I just saw an ad for another speed reading coarse and I’m wondering how they work.
All the exorbitant claims and all how can you train yourself to recognize words faster?
Isn’t there a greater danger of misunderstanding what the writer has to say if you speed read?
Cecil addressed this question: Does speed reading training actually work? (There is also a variant text of that column here. My faith in the inerrancy of the Word of Cecil is shaken, but I’m sure if we tried hard enough we could reconcile the two somehow.)
There’s the key problem with “speed” reading, right there: “Recognizing” words.
Part of the SR training is to learn a word by what it LOOKS like, not by actually reading it per se.
And, speaking as one who has a terribly low tolerance for those who willfully keep themselves ignorant by not reading anything more than the editorials and comics in a newspaper, I’m of a mind that “speed” reading unnescessarily handicaps a reader.
I once met an older lady who had been raised, not to “sound out” and then “read” a word, but to simply recognize the word as a whole. She was in her mid-forties, and had significant difficulty with simple day-to-day reading (such as a newspaper, or written documents where we worked for a time.)
She was constantly encountering words she had never learned to “recognize”, and had no fallback training to “sound it out”. She’d try to get the “feel” of a sentence from the words she did recognize, but she constantly misinterpreted entire paragraphs because of it.
I mean, terms like “innage” and “ullage” are obscure enough, toss in words like “bunkers” when referring to a ship’s fuel, and then mix in short tons, long tons, metric tons and occasionally spell it tonnes for good measure, and you can see where one might have a problem.
Whoever taught her that crap should have been shot.
Here’s a good way to address this question: I’ve seen countless books on speed reading on peoples shelves. So-called courses are advertised all over. I’ve never known, or even met, a single person who could “speed read” in my life. Has anyone else?
I can finish a novel of average length (let’s say 200-300 pages) in about four hours if I have no distractions. However, this is an innate skill and is not something I have ever been taught.
One thing I have heard about speed reading classes that I know to be personally true about my own reading skills is that they teach you to read by analyzing whole groups of words at once, rather than picking your way word by word across the page. So that the first sentence of this post, for example, gets read as “I can finish”, “a novel of average length”, “in about four hours”, “if I have no distractions.” Rather than “I”, “can”, “finish”, etc.
I have no idea how you would actually teach someone to change their reading habits in this way, though, because as I said, this is something I have never had to be taught.
I have seen (but not used - yet) a computer program designed to increase one’s reading speed. The way it works is by flashing short groups of words on the screen sequentially. Essentially forcing the reader to recognise whole words and phrases at the speed that the program is set to.
This is similar to the way I find myself reading, though if I try to go too fast on a printed page I end up losing which line I’m on.
I actually took the Evelyn Wood’s SR course at home, from info sent me I guess - I don’t remember. It was way back when the idea first came out. The fundamental concept that she urges is that people, even if they don’t lip the words, mentally lip them. You see “read” on the page and your mind says “read.” Her idea is to wean you away from mentally lipping the words. As posted, you start out with groups of words, progress to a paragraph, and eventually a whole page. You are supposed to see all the words in the group (line, paragraph) at one time and without mentally reiterating the words to youself, grasp what they mean.
I never put much effort or time into it. I don’t remember how I came acros it. I suppose the concept has some merit if you are able to know what words mean without mentally saying them to yourself. I really don’t know if that’s possible. Unfortunately now, I find myself speed reading occasionally and missing important points.
Not that this answers the OP, but I think there was a Woody Allen quote where he said something like: “I took a speed reading course and then read ‘War and Peace’–it involves Russia”.
In my high school days, I ran across a similar program. It was horribly misleading about reading speed. If I’m reading light material for entertainment (the bulk of my reading), then I generally maintain a speed around 200 wpm. “Flash reading”–the kind involved in the program, or in reading street signs, is very different. I hit the limit on the program at 10,000 wpm. The problem is, reading speed is not linear; the wpm value is generally defined as the number of 5-letter words one can read in a minute. Obviously, I could never read 10,000 5-letter words in one minute–I could, however, read one 5-letter word in 6 milliseconds (1/10,000 of a minute), or two in 12 msecs. More than two words and the rate started dropping off.
The techniques advocated by the courses I’ve seen will inevitably cause you to misinterpret passages. You won’t necessarily scramble everything, but you will lose important subtleties quite often–consider how much meaning can change with the alteration of one easily-overlooked conjunction or preposition. If you want to learn to read faster, my advice would be to practice. Don’t bother with a “speed reading” course; don’t strain your eyes on a flash-reading program. Just read–you’ll gradually develop your own tailor-made approach to the matter, and you’ll have more fun doing it.
I’d better get off this soapbox. If I’m still on it when the mods shove this off to IMHO, I’ll probably fall. (I promise I addressed the GQ in there somewhere, guys.)
If you mean the course that is currently running late-night infomertials, They call it “photo-reading”. I recently bought the course (a cool $200) with the intention of copying the tapes and returning it(there is a trial period), but I did the tapes, and it worked, so I decided it was worth the money.
This particular course actualy discourages you from working at it.
It’s different from the speed reading you’ve heard about, in that you don’t read one word at a time, but rather take a mental “picture” of the page and prosess it later.
I have no cite, but my personal experence is that, yes, this particular system does work, and no, there is not a loss of understanding (this course stressed recall more than the “photo-reading” techneque itself), infact I’d say I remember more of what I read now than I did before I took the course.
–or maybe all those tapes really did was hypnotise me into a drone to promote their product…
I took a speedreading course and it worked well for some things. I hate reading with a passion BTW, so getting it over with quickly is important to me.
I end up somewhere between ‘skimming’ comprehension and memorization. For example, reading a typical press release or newspaper article, I can blow through about 4-5 pages a minute and have an 80%-90% idea of what’s going on. It works for dull message board threads :o and news stories too. Anything that is ‘dense reading material’ I read at normal speed.
That’s about how fast I read, and that rate hasn’t improved since early grade school. I can make myself read faster, but I miss stuff.
Sometimes I wish I read slower, especially when I buy a few books and have them finished before the day is over.
Evelyn Wood’s SR was not reading one word at a time. As I noted, she stated that people draw mental images of words when they read and then process that mental image into a meaning. Her idea was to eliminate a step: the mental image. The student would learn to see a whole line at a time, then several lines, then a paragraph, then several paragraphs, then a whole page.
She further maintained that your brain would not see the words in the order that they appear. For example, the previous sentence may appear as: “She maintained further brain your would see not in the order word that they appear.” Her position was that it did not matter as your brain would understand the meaning altho the words were not in order.
It’s my 1st post here, but as I’ve had experience of this first hand I thought I’d reply,
A few years a go (when I was 16) a zany Doc (Eccentric Englishman) came in to our school and showed us several revision techniques, a lot of his stuff was very rudimentary but it introduced me to speed reading. My Normal speed, sounding the words as I read, is fairly high anyway (sorry no figures) but speed reading, taking a sentence/group at a time increased this with only a slight decrease in being able to recall details.
I find this type of reading useful for some styles of fiction, you become much more immersed in the book and it feels like you are actually there where the action is. I use this technique rarely however, preferring to read the words the author has written as well as taking part in the story.
Regarding on fictions works (press releases) his claims were large (again no figures sorry) but based on my experience I would say obtainable.