3 ms·

On its own, you're not going to magically be able to reduce your reading time by 95% and still maintain the level of retention you get by a slow word-for-word r

by mdip 11y ago

On its own, you're not going to magically be able to reduce your reading time by 95% and still maintain the level of retention you get by a slow word-for-word read from a few weeks with an app/course. As the article states, there's more to reading than just swallowing a word more quickly. But the techniques enable you to change the way you consume information by eliminating the bottleneck and associated procrastination of staring down a 1000+ page book and the weeks it will take to get through it. I'm a huge advocate of speed reading, personally[1]. However, I think the points made in the article have a lot of merit. Speed reading should be seen as a tool for consuming information, but you have to adjust the way you learn accordingly[2]. I can read, cover to cover, a 1000 page book in a few hours. My strategy for learning from a large book is to read it more than once (often three to four times) to treat the first read as a 30,000 ft view. I don't do included exercises, and I also limit my note-taking. My second read is with pen and paper in hand. I break for exercises and notes, but otherwise continue to read just as rapidly. If I struggled with the concepts, I'll repeat the process. Years ago, that book would have taken several sessions to complete the first read and the second read would only be over particular sections. I'd be done after weeks, rather than a weekend, which also negatively affected my retention. Reading from day 1 is built upon and by day 19, it's foggy. When I can do that in an afternoon, it's fresh on my mind. And at worst, with several reads, I'm still getting through the material in half the time it would have previously taken me and with solid retention[3]. It's also not something you become good at over night. After I took the course, I could read twice as fast, but not twice as effectively. It requires a lot of practice. When I sit down to read something, I have a goal of learning whatever it is I'm trying to learn, but I have a second goal of consuming that material more effectively. The first few years, I focused on reducing my time spent on the first read. As the years have gone by, I've adjusted my note-taking and methods for retention. I read a 500+ page book (often equivalent text in PDF) nearly every weekend. I pick things I am using today and grab books that build on that. [1] I took a multi-week course that focused on the typical "eye movement" techniques along with skim/scan techniques. That course started, for me personally, a rapid change in my ability to consume information from text and I still believe it was one of the most important classes I've ever taken. I greatly prefer book reading over courses these days because I can completely control my pace from very rapid to word-for-word. [2] I'm speaking purely of technical reading. I do not speed read fiction and my personal experience is that speed-reading fiction is awful. I stick with audio books for that. [3] I do not have data to back this up. I've been reading large, technical programming books for 18 years, and some of that added speed is that I have a relative understanding of the work before I begin. I know how to read a programming book to maximize my retention and I read programming text to become better at what I do, which is something I've learned how to do from years of practice. [Edit: Added a note clarifying fiction vs technical]

radicality 11y ago
So this 1000 page book you can read in a few hours are technical or fiction books? What about the 500 page book over a weekend? Both sound extremely impressive. What type of technical books are these? Any technical/programming book I read usually has a lot of exercises to do, or is just non-trivial and requires more time from me. For example I can't imagine it being possible to speed-read something like 'Introduction to Algorithms', or anything technical really.
- armitron 11y ago
  I call bullshit. What he describes would be a major accomplishment worthy of publication in the most prestigious scientific journals but of course it's simply not true. He may delude himself into believing he's actually getting anything out of the books he's speed reading but I bet if put to the test, his performance in terms of comprehension would be abysmal.
  - mdip 11y ago
    I'm not sure what else I can write to convince you -- I've detailed how I "read" so quickly in a few comments on this topic. It's true but I don't think it's all that unusual (your comment is making me think it may be which I'll try to keep from going to my head). I used to work in Infrastructure in the early 2000s and a coworker and I had a running contest on how many certifications we could amass (my company had a library of reading materials). It was my coworker who pushed me to take a speed reading course. We'd each read 600+ page books covering the material around 3 times (maybe 4, but later reads are not complete reads) over a week while testing each other at work. Both of our pass rates were perfect[1] (Novell CNE, CNA, MCNE, A+, Security+ -- do those still exist? -- and a myriad of other certifications of dubious worth) -- failing meant we had to pay out of pocket, so we passed. The "first read" is a skim/scan, very superficial read, and it's easy to get through a large book this way, especially if it's material I'm already comfortable with. The 1000 page books are technical books (points I made elsewhere) that aren't all wall to wall content, lots of diagrams, code, etc. I read a book more than once if I want to learn the content (the first read is partly to weed out a book that has no value to me). At the end of the day, it's the equivalent time it takes to learn the material that matters. After a 2 hour "read" (skim/scan/speed-read) of a 1,000 page book, I'm nowhere near where I'd be if I had read the entire thing, slowly, word-for-word while taking notes and doing exercises. If I feel the book is worth it, I'll read it again, then read parts of it carefully, to the point where I've likely read the book 3-4 times with notes and exercises included. I'm at "equivalent to reading it slowly" by the end of the second read. But that's a low bar for a book of that size. Considering that same exercise would have taken me a month to complete the first read. How much of Chapter 4-6 will I remember on day 30 of multi-evening broken-up reading sessions reading it "slowly"? How likely am I to be burned out by then? By doing it this way, much more of it is fresh in my mind and (most important to me), I'm more likely to devote the time to learning the material knowing it will take a week, not a month+, to get what I want out of the book. After finishing a C++ book recently, I was writing in the language. I'm nowhere near proficient, having only two books and a 10-year gap in my C++ code experience, but "the old way" I would have been more likely to let it sit on the shelf half-read, never completing it. If I did, I wouldn't have been able to write more than a "Hello, World" program without having it pulled up along-side my IDE, constantly referring to bits I hadn't read in over a week. [1] Pass rates, not scores. There were some tests I squeaked by one question over passing. I scored perfectly on more than a few, though, too.

