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Like a lot of people, I'm drowning in words. It's no wonder then that speed reading—reading at an increased speed with no loss of comprehension—is an increasingly popular recourse for both the GTD (Get Things Done) crowd and anyone who worships at the altar of productivity. Who wouldn't want to breeze through their reading list at 2,500+ words per minute and devour Johnny Five levels of input?
That's more or less the promise that Evelyn Wood's Reading Dynamics, Tim Ferriss' PX Project, software called Spritz, and countless other speed-reading techniques make to overwhelmed readers. Some involve suppressing your inner speech while reading. Others teach you to "chunk," or take in multiple lines of text in a single glance. Still others eliminate the need to move your eyes at all. Unfortunately, decades worth of psychological research and more recent insights into the visual processing system seem to confirm only one thing: Doing things quicker means doing them less accurately. Can you learn to read faster? Absolutely. But you won't understand what you've read nearly as well ... if at all.
Much would seem to depend on the material you're trying to read and comprehend.
(Score: 3, Funny) by zocalo on Wednesday September 09 2015, @07:28PM
Woody Allen
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
(Score: 4, Funny) by JeanCroix on Wednesday September 09 2015, @07:35PM
(Score: 5, Funny) by zocalo on Wednesday September 09 2015, @07:50PM
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
(Score: 2) by JeanCroix on Thursday September 10 2015, @01:53AM
(Score: 2) by zocalo on Thursday September 10 2015, @06:22AM
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
(Score: 2) by DeathMonkey on Thursday September 10 2015, @06:02PM
Maybe I speed read the article?
I think you S-RTFAcronym too!
(Score: 1) by captain_nifty on Wednesday September 09 2015, @07:44PM
That's not bad it took me a couple chapters into war and peace to figure out they were in Russia at all, they were at some fancy party speaking French or something, God that was a long book!
It was a great sleep aid, I couldn't read more than a few pages before getting drowsy.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Wednesday September 09 2015, @08:40PM
You sure, that sounds like Dostoevsky's The Idiot, I couldn't make it thru that book.
I think those wordy Russians wrote their novels as a practical joke to F with people. When you're 400 pages in and its still basically the introduction... As an art form or presentation I couldn't stand the main character and got too exasperated with him to finish the book, which may have been a desired performance art result all its own, in that way maybe the book is a success? Maybe he was less obnoxious by page 1000 or so, but I just couldn't slog any further.
Yeah yeah I know the back story that those books were basically the semi-eternal soap opera of their day, and they're famous mostly for not totally sucking despite their horrific length, kinda like my SN posts, but it still doesn't make the reading experience any more enjoyable.
(Score: 2) by CRCulver on Wednesday September 09 2015, @09:57PM
(Score: 3, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 09 2015, @07:54PM
Who cares?!? APPLE HAS MADE THE IPAD LARGER AND IT WILL HAVE A STYLUS!!!
INNO-FUCKING-VATION!!!!!
(Score: 3, Funny) by isostatic on Wednesday September 09 2015, @09:41PM
I'm waiting for the ipad with wings
(Score: 2) by kurenai.tsubasa on Wednesday September 09 2015, @10:50PM
Will this new iPad be for cows or just apping app appers??? What about apps that go moo??? Inquiring minds want to know!
(Score: 2) by Tork on Thursday September 10 2015, @02:17AM
🏳️🌈 Proud Ally 🏳️🌈
(Score: 5, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 09 2015, @07:29PM
tl;dr
(Score: 5, Interesting) by captain_nifty on Wednesday September 09 2015, @07:41PM
I have been a constant reader, and have a few times read books on speed reading methods and tested reading speeds to measure the effectiveness of techniques.
Short answer is Yes it is possible to improve reading speed while retaining comprehension.
The biggest factor is however not fancy techniques, it is practice, if you read more difficult materials more often you will read faster. However again as the saying goes practicing wrong doesn't cause improvement.
Several methods do improve speed, suppressing an inner voice works very well. Based on how reading is taught relying on auditory phonic sounds the letters make, this slows reading speed significantly forcing your brain to double process through the visual and auditory centers to comprehend meaning, this is very difficult to unlearn. Eye movement techniques can increase speed too; don't backtrack, word chunking to move at a faster pace, moving vertically down the page rather than horizontally across each line, etc. They can all improve reading speed.
For me doing and practicing all of these things allowed me to jump from my normal reading speed of ~350 wpm to around 1,000-2,000 wpm with little loss in comprehension (based on reading tests), but this required intense concentration and made reading a lot less enjoyable. Also I tend to read to stimulate thought and will often have ideas formed from the material read and head off on thought experiments further slowing the reading process. So it all depends on why you are reading something, you can read faster and retain knowledge, but at the expense of processing or understanding the information while you're reading.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Common Joe on Wednesday September 09 2015, @08:19PM
That may work for some people, but won't work for all. Some learn better by hearing so that little voice in the head becomes critical. It would be like saying, "Well, we've been writing everything down as music notes to communicate what we want, but today we're going to start writing math equations instead." Some people will just never be able to make that jump. For me, learning a second language in a foreign country has certainly changed the way I learn and think, but most people will always run rings around me no matter how hard I try. I don't possess the talent that a lot of other people do.
