I took Evelyn Wood in the late 70s as a teenager. I already read the way they tell you: scan bunches of words and lines, and use your finger to drag down a column of text to help your eye track faster.
The idea is you don’t want to “hear” or “say” each word out loud to yourself, because this is what slows you down.
This method works great on newspapers, not so good for complex philosophy, deep legalese, or detail-oriented material.
I also discovered that some types of poetic fiction, and of course poetry itself, both suffer drastically from this treatment. I actually had to consciously re-learn to hear the music in the words, and read more slowly where the quality or intention of the writing required it.
Does it help? Yes. Does it allow you to easily read thousands of words per minute with great comprehension? No, unless you’re some kind of savant.
A lot of people have bad reading habits, and plod along at 200 WPM or so. Training (and all you need is a book on the subject, not a several hundred dollar course) can quickly get intelligent people up to more like 500-600, with little or no loss in comprehension. There are always people who can do things that most people can’t, but the typical intelligent person cannot go much faster than 800, even with very strenuous practice, without losing comprehension.
And the use for that is limited. If you are reading for pleasure, you won’t want to read that fast. If you are reading to learn math or physics, you absolutely can’t read that fast. For new and complex material, forget waving your hand down a page; it might take you an hour to completely absorb one page.
Of course, there are situations where the rapid acquisition of superficial knowledge can be useful. If you’re interviewing job applicants, you can scan their resumes quickly, and get details about the high points by asking them questions when they come in. If you’re trying to impress a date, you can read up on art history or music appreciation or whatever, and then take her to a museum or concert and fake it convincingly, provided she doesn’t know much herself.
IMO all such courses are overpriced, and their main benefit is in teaching you how to scan, not read for comprehension. If you’re Charlie Rose, the ability to scan the NYT for information that will be helpful in upcoming shows would be valuable. A lot of courses include note-taking or outlining techniques that help retain information. But again, there are any number of $10 books that teach the same techniques.
I could read a LOT faster when my eyesight was better. It’s not very bad now - I don’t wear glasses except for driving at night - but it was something like 40/10 when I was young (that would be 12/3 for metric types…). And my comprehension was excellent.
I guess that sometimes when people say “I can’t read that, I haven’t got my glasses with me”, they really aren’t illiterate at all!
MODERATOR NOTE: It’s helpful to other readers if you provide a link to the column in question when starting a thread. Saves search time, and keeps us on the same page (so to speak.) I’ve added the link,. hazmatdance, and you’ll know for next time.
About 1970 I was sent on a speed reading course, and during tests found that my speed was about 400wpm, with about 75% accuracy on being tested
a Professor made the same speed but with 95% on being tested .
Later, working in a secret spy base, I could view traffic passing at 1500 wpm and know if it was a Russian Weather ship, or Polish tank movements.
I believe there were tests done in ~Australia and they found that with careful schooling
there is no limit .
1,500 w/min is 24 w/sec. That’s like putting one word on each frame of a movie. And you scanned words that fast and retained understanding?
Did the training your receive also train the photochemical reactions in your retina and neurochemical reactions in your nerve and brains cells to break the laws of physics?
While that’s the same rate, it’s nothing “like”. The whole idea behind this speed reading technique is to get the maximum number of words per eye fixation. If we believe we can read whole passages at a time, then reading 24 words in one glance (and doing that once a second) isn’t that big a leap.
I never took a course, but I did practice this for a while myself. Without the method, I read about 300 WPM, when reading something like a novel. I practiced on newspapers, which (if well-written) is lower grade level than a typical novel, and has narrow columns (which is optimal for this method). I didn’t measure myself, but did get to the point where I could read a typical article taking about 3 lines at a glance.
I quit because it was too much effort and I was losing details. My experience isn’t sufficient to render a judgment since I didn’t really commit and practice until it became second nature. But it was enough to show that the method had promise … as long as details aren’t important. I was in college at the time, and I definitely couldn’t read science/math/engineering textbooks that way (it was hard enough reading them at 60 WPM!) Sociology textbooks would have been perfect, since they use a lot of words without saying anything anyway (or as someone put it, they make a point to state the obvious in incomprehensible terms.)
In any case, the biggest technical difficulty I had was due to the fact that blocks of read text would include ends of previous sentences and beginnings of next ones, and it was very easy to misconstrue the actual meaning, miss a negative, or get the two sentences a bit garbled in my mind.
