I don't get why anybody would want to speed read a novel. (Outside of a High School literature class where you're being forced to read Ethan Frome and you just want to get back to playing Minecraft, of course).
When I'm reading Hemingway, I'll go back and read individual paragraphs three times to squeeze the last drop of juice out of them. There are only so many Hemingway paragraphs in existence, so wasting one feels like cramming an entire bar of imported Spanish 70% Artisan Chocolate in your mouth and washing it down with soda. Why would you do that???
Take Sordo on the Hill from For Whom the Bell Tolls. It's just a few pages about these guys shooting at each other, but there's so much crammed in there. You learn an awful lot about that guy, his feelings about this war, why he's fighting it, how he ended up on this stupid hill, and why he's going to go ahead and die there rather than any of his other options. He's a real person with complicated motivations and after a few pages you come away knowing pretty much everything you need to know about him and why he was acting the way he was earlier in the book.
Of course you could skim that scene in a minute flat and get the Hollywood Blockbuster version with the crazy local militia yelling stereotypical catch phrases and dying in a blaze of glory.
But then can you really say you read that book? Wouldn't you still want to go back and read it for real some time?
I speed read pulp novels, and have for decades. From Doc Savage to Honor Harrington's recent outings, sometimes you just want the the combination of that literary equivalent of zoning out in front of the TV, combined with finding out what happens next.
You're right that speed reading very well done stuff is a waste of time, but for the written equivalent of fast food, it seems to work fine. And if something does turn out to be better than expected, I can always slow down or go back and reread at my normal speed.
What is the point of speed reading a novel? If you can't be bothered to read what the author wrote, word for word (or nearly so) then you might as well go online and read a summary of the novel - job done. When an author writes a book, they consider every word they put in. Every word has meaning and a reason for being there. I am sure you could take almost any novel ever written and reduce it down to a 10th of it's original size and not lose any of its plot, but it would not be a good book to read.
Of course, it is your time and you can read or not read a book any way that pleases you, I just do not see the point in skimming it.
>When an author writes a book, they consider every word they put in. Every word has meaning and a reason for being there.
I think that's true of authors writing poetry and some authors of novels such as Gustave Flaubert[1]. He spent years refining the same sentences over and over for a single novel.
However, a lot of authors' output has a lot of fluff and fat and the final novel's sentences are hardly more polished than a 1st draft "brain dump". A lot of thrillers and mysteries sold at airport bookstores could be characterized like this. However, it's fine because the plot was interesting and readers will forgive a lot of flabby sentences they had to slog through. Some authors really "craft" their sentences. Some authors don't.[2]
I think readers, as they read certain authors... implicitly perceive if... Each. Word. Is. Really. Important. ... and therefore, slow down to digest it as necessary.
E.g., I would read Flaubert slowly but read Charles Dickens quickly. It gets more complicated with non-English writers like Flaubert because there would be 2 layers of word choices happening: it's Flaubert's French word choices and then the English translator's choices.
Dickens, on the other hand, wrote to a schedule of installments. Even though he didn't literally get "paid by the word count", he did have to fill out a set number of pages each month and the quality of writing is uneven.
I recently read Robin Hobb's liveship trilogy. I was often skipping/speed reading pages at a time to keep the story going at a pace that I enjoyed.
I enjoyed the story without having to 'endure', from my point of view, the boring exposition and over detailing and over explaining of plot points. The dialogue was good, the story interesting, but there were big chunks of text talking about character motivations or other inner monologue and scene painting that were very unnecessary and dull. Entirely skippable. From my point of view.
I've even done the same with my favourite author, Iain M Banks, who got a little wordy in his later novels (for example Matter, which was a bit of a slog compared to the sublime Excession, which I soaked up every word).
That's the point. Not every word in a book is created equal. Authors aren't infallible and also I'm very quick at picking up the gist of a plot point or argument, it's my 'superpower', I get a bit bored at the comprehension rate of most people that authors aim for.
Also I prefer story to detail, I think of it as the difference between people who listen to music for lyrics vs listening to the tune. Personally I don't understand lyric listeners, it's called music, not poetry. Each to their own.
Well, if it's a recent Honor Harrington novel, to skip over all the stuff you already know is going on because it's been covered in pretty much exhaustive detail in the last four or five books too. David Weber is a man in desperate need of an editor.
What if you want content that's half-way between the summary and what the author wrote? Certainly in the rare cases I read "airport novels" whose authors are masterful at pacing, intrigue and plot, but whose writing I don't particular enjoy (Grisham, for example), I'm just vegging out and don't want to absorb every last morsel.
Many novels are better for being speed read. Dan Brown and Stephen King for example, are very good at ideas and pacing but if you spend ages trying to savour their word choices you'll probably end up disappointed.
When I was a kid, I used to speed read each Harry Potter book when it came out, just to find out the plot so nobody could spoil it for me, and then I'd read it again later for enjoyment
Every Neal Stephenson book I've read, I've gone through at break-neck pace wanting to know what happens, and later reread substantially more slowly to get make sure I follow as many of the ideas as possible.