I like the following quote:
"Everybody is a genius, but if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid." -- Attributed to Albert Einstein
I'm not saying you're wrong. I'm just saying it won't work for everyone.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 09 2015, @08:31PM
I agree with you. I am a total auditory learner, I thrive in lectures and from watching videos. If I had to read, I have to speak the words out otherwise I retain exactly zip.
(Score: 2, Informative) by captain_nifty on Wednesday September 09 2015, @08:40PM
I agree it won't work for everyone and is very hard to do if you were taught to read using the phonic method, as most people are.
Honestly I found it a very un-natural reading method and only managed it for a short time, before reverting back to my normal inner voice.
My point was that if you can do it, the method will make your reading speed much faster.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 09 2015, @08:49PM
I always thought it was much easier to recognize words by form and not by the transcribed phonetic content. That is how I initially learned to read and it was a year or two later that I had a Phonics curriculum in school (where several classmates WERE learning to read, with very, very limited success).
I believe we have many advances to go in standard education before we can accurately assess special techniques such as speed-reading.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 10 2015, @03:00AM
I learned to read in the late 50's/early 60's. Phonics.
I internally sound each word out during reading. Really slow. Its like doing DSP on a BASIC interpreter. But I do retain a lot of what I read.
I will never forget the special hell one of my teachers put me through having to read Charles Dickens "Tale of Two Cities" over what was said to be a "Christmas Vacation". Believe me, that was no vacation at all that year, and left me with quite a bitter hatred of that kind of literature. I could never understand why teachers graded us poorly for failing to write concisely, but oohed and ahhed over such wordy tomes. English literature was by far my hardest subject in school.
Expecially vexing was Shakespeare.
If it had not been for "Cliff's Notes", I would have flunked out of school.
I could fix radios and TV's, but no way did I have enough time to read so much verbiage. You do not know just how badly I wish I could have had control of that English teacher's career, given her a broken superheterodyne receiver to repair, and graded her - with a failure to meet my expectations resulting in my ability to block her pursuit of that which she loved...
Oh, the power one has when they are in a position to grade others. I wonder how many kids are done in with the pen of the grader.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by frojack on Thursday September 10 2015, @04:17AM
Shakespeare's writings hail from a time when English was very different. English was still evolving. This is probably more true of English than most languages, but I'm not in a position to judge. It seems difficult for just about all modern readers.
But you don't have to go that far back. Just try reading the Federalist Papers. This was newspaper fare in this country at the time of the writing of the Constitution. Yet sentence structure, length, etc., is so very different from today.
You wonder how modern English teachers would grade those writers. (Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay). They would probably all flunk.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Thursday September 10 2015, @07:17PM
Was? So you think English is now somehow "finished"?
If you were to meet someone from four centuries into the future, his English surely would be no closer to present-day English than present-day English is to Shakespeare's English.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 2) by frojack on Thursday September 10 2015, @08:22PM
True, but the rate of change varies inversely to the degree the language becomes widely adopted.
Only small localized populations can change languages quickly, because the time needed for language changes to spread would render them useless over wide areas. In Shakespeare's time, English was not yet widely dispersed.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Friday September 11 2015, @07:06AM
English is splitting. Already today, American English is considerably different from British English (ask someone from New York and someone from London what a subway is. or what a torch is, for example).
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 2) by frojack on Friday September 11 2015, @06:27PM
Don't think that is all that germane. There are always minor difference in word meanings, which are easily understood, once explained, or by context. Reading news papers from India or Australia will reveal several of these, which cause, at most a fleeting feeling of WTF when you read something like "She pulled a torch out of her purse.". Even when you read "Bob was holding a torch for Mary" you will understand by context.
That is totally different from major differences in grammar, and sentence structure, that you run into reading Shakespeare or something like the Federalist Papers.
Modern readers don't have a lot of trouble with the individual Words that Shakespeare uses.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Saturday September 12 2015, @08:02AM
It is the nature of evolutionary processes that they move in small steps. I can assure you, the people reading Shakespeare 50 years after the plays were written didn't consider his language more alien than you would of an English text written 50 years ago (and also grammar is still evolving; for example "whom" seems to be increasingly replaced by "who"; the data of ngram [google.com] supports this observation).
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 2, Informative) by Francis on Wednesday September 09 2015, @11:20PM
I'd like to see some evidence of that. There's little or no evidence for the idea that people have these learning styles that they're stuck with. It is almost certainly true that some people pick up on those things more easily than other people do. But, there's no evidence that a typical person can't do it. And people who can't are probably suffering from some sort of neurological disorder.
If most other people are running rings around you, it's not talent, they're just going about it in a more effective way than you are. In parts of Africa the norm is to not just speak one or two languages, but to speak 3 or 4 languages well. It's not that they're any smarter than us, it's that they actually put the time in on it and don't expect to fail.
