I have an annoying habit–I “say” the words in my mind as I read them. I don’t always do this, though. For example, when I see a stop sign, I never say the word “Stop.” However, when I’m reading a book, I tend to fall into this habit. How can I break myself of it?
Give the spoken words in your head a voice. Say, Fran Drescher or Yeardly Smith. Apply it generously whenever you encounter a narrative indicating that a character is laughing. This ought to clear up that problem right quick.
But seriously, I do the same thing. It doesn’t actually bother me. In its own way it gives the text some body – a sense of character that adds some depth and warmth to the narrative. But maybe I’m weird.
That’s how I read. Never knew it was abnormal. Since I read this post I’ve been trying to read without a “voice.” and it’s not working well.
That is a big part of speed reading. You practice going really fast, then you realize that you can read words without saying them in your head
If you’re reading for pleasure, sometimes you have to say the words to yourself, especially if it’s a piece of funny dialog. I’m thinking of a George Saunders story that I love, that appeared a couple of years ago in the New Yorker.
There’s no way you can appreciate this fully without saying the words to yourself.
That’s actually the way most literate people read. Like archmichael said, it’s not the most efficient, since it pretty much forces you to read at the speed at which you can speak. Normal speaking speed for Spaniards is 70wpm, the figures below are those given to us by the teacher. Those figures are modified for comprehension: looking at one page for a second and being unable to explain what it said “doesn’t count”.
From a speedreading course that was bestowed upon me by the Parental Units and which I didn’t need at all:
- people who follow words with their finger read the slowest, less than 40 words per minute. They often have some sort of disability (which may range from dyslexia to read-o-phobia, which I’m sure has a technical name but I don’t know it).
- people who mouth the words read a tad faster and usually have good comprehension. About 60 wpm.
- people who think the words one by one read a bit faster than they speak and have good comprehension. About 80wpm.
- people who read line by line take an enormous leap ahead, with good comprehension. They often have better comprehension than the mouthers. 400-450wpm. This is where I was before I took the course.
The most I’ve been clocked in was 6000wpm. But the text was interesting to me, well written and I really think I must have read the article from which it was extracted: for most people, a reread is faster than a first read.
Some of the things we did in that course:
- make sure that the text is of a size and at a distance at which you can see the whole line without moving your eyes. Draw a line down the center of the page. You must look at the line, not at the words.
- some exercises were done using a pencil (or an opaque rules) under the textline we were reading, sort of like when we were kids and followed words with our finger… only this time, you’re marking the whole line, not each word.
- later, no ruler but still your eyes have to follow the line in the middle of the page - no wandering to the sides!
Most of the people in the class went from speeds of 70-100wpm to 400-450wpm.
Text that occupies the whole page (no columns) and which is aligned on both margins is much easier to read this way. The documentation for the project I’m working on now has everything in tables and the combination of “no alignment on the right, sometimes with lines that are very short but not the end of a paragraph” and “text between two vertical lines” reeeeeeeeally slows me down. Evidently not the design of a speedreader 
Most people do not realise they do this until they start a speed reading course and are taught how to stop doing it. Why would you think it is a bad habit?
I do this, and it only bothers me when I am encountering words that I can’t seem to settle on a pronounciation mentally. I then generally have to point to the word and get my husband to give me a pronunciation, and that generally works to get my brain to accept it.
One stupid example of me mentally mispronouncing a word is from Robin Hobb’s “Assassin” trilogy. She kept referring to the “Outislanders.” I kept mentally hearing outis-landers, instead of out-islanders. In the third book, it changed to “OutIslanders,” which I didn’t have any problem hearing correctly.
I’ve taken a speed-reading class and I can do it, but it feels unnatural and it takes the pleasure out of reading. If I had a job that required me to read large volumes of material, perhaps I’d train myself to stick with the speed reading method, but since I read mostly for pleasure and entertainment during my free time, it’s much more fun to coast along at 70-80 wpm and hear the words in my head.
Kind of like savoring a chocolate bar instead of gobbling it down in two bites.
Different kinds of things are best read at different speeds. Hearing the words in your head as you read does indeed slow you down, but that can be a good thing or a bad thing, depending on what you’re reading and whether the langauge is the kind of thing worth savoring. You pretty much have to read this way (hearing the words in your head) to appreciate poetry, for example, but I’d hate to read a newspaper or a Dan Brown novel that slowly and carefully.
So how can I read without saying the words in my mind?
Why do you want to? I guess that’s the part I don’t understand - do you dislike
the “narrator voice” in your head?
I don’t know if this will work, Benighted, but it’s worth trying.
People who habitually actually form the words with their lips as they read silently find that putting a pencil in their mouths sometimes puts a stop to that problem. Try it to see if it serves as a subconscious reminder to “keep moving” even though lip movement is not your problem.
I suppose you could try some speed reading techniques, like humming or reading backwards.
Yes, the “narrator voice” is distracting, particularly when I have to read for a long period of time.
In my youth, I read rapidly and voraciously. But for the past twenty years or so, I have been deliberately reading poetry and fiction very slowly in order to hear the author speaking directly to me and because I find words tasty and sensuous. I re-read constantly to enhance this effect. I don’t so much read poems or novels, as listen to them. My progress with both is more like a spiral than a straight line. If the author’s voice is actually known to me, then I hear a pretty good approximation in my head. I can’t read Anaïs Nin, for example, without hearing “r” pronounced like “w.”
When I was a teenager, my mind translated actual speech into written words. As you spoke, my mind was busily punctuating and paragraphing your sentences. I also remembered people and places not as mental snapshots but as drawings. I’m glad that I outgrew that irritating faculty, but the ability to hear written words is a gift. I really don’t understand why you find it distracting. What’s the hurry? Are you reading under a deadline? If not, words are succulent morsels to be savored.
Great. Now if I read Anais Nin I’m going to be hearing Elmer Fudd.
It could be worse. You could get ‘Rebel Rebel’ stuck in your head.
Sung by Fudd.
I wish I could be more helpful but it seems as if what you see as a bug, others see as a feature! Maybe the speed-reading idea would be helpful.
I wonder if you dislike audiobooks also? I love them for painting or driving, but they do seem to strengthen the “narrator voice” and in fact sometimes change the identity of the narrator. Frank Weller does a marvelous job reading The Green Mile, for instance, so if I read the book itself I now hear his voice - much as you can hear a familiar song in your head when you read the lyrics. I enjoy reading for pleasure in the context of having a story told to me, so the ‘voice’ is an expected part of that. Some writers I cannot develop a voice for, and it makes it hard for me to get through their writing (I’m lookin at you, James Ellroy)