There are many ways to skin a wizard.
(Who's to criticize how someone enjoys their leisure reading? I too spped-read the later honor Harrington books, for precisely the reasons noted above.)
I do it with academic papers,too - but because my goal is to index it and to identify quickly if I need to read it more carefully now, or just to know enough about it that I can remember it exists if I need it later. Of course, I don't pretend it's even speed reading - I literally skip most of the interior text.
Personally I retain information better if I read the CliffsNotes before the novel itself.
I'm not concerned with spoiling the plot, but rather giving myself a structure to be built out with details. [There's a term for this in learning theory that was mentioned in Pragmatic Thinking and Learning, but ironically it's slipping my mind right now.]
Yea I suppose so. But I was always gonna re-read them, no matter the initial speed... I just didn't want someone else to spoil it I guess. I also find it easier to keep the plot in my head if I'm reading faster. If I read too slowly, I kind of forget what's happened. The experience is too similar to reality. Haha.
> I don't get why anybody would want to speed read a novel.
The bit about 'War and Peace' was a joke. Woody Allen didn't really speed read it :)
But even if it wasn't, War and Peace is a great example of a classic most people would be happy to speed read. It's not a relaxing novel like Harry Potter but it's perhaps arguably an important novel to read.
In today's society classic novels like that are often more about absorbing the knowledge rather than enjoying the story, which is people want to speed read... Fast knowledge absorption.
You obviously like Hemingway, you must realise for most people that's odd. Just like you think it's odd a small part of the population might speed read certain novels. It's great that not everyone is the same.
I would never want to "speed read" a novel, or anything else I was reading for enjoyment or enrichment. There are times, however, when I found "speed reading" for rapid content absorption not only desirable, but necessary. When I was in graduate school I would often be assigned voluminous amounts of text on a weekly basis, in several classes. Much of this assigned reading was not particularly interesting or enlightening, yet it composed of hundreds of pages per week in each class. It certainly isn't something you want do to all the time, but speed reading does have its place.
I have found that the density of content certainly adds to or detracts from the ability to read at a rapid pace.
When I sit down with a Raymond Carver short story, the shorter sentences and clear descriptions allow me to absorb it more quickly and move on.
I tried to read at the same pace with authors like Thomas Pynchon or David Foster Wallace (and Hemingway) and found myself re-reading the same paragraph four times.
For me, it isn't nessecarilly that I want to speed read a novel, it is just that I have trained my brain in other ways to absorb the most crucial aspects of a text/problem quickly and jump ahead (at my own detriment). Thanks college!
I don't get it, either. I read at a speed that matches what I'm trying to get out of it. I skim work-related documents and zone in on relevant areas. In college, I would speed read humanities textbooks.
But novels? Like you, I read those slowly and savor them like a good bourbon or wine. I look up words I don't know and commit them to memory. I stop and think about the writing, or a turn of phrase in some dialogue, or the world or characters. I consume novels. This is very different to how many people I know read.
But then I only read very good books. Life is too short to read a bad book.
So, for me, I read quickly and I read through books aggressively and without, as you say, savoring the experience: if it is a book with a strong character or event-based drive, I want to get at what happens to change them, or the events that drive the story, as fast as I can! But here's the thing--as you say, I do go back and read it. I'll read the same book three times, sometimes, and get more out of it each time. Once I know what the shape of the story is, I can more easily drill into it to appreciate the nuance. It's still faster than trying to read slowly to soak it all in the first time, and I think (can't prove, obviously) I get more out of it through the repetition than if I were to try to slow down and spend longer to do it only once.
If you like the recount of the spanish war in "For whom the bell tolls", read "Homage to catalonia" by George Orwell. It's one of the best books I ever read.
It's really quite simple: some novels have writing you want to savor, and you read them slowly, and some novels you just want to extract the plot out of, from fairly mediocre writing.
For example, I really wasn't a huge fan of GRR Martin's writing or story, but I wanted to be on top of the plot of SoIaF, so I blazed through the thing. I got a few details wrong, such as someone being a cousin instead of an uncle maybe, but I was ready to discussed tons of specific aspects of the writing as well (like how he calls Brienne ugly ~every. single. time.~ she comes up).
I tried speed reading on a book I've read multiple tea that I enjoy. It doesn't last long - the world falls away and I read at the pace that felt natural as I enjoyed the book once again.
I agree that it's a bit daft speed reading good works but, if you enjoy reading fiction, you'll find it difficult - you just want to enjoy it.
It only makes sense to speed read texts that don't have a lot of meaning in them. Which, of you consider avreage quality of technical books, articles and work stuff like email and memos, is the majority of texts you encounter.
Because people think more is better. I shortsighted and materialistic view of the world, that which has lead to much of our sufferings in this day and age.
> Except if we're talking about Grisham/Crichton/Dan Brown etc "novels".
Whilst these authors may not be literary greats (though not sure why you lump Crichton in with Brown), isn't it important that people are reading something, even if it is The Davinci Code or The Firm? Even if these are throwaway novels, readers are improving their comprehension, spelling and vocabulary skills (especially if these books are in english and english is not your first language). That's surely better than lazing in front the the telly watching reality TV shows.