by mdip 11y ago

radicality 11y ago

So this 1000 page book you can read in a few hours are technical or fiction books? What about the 500 page book over a weekend? Both sound extremely impressive. What type of technical books are these? Any technical/programming book I read usually has a lot of exercises to do, or is just non-trivial and requires more time from me. For example I can't imagine it being possible to speed-read something like 'Introduction to Algorithms', or anything technical really.

armitron 11y ago
I call bullshit. What he describes would be a major accomplishment worthy of publication in the most prestigious scientific journals but of course it's simply not true. He may delude himself into believing he's actually getting anything out of the books he's speed reading but I bet if put to the test, his performance in terms of comprehension would be abysmal.
- mdip 11y ago
  I'm not sure what else I can write to convince you -- I've detailed how I "read" so quickly in a few comments on this topic. It's true but I don't think it's all that unusual (your comment is making me think it may be which I'll try to keep from going to my head). I used to work in Infrastructure in the early 2000s and a coworker and I had a running contest on how many certifications we could amass (my company had a library of reading materials). It was my coworker who pushed me to take a speed reading course. We'd each read 600+ page books covering the material around 3 times (maybe 4, but later reads are not complete reads) over a week while testing each other at work. Both of our pass rates were perfect[1] (Novell CNE, CNA, MCNE, A+, Security+ -- do those still exist? -- and a myriad of other certifications of dubious worth) -- failing meant we had to pay out of pocket, so we passed. The "first read" is a skim/scan, very superficial read, and it's easy to get through a large book this way, especially if it's material I'm already comfortable with. The 1000 page books are technical books (points I made elsewhere) that aren't all wall to wall content, lots of diagrams, code, etc. I read a book more than once if I want to learn the content (the first read is partly to weed out a book that has no value to me). At the end of the day, it's the equivalent time it takes to learn the material that matters. After a 2 hour "read" (skim/scan/speed-read) of a 1,000 page book, I'm nowhere near where I'd be if I had read the entire thing, slowly, word-for-word while taking notes and doing exercises. If I feel the book is worth it, I'll read it again, then read parts of it carefully, to the point where I've likely read the book 3-4 times with notes and exercises included. I'm at "equivalent to reading it slowly" by the end of the second read. But that's a low bar for a book of that size. Considering that same exercise would have taken me a month to complete the first read. How much of Chapter 4-6 will I remember on day 30 of multi-evening broken-up reading sessions reading it "slowly"? How likely am I to be burned out by then? By doing it this way, much more of it is fresh in my mind and (most important to me), I'm more likely to devote the time to learning the material knowing it will take a week, not a month+, to get what I want out of the book. After finishing a C++ book recently, I was writing in the language. I'm nowhere near proficient, having only two books and a 10-year gap in my C++ code experience, but "the old way" I would have been more likely to let it sit on the shelf half-read, never completing it. If I did, I wouldn't have been able to write more than a "Hello, World" program without having it pulled up along-side my IDE, constantly referring to bits I hadn't read in over a week. [1] Pass rates, not scores. There were some tests I squeaked by one question over passing. I scored perfectly on more than a few, though, too.