I read really slowly, at least for what I would like to read at. I read a lot, and I would like to be able to read more quickly than I do. I have heard there are many methods for speed reading and even methods to achieve 100% retention of what has been read. If I could learn these skills my life would be far easier. Does anyone have any suggestions?
Speed reading was not easy for me. I learned to read much faster, but I retain hardly any of what I read. That is to say, I actually can recognize each word and phrase, and I understand what it means, but I feel like I forget each sentence as soon as I’m done reading it. So it didn’t really work out for me. Still, I read a little faster now than I did before. Take a little course on it or something, what do you want me to tell you? Poorly phrased questions beg poorly phrased answers.
Speed Reading is, unfortunately, a subject prone to much mis-information and dis-information, often supplied by… guess?.. people who want to sell you a book or a course on speed reading.
Here’s the genuine info. Let’s start with some background theory.
When you were in school and being taught how to read, you started slowly and learned to identify letters, and then learned how to ‘chunk’ these recognised letter shapes into words and their corresponding sounds. For many people, that’s where their learning of ‘how to read’ stops. They still read ‘word by word’, even though they learn (as adults) to do it faster than they did as a child.
Also, be aware that when you read a line of text, your eye is NOT making a continuous sweep along the line and down the page (even though you might think so). Your eyes are actually making several rapid stops across the line. It’s like this: shift to new position / take in data / shift to new position / take in data… and so on, repeat for as long as you keep reading. See ‘saccadic eye movement’ if you want to learn more.
To read more quickly, here’s what you do. You practise making just two or three stops along each line of text, rather than many stops. In other words, you make your saccadic eye movement much more efficient. This means you stop taking in a line of text a word at a time, and instead start processing the data in larger chunks, taking in two, three or even four words at a time. You’ll find you can do this with a little practise.
The more you practise, the better you will get (within certain practical limits). When you reach the level of only stopping twice per line, taking in ‘half a line’ with each saccadic eye movement, you will be reading considerably faster than you do now. You will also be processing the textual information more quickly in your head (different people have different aptitudes for this).
The next stage is to read using even fewer saccadic eye movements, thus processing larger individual ‘chunks’ of text. Consider two consecutive lines of text. Consider two points: a point roughly one third the way along the first line, and a point roughly two thirds the way along the second line. You can train yourself to look at just these two points and ‘take in’ all of the text in those two lines. This is harder, and more advanced, but most people can do it. If you tackle an entire page this way, you will be making a sort of ‘zig-zag’ pattern down the page with your eyes, scanning lines in pairs.
And that’s all there is to it. You use fewer saccadic eye movements, and your mind processes the text in larger chunks.
Now, there are two related factors to consider: retention and pleasure.
With regard to ‘retention’, those who have books and courses to ‘hype’ will boast that they can teach you not just how to read faster, but also to retain significant information along the way. The problem is that it’s really hard to measure successful retention in any sort of meaningful way, and so the teachers can quote almost any statistic they want and it’s hard to challenge them. If you ask to see independent and objective empirical data to back up their claims with regard to meaningful retention, they will most probably become shy on the subject, or snow blind you with dud references, or claim they can’t share the data because it’s commercially sensitive, or switch the pitch and say ‘You’ll know it works when you try it for yourself’. In other words, they will cop out. If you don’t believe me, try it sometime!
The best comment on this comes from Woody Allen: “I took a speed reading course. I read ‘War and Peace’ in a weekend. It’s about some Russians”.
So, while you can teach yourself to process textual information more quickly, whether you will retain much of what you read comes down to practise, proficiency, natural aptitude and other factors, such as the type of material you are tackling. I’ve found that if I’m reading dense, factual information that I actually need to know about and understand, eg reading a textbook for an examination, the ‘speed reading’ approach creates more problems than it solves. Slow and sure is the better way.
For fiction and reading for pleasure, I find I can read quickly and ‘filter out’ a lot of the stuff I don’t really need to retain in order to follow the story. This is useful if I am reading something not necessarily for the pleasure of the style or the prose, but because I want to know ‘what happens next’.
