11 ms·

For a long time I was really into the idea of speed reading, and I worked through one of the original books on it: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/073520019X

For a long time I was really into the idea of speed reading, and I worked through one of the original books on it: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/073520019X http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/073520019X After a lot of practice I ultimately came to the conclusion that it doesn't really work. I could 'read' the pages really fast, but it's not what I'd call reading. It's skimming. Sure, the speed of fixation and regressions limit your theoretical maximum reading speed, but — for me at least — the real bottleneck was how fast I could understand what I was reading. You may be able to look at 10 pages of words per minute, but understanding 10 pages of material per minute just doesn't really work. Another thing I learned is that there's no good metric for what constitutes 'retention'. It's usually measured by making a list of how many 'things' you can remember from what you read. It's arguable whether remembering a list of words from what you've read relates in any meaningful way to whether you comprehended what you read. Having the word 'scientific' in the title of the article is misleading at best.

sketerpot 17y ago
Exactly. I can naturally read very quickly without subvocalizing words, but it's only useful when I have to quickly read something with a very low content-to-words ratio. Or when I need to awe lesser beings, of course.
discojesus 17y ago
After a lot of practice I ultimately came to the conclusion that it doesn't really work. I could 'read' the pages really fast, but it's not what I'd call reading. It's skimming. I believe this was shown in a study where experimenters gave reading selections to self-proclaimed speed-readers without telling them that the text was actually two separate texts mixed together (i.e. so that line 1 was from book A, line 2 was from book B, line 3 from book A, and so on). The idea being, of course, to see if they could really comprehend what they were reading, since the fact that this was a jumbled mess would be apparent to any careful reader within seconds. Of course, the punchline is that none of the speed-readers even noticed it, which should give some indication as to the level of comprehension that can be achieved via speed-reading.
3pt14159 17y ago
Take this test: http://www.readingsoft.com/index.html#results http://www.readingsoft.com/index.html#results I did 464 wpm with 82% accuracy (comprehension is important with this one!). I do a blend of visual and "normal" reading. Visual gets auto-turned off for large words and numerical facts. I don't think I could breach 500 wpm without totally loosing my comprehension.

sketerpot 17y ago

Exactly. I can naturally read very quickly without subvocalizing words, but it's only useful when I have to quickly read something with a very low content-to-words ratio. Or when I need to awe lesser beings, of course.

discojesus 17y ago

After a lot of practice I ultimately came to the conclusion that it doesn't really work. I could 'read' the pages really fast, but it's not what I'd call reading. It's skimming. I believe this was shown in a study where experimenters gave reading selections to self-proclaimed speed-readers without telling them that the text was actually two separate texts mixed together (i.e. so that line 1 was from book A, line 2 was from book B, line 3 from book A, and so on). The idea being, of course, to see if they could really comprehend what they were reading, since the fact that this was a jumbled mess would be apparent to any careful reader within seconds. Of course, the punchline is that none of the speed-readers even noticed it, which should give some indication as to the level of comprehension that can be achieved via speed-reading.

3pt14159 17y ago

Take this test: http://www.readingsoft.com/index.html#results http://www.readingsoft.com/index.html#results I did 464 wpm with 82% accuracy (comprehension is important with this one!). I do a blend of visual and "normal" reading. Visual gets auto-turned off for large words and numerical facts. I don't think I could breach 500 wpm without totally loosing my comprehension.