> Doubling the speed, in our experience, leaves individual words perfectly identifiable — but makes it just about impossible to follow the meaning.
Wow, sorry but this is very misinformed. A lot of people me included can listen to audio at 2x. I constantly listen to podcasts (so not a slow narration to begin with) at 2x in English which is not even my native language and I understand everything and enjoy it very much.
Blind users listen at 4x without loss of understanding.
Seconded. After I saw and heard how blind people use screen readers (with experience), I started accelerating audio. You can train your brain to become better at understanding — I started at 1.25x and slowly worked my way up. I am now at 1.75x - 2x (plus Overcast's silence removal) and I have no problems, even though English isn't my native language.
Two requirements: headphones (you need much more processing power to deal with crappy speakers and poor audio in general) and lack of significant distractions (you can't afford to think about something else). Also, some apps have crappy audio acceleration algorithms. Overcast does it so well that I use it also for listening to audiobooks.
I also think the article is misinformed. You can speed read by regularly training your brain. Just don't expect miracles and don't believe the "experts" who try to sell you miracles.
Well I haven't tested a lot of them so not sure if it's relevant but I use DoggCatcher as a player and another app called Presto that shims the Android audio layer to increase the speech rate transparently for the player app. It's Presto that uses the Sonic library.
Hmm, now you got me worried. I use a dedicated device for podcasts that is still running Android 2.x. Prestissimo seems to be the new name, but itself deprecated in Android 6.0. I'll have to look into that before that device dies.
It depends on the density of the information doesn't it? I would certainly agree that many, if not, most podcasts could be listened to at double speed or higher and still be understood. However if the podcast is about a detailed analysis of how string theory explains quantum gravity effects, then I highly doubt one could listen to it at double speed and retain much understanding.
The inverse holds that the density is sometimes not high enough. I had trouble following videos on the mill cpu at normal speed, but at 1.25/1.5 my mind was forced to pay more attention
I'm a physics student who has listened to tons of physics course videos at 2x or sometimes 2.5x. I pause when an equation is drawn on the board, but the speech is fine.
This part made me question the entire article. Just about any audiobook or podcast under 2x is too slow for me and most videos (including tv shows and movies) I watch at 1.5x comfortably. I'm also much faster at reading today than I was a few years ago. There is definitely a way to get much faster (while still being realistic).
Yeah. For a long time I thought I hated nearly all video-based entertainment. Then Youtube got that speedup feature. Now that I can watch things at 1.7x, it's much more interesting.
One of the biggest limits is the processing I think. Good algorithms try not to omit anything, but those also begin to blur vowels in to consonants. Fine-tuning of the window size helps (not sure if this was on the FFT or resynthesis part).
Close to the speed limit for understanding two things are difficult:
- personal names (especially of companies) and aberrations.
- a change of the speaker to someone who has a slightly higher speed or worse audio quality
Unavoidable and super annoying:
how back in the "real world" everything appears to be in slow-motion. It takes ages for someone to just finish a single word...
I second this. English is my second language and if I listen to an audiobook or watch an informational video in normal speed, I might as well not do it at all... because my brain starts thinking of something else if it is too slow (i.e. normal speed) and I lose track of it.
Related: There's a plugin for chrome that lets you speed up all html5 videos. I usually watch youtube at at least 1.5x. The plugin is better than the youtube settings because it lets you set the speed on small increments.
Perhaps this depends on the speed of your brain? You know, different people score differently on IQ tests. For example, some score 140 while others score 70. I read (in the book IQ and the Wealth of Nations by Richard Lynn and Tatu Vanhanen, I think) that what an IQ test basically does, is measuring the speed of your brain.
So I guess intelligent people will be able to understand everything on 2x while dumb ones may not.
I was on a debate team in college, and understanding people talking at 200 to 300 wpm is a critical skill. Wired ran an interesting article on this phenomenon a few years back: http://www.wired.com/2012/01/ff_debateteam/
I don't have research about 2x audio to cite but I think there are datapoints that the authors didn't consider when they wrote "Doubling the speed [...] makes it just about impossible to follow the meaning."
Consider that most of us can read text at a normal unhurried speed of 200wpm to 300wpm. We also hear this "inner voice" as we read the written words. This subvocalization is therefore "sounding out" the words at ~300wpm in our head.
However, many people speak out loud at only ~100wpm. For many of us, accelerating speech from 1x to 3x is simply making the speaker sound out the words at 300wpm. Since that's the same as our subvocalization wpm, the meaning is not impossible to follow. Most humans can't move their mouths fast enough to talk at 300wpm -- but with digital technology -- they don't have to.
Spoken recordings at 100wpm is mind-numbingly slow and it would just make my mind wander.
I think the authors should have surveyed a hundred youtube users that always take advantage of the 2x speed option. They would have been surprised to learn that people can follow the meaning of the words at 200wpm very easily.