This brings me neatly on to the point I mentioned earlier: the pleasure of reading. In my experience, speed reading never enhances the pleasure of reading, and usually detracts from it. You don’t hurry a good meal, or a good sunset, or good sex. You don’t hurry good prose either. When you run past the scenery, you miss an awful lot of the beauty.
I’ve wondered about speed reading myself. What a great informative response ianzin!
I’ve tried to check out speed reading books from several different libraries. Oddly, every time I tried, the books turned out to be checked out and presumed missing. I’m sure there’s something ironic in that, but can’t quite put my finger on what.
ianzin Thank you very much. At some point I was reading some critiques of modern education. One of the things I heard critiqued was the method of teaching people to recognize characters by shape. You touched on this. I heard it attributed to Dewey of Dewey decimal fame. What do you know about this method of teaching to read?
Yllaria They were probably slow readers.
Most people subvocalize what they are reading, which means that they don’t read at a pace faster than they can subvocalize. The “cure” for this is to speed up your reading by using your finger to pace your eye. When you get past a certain speed, you can no longer subvocalize and you just stop.
We were also taught that you did not need to see the words in the order in which they were written. I got to the point where I could read two lines left to right and the third line right to left. The idea behind this is that your mind will put all the words in the order necessary to understand them.
In my experience this worked and you retained more simply because you had to concentrate more. It requires constant practice, however, and I let it slip away fairly quickly. When I need to read a lot of technical material I will use my finger to pace myself, but I no longer truly “speed read”.
Just how fast can you run by the scenery, ianzin?
FYI: One of the contestants from the annual Nathan’s Hot Dog competition has opened a Speed Eating school in Flushing, NY.
I wish someone had told me sooner about the part about sex. I just wasted 19.95 for an online course on speed sex. It turns out I didn’t need the class, my girlfriend did.
Live and lean.
Nothing.
Let’s hope Lynne_42 passes by this thread. She’s an education expert and can probably shed some light.
Or, failing that, we can read Cecil’s (brief) column on the subject.
I appreciate your faith in my educational expertise, ianzin, but it doesn’t cover reading! My expertise is in differentiating the curriculum for gifted students.
As for mswas’ question about shape recognition, I am not quite sure what he/she means. The only way you can recognise a letter is by its shape. You are probably referring to Dewey’s ‘learning-by-doing’ theories which became very popular for a while. That led to some very tactile methods for learning letters.
Educational theory is very much about differentiation these days. That means you teach different methods within a single classroom to allow for the different learning styles of the students. Much easier to say than do! Some students are highly tactile and for them tactile shape recognition would be an advanatge. Others will be highly logical-sequential, and these students may be better off using different techniques. Others will be in the middle. Good teachers will use a blend of a number of methods.
Bascially, a single method of teaching a given concept can never be optimum for all students.
Lynne
I was introduced to speed reading when I was in high school back in the '70s using a tachiscope, or tachioscope. I’m not sure which term is correct.
The machine was like an old-fashioned slide projector. A slide with a couple of paragraphs of text would be projected on the screen and then a mask would be applied where only two or three words would be visible. The mask would jump along the line of text, displaying two words at a time until the whole paragraph had been displayed. Then we’d take a test on comprehension of the material.
The next step would be to display three words, and so on. The machine would gradually increase the size of the aperture so that more words would be displayed as well as gradually increasing the speed at which the mask moved. Pretty quickly, IIRC about a month, the machine would display an entire line at a time. Eventually, the machine displayed an entire paragraph at once, but only very briefly.
By the end of the course where the machine was very briefly displaying whole paragraphs, we were really reading the paragraph retroactively in that you had to close your eyes and think about what you saw.
The technique actually worked in that the students read much faster and remembered (at least for a few minutes) what they’d learned. In all truth though, I have to agree with ianzin that speed reading for enjoyment is fine but dense, factual material that you’ll need to use is better read slowly and carefully.
