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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.
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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?
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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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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.
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.
TLDR
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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
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Regards, -- Chris Johansen
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.
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"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.
how do you know that people reading out loud can't also see and hear what's going on in their minds?
Because I wasn't born with the ability to read and can remember not knowing how, and can remember learning.
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