4 ms·

I'm skeptical of claims like this. How do the claimants define reading? If we mean extracting a subset of information from a particular, arbitrarily defined blo

I'm skeptical of claims like this. How do the claimants define reading? If we mean extracting a subset of information from a particular, arbitrarily defined block of text, well then I can read tens or hundreds of thousands of words per minute: I know how to pick up a typical business paperback, flip to the last chapter (or even just the conclusion), and skim for the 1–3 big ideas. But try to read a text like a complex SCOTUS majority opinion, or one of the Great Books, at anything close to that speed — good luck! Even trained and very experienced appellate attorneys can study such texts for hours, days, weeks, and still find important intricacies that require not just perception, but ingestion and digestion. As an exercise, one might grab any text and have one's computer read it aloud at 900 WPM. If one were to glean a single sentence, let alone the important bits, let alone all of it, I'd be shocked.

TrainedMonkey 2y ago
Anecdatally, I have two reading modes - full comprehension and skimming. In full comprehension I read and subvocalize each word, often slowing down, pausing, or even re-reading to make sure the meaning sinks in. In skim mode I look at phrases, sometimes whole sentences or even simple paragraphs, and move to the next chunk before consciously comprehending the previous one. Skimming effectiveness highly depends on my alertness level and works best with fiction or other media with low information density. For fiction books I can generally recount the plot and events pretty well.
- RajT88 2y ago
  I have skim mode as well. I could not put a number to it, but I pick up the gist and leave behind some detail. It is how I got through those middle Wheel of Time books.
- noman-land 2y ago
  What benefits do you gain from skimming a fiction book?
  - TrainedMonkey 2y ago
    Mostly find out what happens next faster. But on some level something about it is meditative. A constant progress across the book understanding what you can and letting everything else go. From pragmatic angle it is acquiring new information at a comfortable rate without stressful backtracking.
nottorp 2y ago
I'd say you only read to assimilate info and not for entertainment then.
- btilly 2y ago
  I did a lot of reading for entertainment. Particularly light sci-fi and fantasy.
  - lproven 2y ago
    Me too. Most of it in fact. But not only. Back in January, Dave Mills died. I told my boss I'd not heard of him so I didn't think an obit was called for. The mourning on HN over the weekend persuaded me otherwise. So, on Monday morning, I read everything I could find about him -- I estimate at least 2000 pages worth and maybe twice that -- and then I wrote this: https://www.theregister.com/2024/01/23/david_mills_obit/ https://www.theregister.com/2024/01/23/david_mills_obit/ It gave me a bit of a headache but I can still tear through large amounts of text, retain the info, summarise it, and then if I don't want or need it let it go.
minihat 2y ago
Reading speed might follow a normal distribution near the middle ranges, but I'd expect non-trivial deviations in the tails due to dyslexia, ADHD on the one side and trained speed readers on the other. Perhaps this individual just falls on the far tail of that distribution? During my graduate coursework I sometimes read 100-200 pages of technical material in a day while cramming for an exam, and was able to retain it for a day or two. I'd believe it if some people exist who could comprehend and retain all of that long-term. Alas, 'tis not I.
- PaulHoule 2y ago
  I think Dyslexia has a lot of politics attached. If 25% of people have it then, practically, Dyslexia means you are in the bottom 25% of readers, as much as the Dyslexia industrial complex wants to see it as taxonic and not dimensional. (Sure they say it has two subtypes and sure, maybe there are two reasons that make most bad readers bad readers, there are probably more reasons that are more obscure and too hard to pin down) Personally I think there are a lot of white collar people who are devastated to have a child who is a poor reader who won't follow in their footsteps (college professors, journalists, people in ethic groups where people will think you're a loser if you're a cop or pro football player, etc.) Labeling it as a disease makes it easier for people in that situation to live with it.
  - tshaddox 2y ago
    > Personally I think there are a lot of white collar people who are devastated to have a child who is a poor reader who won't follow in their footsteps (college professors, journalists, people in ethic groups where people will think you're a loser if you're a cop or pro football player, etc.) Labeling it as a disease makes it easier for people in that situation to live with it. Isn't this just how all diseases and indeed all things work? We're the ones who come up with these simple categorizations and labels to describe reality which is vastly more complex. The terms are necessarily underspecified and the boundaries between categories are necessarily fuzzy. This is true even within some medical community that attempts to have more precise definitions of "disease"/"disorder"/"disability"/etc. and it's all the more true for colloquial usage of these terms. But yes, these terms do end up just meaning "any condition that is not normal that causes problems for the person experiencing it."
ACow_Adonis 2y ago