> there are datapoints that the authors didn't consider
In fairness, 1) we don't know what the authors considered; they apparently have done a lot of research on the subject, and 2) what you list aren't data
>we don't know what the authors considered; they apparently have done a lot of research on the subject
That's true we don't know what they considered but a cursory search doesn't find any primary research on 2x audio acceleration performed by either Rebecca Treiman or Jeffrey Zacks. As for reading text, it looks like RT's commentary on speedreading is based on meta-research[1] and not primary lab research. (It's also possible they published primary research in an academic journal that google doesn't index.) It looks like their comment about speech acceleration is anecdotal instead of being based on rigorous research.
>what you list aren't data
Why not? If an audiofile has speech content, one can count the total words, divide by total minutes, and hence, calculate a words-per-minute. Why is wpm not data? The average reading speed of adults is also well-documented: https://www.google.com/search?q=average+reading+speed+of+adu...
In any case, HN readers can try it themselves on a bunch of youtube videos.
Change the playback option to 2x on those videos. Can it really be impossible to understand the meaning as the authors assert?!? For listeners whose native language is not English, perhaps they require the slower 1x playback speed. For most others, I'm very skeptical that 2x speed is impossible to extract meaning.
Completely agree, you just have to work your way up. Made a custom chrome extension and often watch videos at 4x speed (depending on the speech rate of the actual narrator).
The linked article abstract from Psychological Science says:
> The way to maintain high comprehension and get through text faster is to practice reading and to become a more skilled language user (e.g., through increased vocabulary). This is because language skill is at the heart of reading speed.
So, in short, moving your eyes over the page faster only helps if your speed of language interpretation can keep up (the nytimes article has a slightly paraphrased version).
I wasn't really impressed by the article. It seemed to add very little to the abstract, just a couple of concrete examples of speed reading techniques (and one accompanying study).
Defining speed reading as 'eye movement speedups' and explicitly excluding 'language comprehension speedups' is fine, but it makes me want an article about what happens when you combine both, which I know for a fact can result in reading speedups by a whole number multiple.
I agree. I feel that for me reading in my native language or English goes as fast as I can see sentence. So I assume my language interpretation for those languages is high and maybe I could speed up by doing fancy things with eye movement.
But I am learning Dutch right now and I have to spend a lot more time to get correct meaning of sentence. So no eye movement technique would help me.
this article seems to confuse speed reading with skimming.
i took a full semester class back in high school where all we did was train speed reading. i was able to get to 800 wpm with 90% comprehension on tests. that was from a baseline start of ~150 wpm with 80% comprehension. (the tests afterwards weren't easy "what was the name of bob's dog?" questions)
i've, of course, lost it all in the past 25 years of no practice, but i remember the keys being swallowing entire lines instead of words, achieving "flow", and dropping the subvocalization of what you're reading. (when you pronounce words in your head)
Also, the part about not listening to stuff at double speed. As if all recordings (and thus people speaking) were using the same speed. Sure, there are people who talk too fast anyway, but I've had an online course where I had to move to 1.5x speed to even be able to follow along and not drift off constantly...
>I had to move to 1.5x speed to even be able to follow along and not drift off constantly...
I'm an avid audio-book listener, and I use both 1.5-2.0x and 0.8-0.9x, depending on my mood. The slower speeds definitely allow you to "think" more about the content, rather than concentrating solely on the narrative.
Ditto. I also got a pair of head phones that have a mic/play/pause button on the Y of the cable. This is GREAT for quick pauses without having to reach for my phone.
(I use MEElectronics M6 PRO IEMs because of replaceable cable.)
The reason people want to read quickly is because writers often digress. Maybe the focus should be on writing text that can be absorbed easily and quickly and finding and promoting such text.
Yes! I often scan low-density writing, and love finding technical blogs and tutorials that convey information with clarity and concision. We value writing with strong personality and style, and that's not always aligned with high density.
I once took a speed reading course and my conclusion was, just as the article, that it is glorified skimming.
But some text are written to be skimmed (large parts of many college textbooks for example - the author is paid by the word, so there's often a lot of filler. Most people only need to get squinted with most journal article they meet)
Is it just skimming? When I saw the headline of the article I decided that, rather than skimming it, I'd try just reading all the words really fast. I haven't taken a class or anything, so maybe my technique could use work, but I understood it just fine at a little over 1300 words per minute. The writing wasn't very dense, and even then I didn't have time to think critically about what it was saying until after reading it, but I wasn't just skimming.
What slows things down for me (and for most people) is subvocalization.[1]
It should be possible to get in the zone and not subvocalize, but I can only do it for very brief periods. And it's something that I can only do for "light reading" rather than when trying to understand highly technical information.
I do speed reading: It is real, I am part of a group in Europe that could read a novel in 30 minutes. We are more than 50 people.
The big drawback: we can't read anything that fast. We have to format the content in an specific way that we trained with. For example, reading long lines is a big no no. The idea is to maximize the circular area that you could read on a single eye stroke. With training you make the circular area bigger and bigger.
