I'm pretty sure her conclusions are baloney. She admits the main speedreading takeaway: visual understanding is much faster than subvocalized reading. As for t

I'm pretty sure her conclusions are baloney. She admits the main speedreading takeaway: visual understanding is much faster than subvocalized reading. As for the other statements; of course you can't read complex or deep text by glancing at it and taking it in in one line or paragraph. Imagine trying to learn topology or something that way; you will fail. You have to slow down to the point you're working problems on the side in a notebook. Same thing for learning a new language; looking at the grammar table won't help: I have to internalize it by repetition. Deeply aesthetic poetry; you have to vocalize it, or it doesn't even begin to make sense. Similarly, complex fiction you have to slow down to figure out what is going on, sometimes rereading passages or whole chapters. Sometimes this also needs to be vocalized (Modernist types like Joyce & Pound). But for stuffing clearly written briefing type texts, speed reading is the absolute shizznizzlenuts. That's why Kennedy found it useful; that's pretty much what the man read all day at work. Low end college coursework also fit into this category of reading material. Lots of business stuff also does. Her neuroscience balognia about saccades may be true to some extent, but you can skip over or infer most simple sentences in the exact same way that Gmail and Outlook completes your sentences via semi-markov models. Again: it works for simple texts. It also probably works better if you're smarter and a better reader in general, and so taking a bunch of average people and drawing conclusions from their results is pretty useless.