I'm another "speed reader" skeptic. After significant repeated investigations I came to a stunning conclusion: I'm among some of the fastest actual human readers. My general reading speed 300 to 600 wpm depending on context and medium. For context I was your usual bookworm growing up: reading ahead of level, constantly reading everywhere, always reading while walking, always getting in trouble for reading with other people present like at the breakfast/dinner table, just churning through books non stop. And yes I now read random scientific articles and things for fun. Anything above that reading speed I've started just allocating to bullshitters, or generally techniques which come back to "not reading" rather than "reading". That is to say people who choose techniques to try to speed themselves up through strategies like "skimming" (that is to say, not reading parts of the text to try to game metrics) or "extracting key points" (that is to say not reading parts of the text to try to game metrics) or their comprehension drops beyond 100% (that is to say not reading to try to game metrics). And that's assuming you're not just dealing with the actual frauds trying to talk themselves up in a penis-measuring contest or sell something. So yeah, I'm in the anything above 400-600 wpm is in the bullshitters club. And technical or difficult text is of course lower and can't be sped up. No inherent offence intended to "speed readers"... Ok, maybe a little...
- maximus_01 2y ago
  So you have decided anyone who can read faster than you is a fraud? Meaning you think you are in possession of the fastest non-fraudulent human reading abilities possible? Do you have any evidence of this beyond the fact that if you sped up your own reading you would lose comprehension? The person reading at 150wpm could make the same case against you.
  - PaulHoule 2y ago
    There are people who sell "speed reading" courses which is not the same as being a fast reader.
  - Nadya 2y ago
    After wasting the better part of a decade on speed reading as a teen and using speed reading tools I can only find myself to agree with them. Remove multiple-choice questions and ask questions about the material and speed readers comprehension crumbles apart to such a degree it is difficult to call what they do to be "reading". There are quite a number of studies on this, but I'll reference a blog that does all the referencing for me [0] since their experience and thirst for knowledge that led them to later be an advocate against - rather than an advocate for - speed reading is basically a 1:1 match of my own. 500-600 WPM is the upper limits, 99.99% of people claiming otherwise are bullshitting, I always leave that 0.01% because some people are literally just built different and are truly one-of-a-kind (or one-of-maybe-a-dozen people on Earth). Anyone claiming such speeds is going to be under a lot of scrutiny the same way I'd be skeptical of anyone else claiming to be in the top 0.01% of anything. If someone tells me they're a Top 10 Challenger ranked League of Legends player I'm not just going to take their word for it without some solid evidence. [0] https://www.scotthyoung.com/blog/2015/01/19/speed-reading-redo/ https://www.scotthyoung.com/blog/2015/01/19/speed-reading-re...
bitwize 2y ago
I've been doing some anti-ADHD training on my own by reading a difficult book -- The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. LeGuin -- slowly. Sure I could bro down those words in a straight beginning-to-end readthrough and get a sense of what's going on. But I find that going back over the past few paragraphs is rewarding, as subtle turns of phrase reveal details I hadn't noticed. You could probably be trained to comprehend text electronically read to you at 900 wpm. Blind people using screenreaders, for instance, train themselves to understand text read aloud very fast.
- pdfernhout 2y ago
  You might find amusing the RA Lafferty short-story "The Primary Education of the Camiroi" (1966). Summary: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9AXNLUFeplI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9AXNLUFeplI "A PTA delegation from Earth visit another planet to investigate their educational methods in order to figure out how to improve the school system back home on Earth. But the lessons learned, and the conclusions drawn, are rather… odd and disturbing." From the story: https://uncabob.blogspot.com/2015/05/the-primary-education-of-camiroi.html https://uncabob.blogspot.com/2015/05/the-primary-education-o... “How rapidly do you read?” Miss Hanks asked a young girl. “One hundred and twenty words a minute,” the girl said. “On Earth some of the girl students your age have learned to read at the rate of five hundred words a minute,” Miss Hanks said proudly. “When I began disciplined reading, I was reading at the rate of four thousands words a minute,” the girl said. “They had quite a time correcting me of it. I had to take remedial reading, and my parents were ashamed of me. Now I’ve learned to read almost slow enough.” “I don’t understand,” said Miss Hanks. ... “What is this business about slow reading?” Miss Hanks asked. “I don’t understand it at all.” “Only the other day there was a child in the third grade who persisted in rapid reading.” Philoxenus said. “He was given an object lesson. He was given a book of medium difficulty, and he read it rapidly. Then he had to put the book away and repeat what he had read. Do you know that in the first thirty pages he missed four words? Midway in the book there was a whole statement which he had understood wrongly, and there were hundreds of pages that he got word-perfect only with difficulty. If he was so unsure on material that he had just read, think how imperfectly he would have recalled it forty years later.” “You mean that the Camiroi children learn to recall everything that they read?” “The Camiroi children and adults will recall for life every detail they have ever seen, read or heard. We on Camiroi are only a little more intelligent than you on Earth. We cannot afford to waste time in forgetting or reviewing, or in pursuing anything of a shallowness that lends itself to scanning.”