That is, we need to OCR the book or something that let's us create our own book in digital format(tablet) or decrypt the epub-pdf. That is illegal.
Why people love to speed read things like novels?
Because normal reading is boring and too slow. It is like being told to play football at 1km/hour max.
I skimmed this article in about 20 seconds and then went back and read it more closely. I don't feel like I missed much on the first pass.
Sure you won't get the full literary experience skimming through War and Peace. But fluffy articles with a single tweet's worth of information content I can "speed read" just fine.
There's all kinds of different... "textures" of information.
Some things are extremely thick with information. Every few sentences, I might need to pause and think through all the implications and realizations that are revealed to me. In audio form, I'm rewinding or pausing, and consuming at <1x speed.
Other sources might spread the important details and facts around. I'm better served by speedreading / skimming / playing back at (>?)2x speed. This strains my short term memory less, letting me assemble the important bits into a broader, deeper understanding of the material, that can contextualize all those snippets in a way that makes it easier to commit to long term memory.
This can happen even with information dense material, in which case I'm better served by repeatedly skimming, than trying to do a single solid readthrough once.
And then there's the stuff that wasn't even worth skimming through once.
skip reading is perhaps a better name for it. I got the gist - speed reading doesn't work, saved myself a few minutes only skipping to the start of each paragraph.
Yeah, when they mentioned speeding up spoken texts, that was when I had to disagree with the article -- I can easily listen to some material at 1.25-2x, though it's true that if my mind wanders at all, I miss quite a bit. Of course, that's also true when reading at normal speeds, but since it's then playing back slower, you'd miss less in the same amount of time, right?
In this case, I swiped down with two fingers to start iOS' speech function and it read the article quite quickly for me. I was able to better follow along with the reading as it highlighted words on the page. So while I won't say the article is wrong in absolute terms -- it's definitely a different experience to "speed read" in any practical manner than to read each word carefully on your own -- I do think some speed up with assistive tools or training is possible. :)
I have. Works great for (unabridged) audiobooks paired with their original texts. I even put on the Quake and Deus Ex soundtracks while listening to the audiobook of Masters of Doom while reading the paperback.
Mind blown on this one too. It makes sense too - the aural bits of the brain and the reading bit of the brain don't interfere modally, so can act in parallel.
I did speed reading at Sylvan when I was younger, and I was really pretty good at it. The only problem, is that during the tests which tested your comprehension I was able to surmise the answers based on tropes & assumptions rather than actual comprehension. I could get 100% on the tests of maybe 25 answers, strictly based on tropes and assumptions. To be honest, this might have killed my love of reading fiction.
To this day, I can get to pages into a book and begin making major assumptions about the rest of the book (usually it will be close enough), so when my assumptions start playing out, I abandon the book, or skip to the last chapter to find out if I was right (more often than not, the trope plays out.) If I were to continue to read it, it becomes more of a chore than something enjoyable. I don't know if this is a result of my speed reading classes, or not...but it's something I just tied together after reading this.
I do enjoy reading history or things based on opinions, biographies, etc; which are much much harder to speed read. But I do wonder, just how much of speed reading is assumption and reliance on tropes...which underscores two problems, I believe, in both speed reading and in writing.
I don't know whether to call what I do speed reading or not, but I definitely read faster than most people I know. I've spent a lot of time analyzing what things effect my reading speed.
I find that my reading speed is most heavily effected by how much my eyes have to move to scan the words in the line. The best for me is if a column is narrow enough that I don't really have to move my eyes side to side to get all the words in the column.
As an example, a Thompson Chain Reference Bible has about the perfect size columns (roughly 5-7 words per column) for me to be able to take in essentially the whole line at once, so I can just run my finger down the column and take in words about as fast as I can follow it with my eyes.
A related trick in this regard is one I believe I saw on Tim Ferris's blog which (if I remember correctly) suggested focusing on the 6 words at the beginning of a line and then the 6 words at the end of the line. For text that is too long to take in the whole line all at one glance, this seems to work pretty well for me.
> The best for me is if a column is narrow enough that I don't really have to move my eyes side to side to get all the words in the column.
Interesting. I'm the opposite way. Part of how I speed read is being able to quickly back-track if I detect that I've failed to notice something important. Filling the reading surface with text means that I almost never have to scroll around to locate what I missed.
I read the first two sentences of each paragraph in the article, then I went back and read it again. No difference in comprehension. N=1, but then this article is a great example of the current trend in 'science communication' for the 'single study so thing is definitely true with a clickbaity headline' template, so I don't feel bad.
I use a chrome extension called jetzt [1] to read long form articles on webpages.
I find that I'm able to read and comprehend comfortably at 650 - 700 words per minute as long as the text is well written and on a subject where I already know all the lingo.
I read this article at 450 words per minute using Readline, a speed reading extension like spritz. 450 wpm is not a lot, and it's enough to process most of the text. But it's faster than my default reading speed, and it also makes reading feel more gentle and passive.
When I read articles without it (which I do most of the time) I read a bit slower. I get distracted much more often. My mind wanders. It feels a bit more like work to make myself read the next sentence.