Regards
Testy
Speed-reading seems intuitively possible to people because the speed at which we read seems to us to be limited by the “voice” in our heads that “reads out” the words. And, logically, there is no reason why that inner voice should be tied to our speed of comprehension.
In practice, I suspect it is though, and our spoken languages are as much limited by the speed at which information can be understood, as much as they are by limitations of our mouths and vocal cords, or limitations of data compression.
An anecdotal observation and a hypothetical to support my view:
Observation: When reading a technical document, I often have to read more slowly to fully understand. Indeed I would argue that knowing when to slow down when reading is a valuable skill. This implies though, that when I’m reading normally I’m actually processing information at close to my limit of comprehension (because as soon as I’m out of my “comfort zone” I have to slow down).
Hypothetical: Imagine reading a document, let’s say it’s a short story (and therefore doesn’t require you to learn a new abstract concept). The document is full of spelling and grammatical errors.
Now, when I read any document that’s full of errors I’m considerably slowed down because it requires some conscious thought to realise that there is an error and synthesise the correct word(s). To me, it’s intuitively obvious that I could never speed read a document full of errors – the only way would be to speed up my conscious thoughts themselves.
But what about documents that don’t contain errors? I would suggest that, in a sense, all documents are full of errors; English is ambiguous, for instance, and so you might interpret a group of words in one way, and then change your interpretation later. It might smack of an “argument from lack of imagination” but I can’t imagine being able to do this sort of conscious processing much faster than I do now.
I do a lot of reading for research when writing books. I find the speed reading techniques I learnt at a speed reading course decades ago very useful for scanning lots of material to find what I want. It lets me go faster than the voice Mijin is referring to. I then slow down to normal pace (in my case, pretty slow) to comprehend what I have found. That will mean some retension, but given I have a lousy memory, I really need to write things to get them to stick in my head. I guess we vary. My retension rate from reading at any pace is fairly low. If I write and make logical connections, then the retension rate goes way up.
Could I get a cite for that? Or were you referring more to motor theory as a framework for speech perception?
(bolding mine)
When I was in 10th grade, my school offered a class on “study techniques.” Everybody who got signed up was a good student with never-satisfied parents. About half of the work was dedicated to reading faster without losing comprehension - if you haven’t done it right, you haven’t done it. In the first day, I tested at 400wpm, which was the goal of the course; the Dope is too wide for me to do this, but on a normal novel or on the samples we worked with I was actually reading one line at a time.
The highest I tested during that course was 6000wmp, but the text was something I found interesting; if I hadn’t read that exact same text a few years before, it had been one very much like it. On the next one, I tested at 200wpm and there were values as low as 60wpm (less than speaking speed). When the dismayed teacher asked whether we could come up with a reason for this, it was unanymous: “I would never have read that thing voluntarily, actually had to stop and reread several times. I don’t like the subject, the vocabulary is very complicated, some words are used with an obscure meaning rather than their normal meaning.” None of us was very fond of XIX century German philosophers, I’m afraid.
I don’t read that fast any more, partly because I don’t read as much as I used to and partly because a lot of what I read is in formats that aren’t very conductive to reading fast.
Omi no Kami, I’m not very clear on the “most people” and wouldn’t recomend leading with a finger to read faster, but what I do know is that people who move their lips when reading (or even whisper the text loud enough to be heard in a library) can never go beyond talking speed. Someone who doesn’t, certainly can.
I have no cite, I was merely repeating what they told me. As to whether most people subvocalize, I have no idea. I certainly do. When learning to read I was often encoraged to “sound out” the words and was asked to read out loud in front of the class. In my early years reading pretty much meant reading out loud. I suspect that would be familiar to a lot of people, but I am just generalizing from my own experience.
I do, however, manage to avoid moving my lips or reading out loud.
It’s my understanding that speed reading was really developed for businesspeople who needed to skim through piles of reports quickly. It’s meant for information that you’re already pretty familiar with. It’s not that hard to speed read through material you already know about, but as the unfamiliarity of the text goes up, reading slows down. It’s not meant for pleasure reading or reading of things like Plato’s Symposium.