kouru225 2y ago
Agreed. Like I can probably read these comments at 900 wpm if I wanted but if you put Kant in front of me I’m reading at like 10 wpm.
- jdougan 2y ago
  Kant at 10 wpm?! Look at the speed reader!
- btilly 2y ago
  No, that's the speed I'd read Kant. Mind you, I don't agree with a lot of Kant. But that's another story.
autoexec 2y ago
To me it isn't just about comprehension either. When I read I think about what I'm reading. I'll often stop mid-page or even mid-sentence to think about related subjects or past experiences that have some connection to what I've just read. It takes me longer than other people I know to read something, but I'm far from the slowest at it, and to me, reading is (or at least can be) a deeper experience than just an info dump into my brain. I'm sure some of it is ADHD or something but to me, reading is about ideas and I can't wait until the end of a book or even the end of a long article without playing around with them. Especially if it's a topic I'm interested in. Even if speed readers can fully comprehend and retain what they've sped over, I can't help but feel that they're probably missing something.
- btilly 2y ago
  Here's what's weird. I can read a book faster than I can "digest" it. I first learned my reading speed by accident after I read Clan of the Cave Bear in a single sitting. Immediately afterwards I could not summarize it, though I could recognize any passage in the book. The next day, I could summarize it. I describe it as feeling like I have a pipeline. I'm able to fill my brain. Digestion is indeed slower.
  - lproven 2y ago
    Exactly so. As a kid, at once 2 month period, I only had access to a library for a few hours on Sunday afternoons and no other time. I could not remove books. So I read as much as I could in that time window. 5, 6, 7 books in 2 or 3 hours. Then I'd spend the next 6 days going through them in my head and enjoying them.
    - veidr 2y ago
      Man! I didn't remember it until reading your comment, but I had the same experience in elementary school — obligatory time in the school, with access to books, but only while I was there, after finishing whatever trivial tasks were assigned. Alas, the selection was quite lacking. So although I voraciously consumed dozens of "Hardy Boys" novels, the subsequent days were filled with irritating thoughts about how stupid they were.... perhaps the inverse of your experience. Nevertheless, while I was trapped there, it seemed much better than nothing! I still read books, and to me it seems obvious that most of the "experience" of reading plays out in the background in the days and weeks that follow (unfortunately, even if the book has little to offer — although as an adult I'm free to recogize that and move on to another book). P.S. Halfway through https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ministry_for_the_Future https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ministry_for_the_Future and it's a good one! Much better than reading about Chet Morton's old jalopy breaking down again just as the villains are escaping on bicycles... ;-P
btilly 2y ago
What answer do you wants? I can answer comprehension questions and get a good score. For example I got a perfect score on the verbal section of the GRE when I took it in the early 1990s, and this is the speed that I did the reading comprehension tests. I can read whole books, and come away able to find any passage after reading just a few paragraphs. For all intents and purposes, it's read. I can't debug code at this speed though. Doesn't matter how fast I can read, I can't think for myself at the same speed.
- lupire 2y ago
  How long does that memory of the text last?
lproven 2y ago
> I'm skeptical of claims like this. How do the claimants define reading? There are many. I just did this one, the first hit on Google: https://swiftread.com/reading-speed-test https://swiftread.com/reading-speed-test It said: « Reading speed: 861 Words per Minute (WPM) Comprehension: 100% of questions answered correctly How your reading speed compares Slow 150 WPM Average 250 WPM Fast 400 WPM Speed reader 600 WPM You can read pretty fast! Remember that reading fast is only valuable if you're able to maintain good enough comprehension for your goals. » I took my time and paid attention in order to be able to give dates and things. I can go considerably faster. I read about 1000wpm or so for work, a bit slower if I am taking time for pleasure, and when I was a teenager, about 2-3 times faster than that when under pressure. For instance, I read Joseph Conrad's _Victory_ -- 432 dense pages -- in 2 hours for homework, then wrote an essay on it and went to bed. I got a B+. :-) Shorter lighter SF novels I read in half an hour, back then.
- lupire 2y ago
  Are you trolling this thread? I took that test: Current Test Results Reading speed: 1560 Words per Minute (WPM) Comprehension: 100% of questions answered correctly Most of my few seconds spent "reading" was actually spent deciding if I even had to read it at all. I correctly concluded that the test was garbage, and then skipped to the questions, and answered the 4(!) questions using only basic common sense.
  - lproven 2y ago
    Good for you. No, I am not trolling. If you have a better test, I can try it, no problem.

