In my experience, more people need to work on reading comprehension than reading speed. Comprehension is what actually matters, and is what seems to be in short supply. If Bionic Reading promised increased reading speed with no loss of comprehension, and provided it, all it would mean is that people would misunderstand things at a faster rate.
I’ve been thinking of that a lot as well. What’s the point of being able to read fast if you miss the fine details? What’s the point if you read so fast that you just sort of forget everything?
One of the many issues I have with contemporary literate culture, another being those who insist on reading a large volume of books, on being “well read”, rather than focusing on quality.
In defence of skimming books: Not everyone is enjoying reading the same way. Not even one person in different contexts. There are books where I'm going to be engaged completely. There are others I'll enjoy for main plot but will want to skip the fluff. I'm extreme cases I'll gloss over a whole paragraph as "whatever, I don't care about the scenery". Being able to skim quickly to the next interesting part is a good skill.
But the comment made me think - can we even improve the comprehension, as in processing what we read? (not as in understanding the vocabulary/structure) I've never heard of ways to purposefully do that.
For me an important part of reading fast is finding out which parts are interesting and which parts are not, and then focusing more on the interesting parts.
I agree 100%. I think the fundamental flaw in seeking methods to speed read is the inherent assumption that there is an equal tradeoff between higher speed and lower comprehension. Alas, bad comprehension is probably many times more harmful than lower reading speed. So the tradeoff is highly imbalanced due to the highly dissimilar importance weights attached to comprehension and speed.
Reminds me of reading math textbooks in college. That text tends to be incredibly information dense, so I would spend minutes reading just one or two pages. One of my friends who tried to read them like they were any other book would get frustrated and stop.
The idea of reading at a given speed seems wonky to me as well. Its all about information density and how deeply you need to understand something imo. I read light fiction pretty quick, non fiction slower, technical stuff much slower etc