For the same reason I prefer audio books to written books, and lectures to textbooks (although I prefer to listen to both at a sped up rate.)
The density of the text matters more than anything. You can not speed read a math textbook at even normal reading speed. You can read a very light or uninteresting article at 200 wpm above normal. I can listen to some audio at 2x speed, but sometimes I slow it down to make sure I have time to process everything.
Well, reading speed clearly isn't a constant across the population or even for one person. Some people read faster, and TFA article admits as much when it points towards experience.
A few hours ago, at 5am, while checking two weeks worth of email, I was very very drowsy and unfocused and couldn't read fast at all. I went to bed, slept a few hours, and now, somewhat refreshed, I can keep in zone again and read at a good pace. Reading speed for me definitely isn't a constant.
When I want to read faster still, I can make a focused effort to do so. Emphasis on focus. The faster advancing eye movement takes focus. As does trying to comprehend the larger amount of words or (short) sentences that the eye consumed in a pass.
Properties of the text have an effect on success; "speed-reading" a math textbook would be a complete waste of time for me, because the comprehension part requires so much more time and effort than "seeing" and "reading" the words. Same goes often goes for code or highly technical texts.
The layout has another effect. Back to the emphasis on focus. Give me the right font size, short lines, and likewise short paragraphs, and I can read much faster without stumbling. Yes, it is about eye movement, about anchors, about breaking the text into conveniently sized chunks that can be parallel processed. If comprehension for the given text is easy enough, then this can help speed up reading a lot. Still, it takes a bit of a focused effort, which I would call speed reading?
I read the linked article pretty fast. And my speed slowed significantly as I got back here, with the long lines stretched to almost full width of my display. First I stumbled a few times, and that was a sign to slow down.
It is fair to say there's a limit to how fast one can read without sacrificing comprehension, that's for sure. But you can totally make a focused effort to read faster.
Hyperlexia is real. I wouldn't say it always works, and in math it can be very dangerous. But I still have enough retention to participate in undergraduate level discussions of the text after I'm done. Sadly, we don't know how to make ordinary people hyperlexic.
So true - I didn't realise there was a name for it. There's both a lot more natural variation than I suspect this article writer wants to believe - and a lot more training benefit if people want to learn to read faster. Just like any other human activity really.
I use audible a lot. I've found that as I've got used to it I can increase the speed to around 2x. When I first started using it I usually set it around 1.25.
It depends a bit on the narrator and the content. I find I often need to start with a new narrator at around 1.75 and then bump it up to 2 when I get more comfortable with their voice. But I would say that provided the speaker is clear and not heavily accented my language processing quite happily works at 2x speech speed. (Perhaps they deliberately speek slower for audio books though?).
Whenever my wife hears it she says it sounds like nonsense to her, so I do think it's something that you get used to over time.
From my experience of speed reading classic novels, I actually go faster and with higher comprehension when I slow down and stop trying to comprehend.
I don't read words allowed or to myself in my head. I look at them and move forward. After a few years of doing this, I've been able to go through novels at surprising speeds. It's like I can parse an entire page and visualize everything without trying.
Also, using my finger to guide me only slows me down.
The authors of the article mention Spritz, but I have to wonder whether they've actually used it. They argue that speed reading involves skipping over words. However, when you use Spritz, you do read every word -- you simply do so faster.
Research [1] suggests that whilst use of Spritz does negatively impact reading comprehension, that impact is relatively minor. My own personal experience of using Spritz agrees with that finding.
I'm not saying there are no downsides to speed reading, but there are times when you do need to read something quickly and you can sacrifice a small amount of reading comprehension. In those cases, speed reading can be immensely useful.
I remember when I was in primary school, I overheard an explanation from one of the teachers about the children in a gifted course: "[They're] wrong: They aren't smarter than you, [they] just learn faster than you."
After a week, my memory of my experience of a book is the same whether I λx→x or λy→y, it's just that one of these methods took less time in absolute terms.
I don't really know what the reading experience is like for you, and I don't know what you call these things, but if I experience books faster than you, you want more time in your life with no other downside that I can see, then I can tell you about my experiences.
Now I say this because I'm certainly biased: I didn't enjoy the article, and where's why I think I didn't enjoy the article:
Here's the statements in the article in "support" of λx→x
• Professor Treiman concluded that it’s extremely unlikely you can greatly improve your reading speed without missing out on a lot of meaning. What exactly do you mean by "greatly" and "a lot"?.
• Skim readers spent more time reading text that was earlier in the paragraph, toward the top of the page and in an earlier page of the document. These findings were interpreted as evidence in support of a “satisficing” account of skimming process. And?
• Have you ever tried listening to an audio recording with the speaking rate dialed way up? Yes, I used to read and transcribe legal dictation at +50% and I got done faster. What exactly do you mean by "way up?".
And here's the statements in the article in "support" of λy→y
• Participants in a 2009 experiment showed reading half the words distributed relatively evenly throughout the text versus losing the beginning half or the end half had better comprehension. No kidding.