TrainedMonkey 2y ago

Anecdatally, I have two reading modes - full comprehension and skimming. In full comprehension I read and subvocalize each word, often slowing down, pausing, or even re-reading to make sure the meaning sinks in. In skim mode I look at phrases, sometimes whole sentences or even simple paragraphs, and move to the next chunk before consciously comprehending the previous one. Skimming effectiveness highly depends on my alertness level and works best with fiction or other media with low information density. For fiction books I can generally recount the plot and events pretty well.

RajT88 2y ago
I have skim mode as well. I could not put a number to it, but I pick up the gist and leave behind some detail. It is how I got through those middle Wheel of Time books.
noman-land 2y ago
What benefits do you gain from skimming a fiction book?
- TrainedMonkey 2y ago
  Mostly find out what happens next faster. But on some level something about it is meditative. A constant progress across the book understanding what you can and letting everything else go. From pragmatic angle it is acquiring new information at a comfortable rate without stressful backtracking.

nottorp 2y ago

I'd say you only read to assimilate info and not for entertainment then.

btilly 2y ago
I did a lot of reading for entertainment. Particularly light sci-fi and fantasy.
- lproven 2y ago
  Me too. Most of it in fact. But not only. Back in January, Dave Mills died. I told my boss I'd not heard of him so I didn't think an obit was called for. The mourning on HN over the weekend persuaded me otherwise. So, on Monday morning, I read everything I could find about him -- I estimate at least 2000 pages worth and maybe twice that -- and then I wrote this: https://www.theregister.com/2024/01/23/david_mills_obit/ https://www.theregister.com/2024/01/23/david_mills_obit/ It gave me a bit of a headache but I can still tear through large amounts of text, retain the info, summarise it, and then if I don't want or need it let it go.

