can sit down with the Lord of the Rings right after lunch and have read it by dinner, and still see the fine linguistic differences between the individual people in Middle Earth. And you can ask me about different scenes, and I can e.g. tell you that this scene is about _here_, on the lower left side.
This is also quite power consuming, i.e. my heart frequency and body temperature rises, and I actually absolutely cannot do this with a clogged-up nose, making having a cold many times as miserable...
I would not say that I miss out on things because of the speed reading - I do not skim, I _do_ read. And having information and storylines 'more present' due to the short temporal distances usually helps understanding a story better. I cannot imagine how people can cope with a story like Ted Williams Otherland when they have to spread reading it over weeks and months - all the issues of normal life in between reading a few pages here and there must be horrible (I spread reading the series over four days).
Over time, the detail knowledge of a story fades, of course, usually after having read some more books in the mean time. But something is always kept, and pops up when I re-read a book, or when I need the knowledge.
Back in the 60s I was part of a program in our school district. The idea was to see how fast kids could read and still past comprehension tests. Kids who scored in the top 1% on aptitude tests could be part of the program.
I was shown books a few grades above my current 5th grade level. The pages were projected and timed. The speed was increased until my test scores slipped below 80%. As I got better the speed was increased again and so on. After a while I was reading a page in 3 to 4 seconds. I could read a 100 page book in 5 minutes and pass a test on it.
I have used the faster reading in math, science and computer classes ever since. It is useless for enjoying fiction. This drains all of the fun. I slow down to conversation speed for those kinds of books. It is like running through the Louvre.
Speed reading is real, but the definition varies.
It's not a speed, but a technique. It's not "scanning" for words or phrases, that's different. It's better than the beginner's way of sounding out words one at a time, but that might still be necessary in unfamiliar subjects.
It actually involves training the eyes and brain to read multiple words from one "snapshot" of vision. Once practiced (with the help of special projectors) we could read several words from a flash at 1/10000 sec. That means a whole sentence in one or two "focus points" on the page. "Flash" into memory and then read from the memory, while the eye is focusing on the next spot. This also reduces eye fatigue.
The best way to read is to adjust your speed so that it "flows" smoothly, with good comprehension. Comprehension is different from memory retention, though, and you can tell the difference. As you read the speed should change as the subject and material change. This becomes automatic with practice, find something you like to read about and that will give you the practice.
Comprehension is different from memory, and if tested should be done immediatly. Test memory the next day.
I had a course called "reading improvement" after highschool, in a 2 year tech school. I was amazed at the results for the class. We started at speeds of 120 to 300 wpm. By the end we were at 400 to 1500 wpm. Even the slowest students improved a lot. It did include comprehension testing.
I timed myself, in my teens, as maxing at about 250 wpm. Speed reading? Hell, I'd never be able to keep myself in books! And, from all I've heard and read over the decades, you certainly don't get it.
I don't like voice books. As fast as I can read, I sometimes want to glance back a paragraph, or a page, so that something makes sense.
mark
When I read King's "The Stand" I pictured people crucified in the electric posts along the highway. I imagine birds pecking at their heads as the sunset sets in. I heard in my head the whirring sound of a motor bike puttering along the highway. It felt normal, and yet foreign. I reminisced of Planet of the Apes forbidden zone with the furry warning effigies. The bongos, the drums, the ocean waves deafening sound as bright eyes falls on his knees. It felt like an eternity. Then I turned the page.
- these are not the droids you are looking for -