• You can learn to skim strategically so that you spend more time looking where the more important words are likely to be, and if the words are presented in a stream you may be able to learn which words to focus on and which to ignore. Sounds great.
I was unable to extract anything stronger than these statements, but then I was λy→y. What I nonetheless got out of the article, wasn't convincing to me that I, doing λy→y am somehow missing out on something. Instead, I felt like this was attempting to console people who λx→x, and perhaps maybe they shouldn't feel so bad.
If I am reading anything worthwhile, I will usually be taking notes and looking stuff up every page or two, or pausing to make sure I really understood some concept, so I'm not sure speed reading would help much
In high school, I took a speed reading course from the teacher who was on the speed reading segment on the 80s show "That's Incredible!". By coincidence, she taught at my high school in Southern California. I feel bad for not remembering her name but it's been well over 20 years ago at this point.
Her technique emphasized exercising the eye muscles, improving peripheral vision and focus. The downside to the technique is that it required one to constantly do these eye exercises to maintain speed, although my peripheral reading ability is still there.
It's a skill that works by paying attention to different structural details in the writing. Instead of breaking up individual words, it looks first for the signal of the sentence parts and sentences as wholes with a higher level of meaning. Given that individual words can have multiple meanings, it skips a layer. Once you get the context going you should already have a predictive model for what definition of the word is meant.
There's an assumption here that meaning or understanding is discrete and limited but the reality is that there is an unlimited depth of meaning in any text. So a claim that a reader has captured the meaning has to include "for the purposes of X". Certainly it isn't captured for the purposes of most media reviews. Just read the initial professional reviews for any book that you know and love.
There are a bunch of speed reading apps that have come out that basically just flash single words in front of you super quickly. It seems like this concept has really gained in popularity as people's attention span has shortened due to smartphones, faster internet, computers, etc.
Hmm interesting. But speed reading isn't just less eye movement while reading line by line. It's using your peripheralife vision to read longer chunks of words line by line. Like when driving you see a sign and just know what you saw without slowly reading it. Idk if I agree with this 100%.
Ironically, this point is addressed in the article. Maybe you didn't see it. :) Here it is:
There is only a small area in the retina (called the fovea) for which our visual acuity is very high. Our eyes are seriously limited in their precision outside of that. This means that we can take in only a word or so at each glance, as well as a little bit about the words on either side. In fact, since the 1960s, experiments have repeatedly confirmed that when people “speed read,” they simply do not comprehend the parts of the text that their eyes skip over.
Of course, speed reading gets some meaning lost. But the very skill of speed-reading amounts to developing a sense of look-ahead: first, intuitively establishing fast anchors in text to actually read a few moments later; second, to expand on this anchors, absorb the information and introduce feedback corrections in look-ahead patterns.
All my reading is "speed reading"; I even can't follow the linear text word by word anymore, this is way too boring. But I can regulate the time distance between look-ahead and absorbing passes, and thus the ratio between speed and meaning extracted. This is invaluable to find something in technical documentation, or prepare for exams.
And I can't listen to audiobooks or lectures; they are sooooo slow...
Ok, so you notice you lose "some" meaning. The question is, how much? One way to find out is to read something the fast way and then the slow way and pay attention to how much is new the second time. Have you tried this, or perhaps some other way to see how much meaning gets lost?
As for comparing reading speed to talking speed (audio books and lectures): of course talking is slower than reading, even if you don't speed read.
I don't know about the parent, but I have tried this - repeatedly, in fact, including taking a number of reading comprehension exams each way, just to see the effects. Something that frequently happens is that I'll mix up side characters. I can only juggle a few characters at a time when speed-reading. I really made a mess of The Hobbit, back in the day, completely mixing up several of the dwarves. And I miss a number of nuances of language - a clever bit of wordplay might pass me entirely. Really, it comes down to the author's style - someone like Stephen Baxter might be on the harder side of sci-fi, but I'm able to chew through his books in hours because there are generally few extra characters. Everything just kinda... proceeds linearly. There's little to track other than what's immediately available. On the other hand, your typical high fantasy fare has to be chewed over the course of a few days if I'm to follow what's going on.
>> Of course, speed reading gets some meaning lost.
The whole premise of this article is that it does not, that "speed reading" is reading faster without losing meaning, and this is precisely what most people cannot actually do.
The author calls the activity you are referring to "skimming", and says it is what most people do.
No. Skimming is when you reading linearly and then decide "OK, I can probably skip this paragraph". Speed reading is the way to read in parallel, without ever tracking sentences word by word.
I don't know that I 'speed' read, but I read rather quickly, enough so that I detest any kind of video explanation because I would have finished reading it by the time they finished mumbling some pointless introductory nonsense.
This is the second in articles in the last few months on speed reading and both basically say the same thing: "There's no way to read at a ridiculous speed and retain anything you've read".
