My reading comprehension has been above par since I was three or four, and yet my whole life I’ve been a notoriously slow reader. It makes me shy away from big novels, and spend more time than most doing reading assignments for a class. I don’t know, I’ve never independently verified it, but I THINK I’m a slow reader.
Ever since I bought a book on raising my IQ in the fifth grade, I’ve been trying to teach myself speed reading. The usual cycle is this: I study the methods for a day, astound myself at how fast I got through a book, and then become dumbfounded when my friend who read the same book talks to me about it, and I’m missing some wildly important details about the plot.
I haven’t seen the infomercials for Mega Memory or the speed-reading courses lately, but those also used to intrigue me. Is there a self-test for reading speed and comprehension that’s relatively reliable as an indicator? Do any of those commercial courses work? Have any of you drastically improved your reading speed?
I know fellow musician friends who have learned to sight read sheet music (a skill which continues to evade me), so in principle it seems possible to train yourself to absorb information faster. I’m curious what the experience of people doing this in literature has been. The boastful 25,000 WPM claimants on the Wikipedia page lead me to :dubious:, but I still think there must be something legit in there!
FWIW, I’ve taught “speed reading” to high schoolers for several years, and while the curriculum didn’t promise or produce crazy, book-in-an-hour results, it did really help some kids. Basically, what it boiled down to was a combination of reading by phrases (e.g. instead of having your eye hit each word individually, you would take in a group of words: “the wind blew / over the hills” instead of “the / wind / blew / over / the / hills”) and doing eye drills to get your physical eyeballs accustomed to moving across the page more quickly. My kids would spend 15 minutes a day reading a book at 1.5x-2x their normal speed (and 50%-70% comprehension rate, at least initially), dragging an index card down the page to “force” their eyes to move more quickly. Of course, if you’re subvocalizing or hearing each individual word in your head as you see it, those will slow you down as well. Good luck!
I read extremely fast, as some form of self-taught/innate speed-reading, and I read phrases rather than words as described above.
I would prefer to read more slowly, as I read too fast to digest all the details, making the experience less satisfying than for a “normal” reader. However, unless I try really hard I am soon back to reading at high speed, missing the nuances of the book… which is irritating, especially if I am enjoying what I read.
I would argue that speed reading puts you at a certain disadvantage with less than full comprehension of the material.
Addressing the original post - Reading is a complex set of several cognitive skills. Speed reading requires the cognitve process to be used in a different way. Congratulations in teaching yourself how to read fast. The Critical Question is Did you understand the material as you read it?**** If so, then comprehension is not the problem. But, as mentioned, days or weeks later you can’t remember. Actually, it’s not that you can’t remember, you can’t recall it. Memory and recall are separate cognitive processes, but are linked in what psychologists call “the memory chain” - comprehension-memory-recall. If you don’t actively "create " a memory of something you want to remember, your recall will be slower, or inconsistent. Having said that, an effective speed reading program should cover these topics with specific skill building exercises. And yes, such a course does exist.
With proper training, comprehension is not sacrificed, and most often improved. The problem for people who suffer loss of comprehension is the “training period” probably was not finished.
I can see how reading faster could, in certain circumstances, actually improve comprehension. I know that if I read too slowly—or, more likely, if someone’s talking or reading aloud too me and they’re going too slowly—my mind may wander and it becomes harder to follow what’s being said.
The ideal, I think, isn’t to be a speed reader but to be able to adjust your reading speed so that it’s appropriate to the material you’re reading: slow for poetry or mathematics or dense, finely-crafted prose, fast for newspapers or suspense thrillers.
I’m interested in any relation between the above task and linguistic reading. I’m a good sight-reader – I can’t read fly shit, as they say, but I can sight-read some fairly heavy stuff.
The key to reading well, I think any music teacher would say, is to recognize shapes of chords, and to not forgot the home key. Schoenberg, Webern, Rzewski, for example, are harder to read accurately than Haydn or Mozart, because of the linkage between chromaticism and atonality.
Are there analogous elements at work in linguistic comprehension?
antonio107, when it comes to the volumes of caselaw that you will have to read next fall, learn to quickly skim through to identify the parts that you need to read, and then slowly and carefully read those parts so that you can appreciate them fully.
