4 ms·

I can't say if this is generalizable, but it certainly hurts my enjoyment of fiction. I read a metric shitton of fiction. I used to read fiction professionally,

I can't say if this is generalizable, but it certainly hurts my enjoyment of fiction. I read a metric shitton of fiction. I used to read fiction professionally, in fact. I remain a very slow fiction reader, at least subjectively, based on my assessment of my friends', peers', and family members' fiction-reading speeds. But speed isn't really the point when I read fiction. Speed reading has its place, but I will never comprehend the desire to apply speed reading to pleasure reading. Those two goals, speed and pleasure, seem orthogonal at best to me. Speed reading is all well and good when you have more on your desk than you can handle, and you need to get the gist of everything quickly. It's a triage technique.

Tarrosion 13y ago
I'd love to speed read for pleasure. That's because most of my pleasure reading is nonfiction. I don't particularly enjoy the reading; I just like learning new things and having my mind expanded a bit. If I could breeze through nonfiction at 1000wpm with great understanding, I'd be all over that. The ability to do so would be worth thousands of dollars to me. But in my experience, things like Spritz, Spreeder, or just moving eyes faster are fine when the sentences are short and repetitive: "Most people read at 250wpm. You are now reading at 350 wpm. That is 40% faster than most people. And this isn't even hard, right?" When I try to use such techniques to read about, say, relativity, quantum mechanics, or international development, my comprehension approaches 0.