I'm a speed reader. It did involve a sheet of paper that had "eye exercises" to practice but this was a tiny part of the class. The vast majority of the study was on scanning and skimming[1] text for information. It's a different way to read technical/programming books and I find it way superior to word-for-wording books. I can read a book this way several times. I can focus (word-for-word) on areas of weakness and skip areas that I know well. I can get through a large volume (with enormous effort) in a weekend with retention that is significantly higher than what I would have experienced if I had read it word-for-word (at least in part because I'd have only gotten through a small part of the book by then if I was reading word-for-word).
It's not magic, but intuitive, when you stop thinking about "speed reading" as a way to read fiction -- or really as anything other than a different way to consume large volumes of information for learning and it's particularly well suited to the huge technical books that plague our industry. Here's how it works in practice (for me; since I can't speak to anyone else):
- First read: 1 hour - a major part of this is simply determining if the book is worth studying. There's no shortage of huge books on complex topics in our industry and many of them aren't effective at teaching the topic they're trying to convey. If I approached reading word-for-word, I might not discover that until 5 hours later or I might miss some useful sections toward the end. In the word-for-word scenario, my choices now are to drop the book and mark that time as wasted or succumb to "loss aversion" and give up on it after several days when I'm exhausted from reading it. This also allows me to eliminate any parts that cover areas I know well, already, which is a huge problem for me when reading programming books.
- Second read: Covers only the parts of the book that were identified in the first read as "worth reading". How long this takes depends a lot on the first part. I still mostly scan/skim but with much more attention to detail. I take a lot of notes here.
- Subsequent reads: Deep reading (word-for-word) of truly useful material. Here's where I'm probably going to start doing exercises if the text includes any. This may or may not be done in the order presented in the book (especially for programming books which often introduce many concepts, dig into each, then way later cover "advanced techniques" of specific topics -- I hate this practice)
For a book that has 90% "new and useful content" to me, I can get through it in half the time it would have taken me to read word-for-word but with much higher retention. The reason for the higher retention is because when reading word-for-word I've forgotten significant portions of the early parts of the text weeks later when I've reached the latter quarter of the text. Technical books build on material chapter-by-chapter so losing the earlier parts drastically affects my understanding of the latter parts. When I sit down with a book, I block out my time in advance so that I can get through a "step" in my process from start to finish in order to avoid this problem. If I reach a latter part of the book and feel like I'm not understanding things well (I rarely feel "lost" mainly because of this technique), I consult my notes and know where to look for the information I'm missing. It makes consuming information efficient by reducing wasted time being lost, reading things that are redundant, and mentally organizing the information effectively.
On "speed reading apps" and courses, I think there's one point that is extremely misleading. That's the idea that you can use an app or take a course and over night become a speed reader. My course helped quite a lot, almost immediately, but it took 10 years before I was really good at it. This should surprise nobody. Any adult with children learning how to read understands what a complicated process reading actually is. You have to practice and when you read you have to think about your reading technique in addition to consuming the material. Thinking about it in the way I think about running: every read is about reducing the time/mile, reducing the amount of effort required to do a run, keeping your heart rate in the right place and increasing the distance you can run. You can practice running without thinking of these things, but if you're not deliberate about it, your returns on practice will become less and less.
Lastly -- I can't stress this point enough -- it's terrible for fiction. I hate reading any other way and as a result I simply don't read fiction at all. So I stick with audio books -- having a book narrated is the ultimate in word-for-word immersion. Enjoying the formation of sentences and the poetry of the text is impossible for me when speed reading.
[1] As it was described in the course: "Scanning" is reading parts of the page: headings, first paragraph sentences, intro paragraphs, etc. This gets a rough idea of context. "Skimming" I think is best described as "reading words but not sentences". You rapidly read the important words in every sentence. I can blow through a text this way in 10% of the time it takes to read...with about 1% of the information actually reaching me. It's not a way to learn material, it's a way to identify more deeply what the material is about.
Scanning and skimming is very ordinary thing to do, I believe many learn to do that without any special instruction, especially if they are in a field where they read a lot. (Humanities majors, people who read magazines or NYTimes...) It's very basic thing in the arsenal of efficient learning.
The thing is, the kind the speed reading the article is about is something its proponents claim to be different than just "skimming".
When I'm reading Hemingway, I'll go back and read individual paragraphs three times to squeeze the last drop of juice out of them. There are only so many Hemingway paragraphs in existence, so wasting one feels like cramming an entire bar of imported Spanish 70% Artisan Chocolate in your mouth and washing it down with soda. Why would you do that???
Take Sordo on the Hill from For Whom the Bell Tolls. It's just a few pages about these guys shooting at each other, but there's so much crammed in there. You learn an awful lot about that guy, his feelings about this war, why he's fighting it, how he ended up on this stupid hill, and why he's going to go ahead and die there rather than any of his other options. He's a real person with complicated motivations and after a few pages you come away knowing pretty much everything you need to know about him and why he was acting the way he was earlier in the book.
Of course you could skim that scene in a minute flat and get the Hollywood Blockbuster version with the crazy local militia yelling stereotypical catch phrases and dying in a blaze of glory.
But then can you really say you read that book? Wouldn't you still want to go back and read it for real some time?