minihat 2y ago

Reading speed might follow a normal distribution near the middle ranges, but I'd expect non-trivial deviations in the tails due to dyslexia, ADHD on the one side and trained speed readers on the other. Perhaps this individual just falls on the far tail of that distribution? During my graduate coursework I sometimes read 100-200 pages of technical material in a day while cramming for an exam, and was able to retain it for a day or two. I'd believe it if some people exist who could comprehend and retain all of that long-term. Alas, 'tis not I.

PaulHoule 2y ago
I think Dyslexia has a lot of politics attached. If 25% of people have it then, practically, Dyslexia means you are in the bottom 25% of readers, as much as the Dyslexia industrial complex wants to see it as taxonic and not dimensional. (Sure they say it has two subtypes and sure, maybe there are two reasons that make most bad readers bad readers, there are probably more reasons that are more obscure and too hard to pin down) Personally I think there are a lot of white collar people who are devastated to have a child who is a poor reader who won't follow in their footsteps (college professors, journalists, people in ethic groups where people will think you're a loser if you're a cop or pro football player, etc.) Labeling it as a disease makes it easier for people in that situation to live with it.
- tshaddox 2y ago
  > Personally I think there are a lot of white collar people who are devastated to have a child who is a poor reader who won't follow in their footsteps (college professors, journalists, people in ethic groups where people will think you're a loser if you're a cop or pro football player, etc.) Labeling it as a disease makes it easier for people in that situation to live with it. Isn't this just how all diseases and indeed all things work? We're the ones who come up with these simple categorizations and labels to describe reality which is vastly more complex. The terms are necessarily underspecified and the boundaries between categories are necessarily fuzzy. This is true even within some medical community that attempts to have more precise definitions of "disease"/"disorder"/"disability"/etc. and it's all the more true for colloquial usage of these terms. But yes, these terms do end up just meaning "any condition that is not normal that causes problems for the person experiencing it."

ACow_Adonis 2y ago

I'm another "speed reader" skeptic. After significant repeated investigations I came to a stunning conclusion: I'm among some of the fastest actual human readers. My general reading speed 300 to 600 wpm depending on context and medium. For context I was your usual bookworm growing up: reading ahead of level, constantly reading everywhere, always reading while walking, always getting in trouble for reading with other people present like at the breakfast/dinner table, just churning through books non stop. And yes I now read random scientific articles and things for fun. Anything above that reading speed I've started just allocating to bullshitters, or generally techniques which come back to "not reading" rather than "reading". That is to say people who choose techniques to try to speed themselves up through strategies like "skimming" (that is to say, not reading parts of the text to try to game metrics) or "extracting key points" (that is to say not reading parts of the text to try to game metrics) or their comprehension drops beyond 100% (that is to say not reading to try to game metrics). And that's assuming you're not just dealing with the actual frauds trying to talk themselves up in a penis-measuring contest or sell something. So yeah, I'm in the anything above 400-600 wpm is in the bullshitters club. And technical or difficult text is of course lower and can't be sped up. No inherent offence intended to "speed readers"... Ok, maybe a little...

