Is there a tried-and-true method to learn speed reading?

[Enright3]

@Sigmagirl

My father took a mail-order speed-reading course when he was young. He said they told him to move his eyes faster. That is not a joke. He also said it worked.

OK, Be honest; Who tried this while reading the rest of this thread?

I’m no slouch when it comes to reading; but I did just now try this and certainly went faster and just as importantly was able to pick up the gist of the rest of the posts in this thread. However, I don’t know how effective it would be for heavy reading material.

[silenus]

I read faster than just about anybody I know, and it’s because that’s how I learned to read in school. I grew up reading fast. It gets expensive when you can burn through a novel in an evening.

[adhay]

When I was 30, I took the Evelyn Woods course. I stayed with it 3 of the prescribed 10 weeks and doubled my speed to about 500 wpm and greatly increased my comprehension. That was enough for my purposes.

What it did for me was teach me to focus. Previously, I’d find myself having to reread whole paragraphs that I’d somehow “read” while attending to idle thoughts. What a drag. It would be fair to say that I dropped out of college because I’d never really learned to read.

These days, the library is my best friend.

[Paul_in_Qatar]

Have you looked at the on-line software SPreeder? You can load any text you want onto the free online version and have a go. They also have a blog and for-sale standalone version.

[Gary_Robson]

@guizot

N.B.: The purpose of several of those references above was to distinguish between dubious commercial “speed reading” methods and simple rapid reading.

[moderating]
The way you spread those out made the thread a pain in the butt to scan. I’ve removed the majority of the space you put between the words.
[/moderating]

[mhendo]

@SanVito

My mother speed reads. She can’t stop herself and sometimes wishes she could. I doubt she learned a method for this but rather just picked up the habit through excessive novel reading in her youth. She can literally pick up a new book in the evening and finish it before she goes to bed. When I asked how she did it, she explained that she only reads/skims through the middle two inches of the page, entirely skipping the edges.

The disadvantages of this is that, firstly, it gives her headaches, but most importantly she frequently misses crucial plot developments or character names, which can make a story rather confusing.

But can that really be called speed reading, in any comprehensible sense of the term?

I mean, i could probably use the same technique to read E.P. Thompson’s Making of the English Working Class or Perry Miller’s New England Mind, but if the technique causes me to miss important parts of these authors’ fairly complex historical arguments (the equivalent of plot developments and character names), then it is effectively useless.

The usefulness of skimming or focusing on particular sections of a text can be useful or not, depending on what you need to get out of the book. In my first couple of years of grad school, we had to get through a couple of hundred pretty hefty books in order to pass our comprehensive exams. And writing a dissertation requires reading many more.

With some books i read, i only need to get the big-picture argument, the main contributions made by the author. In those cases, reading the Introduction, the Conclusion, and some key sections of each chapter can be very useful; the details and examples can be skimmed over. But in history the details often matter, and there are books where i have to be very careful to read everything closely, because sometimes the particular information i’m looking for is not something that is part of the author’s central focus.

[guizot]

@Gary "Wombat" Robson

@guizot

N.B.: The purpose of several of those references above was to distinguish between dubious commercial “speed reading” methods and simple rapid reading.

[moderating]
The way you spread those out made the thread a pain in the butt to scan…

My apologies. However, it kind of makes the point. That “pain in the butt” becomes a pain in the cognitive processing areas of the brain when one reads too slowly.

What skilled readers tend to do while reading is apply “schema”–mental frameworks they draw upon from their familiarity with texts. They slow their scanning rate only when it’s actually fruitful, such as when they come across important (or necessary) details. (The schema inform good readers, and guide them to evaluate what information requires a slower scanning rate, and what information can be “indexed” for re-reading, if necessary, which is what Stranger has described above.)

**OpalCat’**s friend will presumably assemble more and more schema specific to the field of his or her graduate studies, as he or she progresses with the program.

@Stranger on a Train

…do I need to know the calibration history on your Deocyclophenomenegazzer is if the data is all consistent with predictions?

Only if you go back to actually use the data for one or another purpose. Note, however, that even before your eye gets to that part of the passage, you have made “predictions”–these are part of your reading “schema.”

[guizot]

@guizot

… apply “schema”…

Make that “schemata.”

[Testy]

Just an anecdote but I was trained to speed read using a machine that did much the same as the “Spreeder” site referenced above. The machine was attached to a slide projector and projected individual words much like the Spreeder site. Then we’d take a comprehension test and if we passed it we’d speed the thing up a bit for the next slide. The machine would also gradually increase the number of words displayed. Eventually we worked our way up to a line-at-a-time with decent comprehension. It seemed to work although I have always loved reading and read reasonably quickly so that might have something to do with it.

As an OBTW, this was back in 1972 when dinosaurs ruled the land.

Regards

Testy