You were trying to get us to do your homework for you? Go back to the books, worker bee!
Seriously, though, the pro tip for me in reading long books of dubious interest is to cheat – skip or skim paragraphs or even pages at a time. Even the great critic Roland Barthes admits to not having read every sentence of Proust.
Lol, I’m genuinely interested in learning speed reading, but in anticipation of my new degree this fall, I’m looking to workshop some skills over the summer.
I had to read Roland Barthes in grad school. Something on “phenomenology and the grain of the voice” or something like that. It read like a Chinese phonebook; good advice to skim paragraphs.
When I did my LSAT prep course, they told me to write a 3-4 word summary of each paragraph on the margin to the side, so that I could recall the information more quickly. It never really worked with cultural studies stuff so great, but I found I had a hard time doing it methodically, so that could be the problem.
Got any tips on sight reading music, Jaledin? I’m being groomed as the heir apparent organist at my church, and if I can’t sight a four part chorale, I haven’t got a chance in Hell, lol!
Yeah, the real trick to sight-reading music is pretty much as I explained briefly above. If you can virtually instantly grasp the harmonic progression, then 90% of your work is done, and you can focus on squinting at the individual blots of ink on the page. It’s basically shape recognition, at the initial step, and a combination of intuiting logical “matching” notes and quick assimilation of any outliers.
For four-part harmony, without doing a phenomenological analysis, I’d say I look at the outer two voices first, then nearly immediately afterwards either deduce from the basis of my knowledge of idiom and the harmonic outline of the piece the inner voices, or very quickly (after having eye-checked that things “aren’t what I would have written”) grab the inner voices.
For this, you need to be very clear on what tonality the section of the piece to be read is in. that, plus an eagle eye for any accidentals, and you’re in like Quinn.
Good luck with the organ – I play Hammond a bit myself, but not enough to be called a real organist by any stretch of the imagination.
antonio107, when you are reading introductory texts (e.g. Irwin’s “Essentials of Canadian Law” series), get in the habit of looking up the cases to which they refer (you will find CANLII very useful), and reading those cases. By practising this over the summer, you will develop your skill at quickly finding the ratios of whatever cases that you must read in the fall, rather than being slowed down looking for needles in haystacks.
Depends what you mean by “speed reading”. When we read, the eye doesn’t move smoothly across the page. Instead it moves quickly between spots where it pauses and takes in information around the focal point. When children are first learning to read, the eye often has to stop multiple times per word. As their word recognition ability increases, it stops once per word, and finally only a few times per line of text. However, many adults never reach this point and still read like an 8 year old (then they come here and make claims that poor spellers just need to read more, without realizing that competent readers long ago stopped seeing letters when they read.) Some people call reading without sub-vocalization where the eye takes in multiple words at a time “speed reading”, but I would just call that normal adult reading. Getting oneself up to this basic level of competency is certainly a valuable skill. As for 25 kWPM, that very well may be hornswoggling, but I don’t have much experience in that area.
If anyone is curious about learning how your eyes move while you read, find someone who can monitor your eyes using an Eye Movement Recorder. It will quickly show how often your eyes stop per line of text and whether or not they are teaming properly. This can be particularly revealing for children with reading problems, since most schools and optometri/ophthalmologists tend to be ridiculously incompetent when it comes to looking into and resolving many eye issues that interfere with reading competency.
To Philliam - Most novels are quite easy to read “visually,” that is, your mind and imagination are crusing through the book like watching a movie. No, the dialogue doesn’t sound like the chipmunks (unless you put that voice in!) As a matter of fact, with good dialogue, slowing down to “hear it” can add to the enjoyment! However, it does take some training to get your mind to the point of reading visually.
To Ruken: I’m not sure where you got that tidbit about poor spellers. As a life-long educator, I would argue against “reading more” as a a method to improve spelling. On the other hand, your description of taking several words per fixation is nearly correct.
For all - it’s not a matter of how fast your eyes get through material, it’s a matter of how fast your brain can process the material that in reality constitutes reading speed.