maximus_01 2y ago
So you have decided anyone who can read faster than you is a fraud? Meaning you think you are in possession of the fastest non-fraudulent human reading abilities possible? Do you have any evidence of this beyond the fact that if you sped up your own reading you would lose comprehension? The person reading at 150wpm could make the same case against you.
- PaulHoule 2y ago
  There are people who sell "speed reading" courses which is not the same as being a fast reader.
- Nadya 2y ago
  After wasting the better part of a decade on speed reading as a teen and using speed reading tools I can only find myself to agree with them. Remove multiple-choice questions and ask questions about the material and speed readers comprehension crumbles apart to such a degree it is difficult to call what they do to be "reading". There are quite a number of studies on this, but I'll reference a blog that does all the referencing for me [0] since their experience and thirst for knowledge that led them to later be an advocate against - rather than an advocate for - speed reading is basically a 1:1 match of my own. 500-600 WPM is the upper limits, 99.99% of people claiming otherwise are bullshitting, I always leave that 0.01% because some people are literally just built different and are truly one-of-a-kind (or one-of-maybe-a-dozen people on Earth). Anyone claiming such speeds is going to be under a lot of scrutiny the same way I'd be skeptical of anyone else claiming to be in the top 0.01% of anything. If someone tells me they're a Top 10 Challenger ranked League of Legends player I'm not just going to take their word for it without some solid evidence. [0] https://www.scotthyoung.com/blog/2015/01/19/speed-reading-redo/ https://www.scotthyoung.com/blog/2015/01/19/speed-reading-re...

bitwize 2y ago

I've been doing some anti-ADHD training on my own by reading a difficult book -- The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. LeGuin -- slowly. Sure I could bro down those words in a straight beginning-to-end readthrough and get a sense of what's going on. But I find that going back over the past few paragraphs is rewarding, as subtle turns of phrase reveal details I hadn't noticed. You could probably be trained to comprehend text electronically read to you at 900 wpm. Blind people using screenreaders, for instance, train themselves to understand text read aloud very fast.

pdfernhout 2y ago
You might find amusing the RA Lafferty short-story "The Primary Education of the Camiroi" (1966). Summary: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9AXNLUFeplI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9AXNLUFeplI "A PTA delegation from Earth visit another planet to investigate their educational methods in order to figure out how to improve the school system back home on Earth. But the lessons learned, and the conclusions drawn, are rather… odd and disturbing." From the story: https://uncabob.blogspot.com/2015/05/the-primary-education-of-camiroi.html https://uncabob.blogspot.com/2015/05/the-primary-education-o... “How rapidly do you read?” Miss Hanks asked a young girl. “One hundred and twenty words a minute,” the girl said. “On Earth some of the girl students your age have learned to read at the rate of five hundred words a minute,” Miss Hanks said proudly. “When I began disciplined reading, I was reading at the rate of four thousands words a minute,” the girl said. “They had quite a time correcting me of it. I had to take remedial reading, and my parents were ashamed of me. Now I’ve learned to read almost slow enough.” “I don’t understand,” said Miss Hanks. ... “What is this business about slow reading?” Miss Hanks asked. “I don’t understand it at all.” “Only the other day there was a child in the third grade who persisted in rapid reading.” Philoxenus said. “He was given an object lesson. He was given a book of medium difficulty, and he read it rapidly. Then he had to put the book away and repeat what he had read. Do you know that in the first thirty pages he missed four words? Midway in the book there was a whole statement which he had understood wrongly, and there were hundreds of pages that he got word-perfect only with difficulty. If he was so unsure on material that he had just read, think how imperfectly he would have recalled it forty years later.” “You mean that the Camiroi children learn to recall everything that they read?” “The Camiroi children and adults will recall for life every detail they have ever seen, read or heard. We on Camiroi are only a little more intelligent than you on Earth. We cannot afford to waste time in forgetting or reviewing, or in pursuing anything of a shallowness that lends itself to scanning.”

kouru225 2y ago

Agreed. Like I can probably read these comments at 900 wpm if I wanted but if you put Kant in front of me I’m reading at like 10 wpm.

jdougan 2y ago
Kant at 10 wpm?! Look at the speed reader!
btilly 2y ago
No, that's the speed I'd read Kant. Mind you, I don't agree with a lot of Kant. But that's another story.