Poetry, should be read aloud. Subvocalizing while reading slowly would be the next best thing. Speed reading poetry would be like flipping through paintings as fast as possible – that is, a waste of time unless you’re merely searching for something.
Surely you must acknowledge that there are physical limits: The sharpness of detail in central vision which is not present in peripheral vision; the refresh rate of the cones and rods in the retina; the twitch of the eye muscles; the transmission of nerve signals; the firing off of various complex patches of the brain that needs to recognize the text, parse it as words and phrases, and send ‘meaning’ to the frontal lobes for conscious understanding, and send copies of that understanding to short and long term memory centers for retention.
Without acknowledging those limits, one can claim as naguere does, that “there is no limit.” That is an absurd and laughable statement.
So, 24 fps, as movies demonstrates, surpasses our ability to discern discrete segments of time and movies appear to be fluid motion and not just stop action pictures shown in succession. And while the speed reader isn’t taking in just one word at a time, the claim of 1,500 wpm (with understanding and retention) is clearly near that border (most likely way over) where physical limitations of the physiology of sight, neurology, and thought are.
Sure, I can take in 1,500 wpm if I glance at paragraphs at a time, but a glance at a paragraph is meaningless without time needed to parse the language, especially if the reader has already moved on to glance the next paragraph.
Let’s see a cite where someone proves that they can read that fast without significant loss of comprehension. Cecil’s column shows that they can’t.
I don’t know that **naguere **was claiming comprehension (although he might have been). I read his claim as being able to recognize the type of traffic, which seems possible, assuming the traffic types tended to look the same. Then it was mostly pattern recognition, which humans are pretty good at.
“Speed reading is what you might call the Ronald Reagan approach to reading — you get the text’s general drift while remaining largely innocent of the details”
Was it really necessary to specifically offend conservatives in this article? Did a progressive/liberal/democrat never practice speed reading? The only president that I can remember who specifically said he practiced “Speed Reading” was Jack Kennedy.
This. I learned to read at an early age. The last time I was testing, my “normal” reading rate is in the thousands of words per minute. I’ll buy a dead tree paperback whodunnit or something (or download it to my Kindle) and take it with me to work. I’ll read the whole damn thing on my lunch break. I start out trying to read slowly, but as I get into the book and the flow of the story, my natural reading takes over and I’ll just sit there turning the pages like a robot.
This is where we part ways. I can imagine reading 24 words per second, in one or two fixations per second. Furthermore, naguere didn’t claim 100% comprehension, but rather the ability to detect between a number of specific possibilities.
My point is that the fact we can’t read at 24 fixations per second has no bearing on whether we can read 24 words in one fixation per second, and sheds no light on the subject.
Easily offended, are we? This was not a shot at conservatives; it was a shot at Reagan, specifically, whom you must admit continues to be well known for the phrase “I don’t recall” when asked about details of the Iran-Contra scandal.
Powers &8^]
This is perfectly reasonable. The concept, that is. There are, or course, limits. I don’t remember how many fixations per second that is. But our eyes take in a lot of useful information each time they pause.
Interested parties should see if they can find someone who will let them read while wearing eye-tracking equipment. Maybe bring along a few friends of varying read ability. It’s fun to learn how your eyes work. You’ll generally find that better readers fixate fewer times per line of text. This is one way you can end up with a prolific reader who can’t spell, since she doesn’t even notice how the letters are arranged during normal reading. This concept can be baffling for those who didn’t learn how to read quickly at an early age.
And the physical limits aren’t the same as all people. 20/20 vision is the 50% average/typical vision at 20 feet, which means that 1/2 of the test group had BETTER than 20/20 vision. Flicker dectection (move/TV/computer frame rate) also deteriorates sharply with age.
In my 8th grade class there was a 12y/o kid reading at 800 wpm, and he wasn’t speed reading: that was his natural (tested) reading speed. He was tested only because everyone was tested: the school had a remdial reading program, and a lot of remedial reading students.
Cecil writes with attitude. Surely you’ve noticed that?
I’d like to see a cite for that. As I recall, the Evelyn Wood books ‘test’ your comprehension on passages that you would get a 90% or 95% on without having read the passage thoroughly. In fact, the passage that it asked you to read the ‘old fashioned’ way was harder.
I’ve never seen a good experiment that showed comprehension stayed the same (or especially, as many of those course claim, improved).