autoexec 2y ago

To me it isn't just about comprehension either. When I read I think about what I'm reading. I'll often stop mid-page or even mid-sentence to think about related subjects or past experiences that have some connection to what I've just read. It takes me longer than other people I know to read something, but I'm far from the slowest at it, and to me, reading is (or at least can be) a deeper experience than just an info dump into my brain. I'm sure some of it is ADHD or something but to me, reading is about ideas and I can't wait until the end of a book or even the end of a long article without playing around with them. Especially if it's a topic I'm interested in. Even if speed readers can fully comprehend and retain what they've sped over, I can't help but feel that they're probably missing something.

btilly 2y ago
Here's what's weird. I can read a book faster than I can "digest" it. I first learned my reading speed by accident after I read Clan of the Cave Bear in a single sitting. Immediately afterwards I could not summarize it, though I could recognize any passage in the book. The next day, I could summarize it. I describe it as feeling like I have a pipeline. I'm able to fill my brain. Digestion is indeed slower.
- lproven 2y ago
  Exactly so. As a kid, at once 2 month period, I only had access to a library for a few hours on Sunday afternoons and no other time. I could not remove books. So I read as much as I could in that time window. 5, 6, 7 books in 2 or 3 hours. Then I'd spend the next 6 days going through them in my head and enjoying them.
  - veidr 2y ago
    Man! I didn't remember it until reading your comment, but I had the same experience in elementary school — obligatory time in the school, with access to books, but only while I was there, after finishing whatever trivial tasks were assigned. Alas, the selection was quite lacking. So although I voraciously consumed dozens of "Hardy Boys" novels, the subsequent days were filled with irritating thoughts about how stupid they were.... perhaps the inverse of your experience. Nevertheless, while I was trapped there, it seemed much better than nothing! I still read books, and to me it seems obvious that most of the "experience" of reading plays out in the background in the days and weeks that follow (unfortunately, even if the book has little to offer — although as an adult I'm free to recogize that and move on to another book). P.S. Halfway through https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ministry_for_the_Future https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ministry_for_the_Future and it's a good one! Much better than reading about Chet Morton's old jalopy breaking down again just as the villains are escaping on bicycles... ;-P

btilly 2y ago

What answer do you wants? I can answer comprehension questions and get a good score. For example I got a perfect score on the verbal section of the GRE when I took it in the early 1990s, and this is the speed that I did the reading comprehension tests. I can read whole books, and come away able to find any passage after reading just a few paragraphs. For all intents and purposes, it's read. I can't debug code at this speed though. Doesn't matter how fast I can read, I can't think for myself at the same speed.

lupire 2y ago
How long does that memory of the text last?

lproven 2y ago

> I'm skeptical of claims like this. How do the claimants define reading? There are many. I just did this one, the first hit on Google: https://swiftread.com/reading-speed-test https://swiftread.com/reading-speed-test It said: « Reading speed: 861 Words per Minute (WPM) Comprehension: 100% of questions answered correctly How your reading speed compares Slow 150 WPM Average 250 WPM Fast 400 WPM Speed reader 600 WPM You can read pretty fast! Remember that reading fast is only valuable if you're able to maintain good enough comprehension for your goals. » I took my time and paid attention in order to be able to give dates and things. I can go considerably faster. I read about 1000wpm or so for work, a bit slower if I am taking time for pleasure, and when I was a teenager, about 2-3 times faster than that when under pressure. For instance, I read Joseph Conrad's _Victory_ -- 432 dense pages -- in 2 hours for homework, then wrote an essay on it and went to bed. I got a B+. :-) Shorter lighter SF novels I read in half an hour, back then.

lupire 2y ago
Are you trolling this thread? I took that test: Current Test Results Reading speed: 1560 Words per Minute (WPM) Comprehension: 100% of questions answered correctly Most of my few seconds spent "reading" was actually spent deciding if I even had to read it at all. I correctly concluded that the test was garbage, and then skipped to the questions, and answered the 4(!) questions using only basic common sense.
- lproven 2y ago
  Good for you. No, I am not trolling. If you have a better test, I can try it, no problem.