When I first started studying Chinese I couldn't tell the difference between two characters. Even a minor difference would be easily missed. And God help me if I had to deal with calligraphy or handwriting. I can still barely manage to read simple calligraphy, but it's getting easier and two characters being different is much easier for me to recognize. It's because I put the time in rather than letting myself off the hook because I'm not a visual learner.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by kurenai.tsubasa on Thursday September 10 2015, @12:18AM
On the other hand, with pictographs, once one can tease out the different radicals, they become a lot like root words. Often when going between Japanese and Chinese, I've found the vague meaning of the “root words” translates well but it's just a matter of learning a totally different word that goes with the composite symbol. (Of course, always beware exceptions and visual false cognates!) This seems somewhat related to people who are native English speakers who recognize words by form.
Phonetics has always seemed like an absurd approach to me for reading English unless you're aware that any given word has roots in Romance languages or Germanic languages or what have you. Phonetics worked for me when learning German quite well (was shortly after they went through a spelling reform, which undoubtedly helped) but not English until I learned to be able to say, oh, that word has a German or Old English root or that word has a French root or that word's Spanish and that one's straight out of Latin or Greek and so on and so forth.
As a digression, on that basis I find it odd that Americans aren't naturally polyglots like those Africans you mention. I don't know much about French or Latin and am totally lost when it comes to Greek (it's Greek to me lol), but a crash course in Spanish (I only remember enough to hang myself with) and study of German (along with a failed attempt to read the original Beowulf) made it all make vastly more sense to me.
Anyway, on speed reading. As GP indicated, suppressing the internal voice is vastly helpful. I tend to do a hybrid with the internal voice only reading nouns and verbs, and not even all of them, letting adjectives and adverbs add to the meaning without needing to subvocalize them, at least with non-fiction. With fiction, I enjoy subvocalizing things different characters say to the extent that I even try to “cast” them as some actor I remember or an anime character.
(Score: 1) by Francis on Thursday September 10 2015, @01:20AM
There's degrees of cost associated with reading with phonetics. For a language like German that's largely phonetic, learning phonetics makes a lot more sense as you can see a word and generally read the word and all is good. You still pay the price for turning a word into a sound into a meaning. But, because the written and spoken form tend not to differ much from each other, that last step is going to be a bit less problematic.
English is a particularly bad language to try to read like that because it's not a phonetic language. And a set of letters can have multiple correct pronunciations depending upon the use. That does exist in Chinese, but it's a much smaller problem. It mostly exists as an artifact from a time when Chinese was more complex phonologically. With additional problems that came as a result of combining unlike characters during the simplification process.
And you're correct about using pictures. The brain has amazing amounts of processing power to process images, unfortunately, because of the overuse of phonics when we teach people to read, it means that you've got to essentially start over with the reading if you want to learn to read properly without the subvocalization. But, the first time you do it, it's rather amazing, you get these lovely images in your head.
(Score: 2) by linuxrocks123 on Thursday September 10 2015, @03:36AM
Meh ... I wouldn't be so quick to judge it as inefficient. When learning material, it helps to both read it and hear it spoken, and to visualize it. Inner vocalization probably helps with that process if you're learning from a book.
(Score: 1) by Francis on Thursday September 10 2015, @11:59AM
Inner vocalization requires you to convert from a visual bit of information into an auditory piece of information that then has to be distinguished from other homophones and processed for meaning. For English it's not that bad, but you do have a huge amount of work that goes into figuring out what the various letters sound like, and there's a number of possibilities. For a language like Mandarin it's even worse as you have to figure out what the character sounds like, convert into a sound then you have to do the work of figuring out which of the large number of words it is.
The whole process is needlessly complicated and in the absence of real evidence to the contrary, it's pretty clear that you're doing a ton of extra work just so that we can make use of spoken language when reading. It literally makes no sense.
To make matters worse, there's a tendency of people to actually move the vocal cords, tongue and whatnot while doing it adding to even more drag on the reading process as you have to wait for it to happen in order to read.
(Score: 2) by linuxrocks123 on Thursday September 10 2015, @12:50PM
Humans aren't computers. Well, not good ones anyway. We take notes in lecture not so much so we can go back and read the informatiom later as because it forces us to think more about the material while learning it.
If the spatial recognition system doesn't have anything else to do, employing it in the way you describe probably is helpful to understanding, rather than harmful.
(Score: 2) by Common Joe on Thursday September 10 2015, @11:28AM
Francis, I'm afraid I have to disagree with your entire post. There are some things I do agree with, but not for the reasons you give.
There's a ton of evidence. Speak to anyone who has done tech support on a regular basis. Some people get it. Some people could get it. The rest will never get it. The spectrum is broad. We know the brain is plastic [dana.org], but it loses some of that plasticity at puberty and again in the mid 20s. I also suspect it loses more when a person reaches the age of "crotchety".
But how much effort must a "typical" person put in? The less talent a person has, the more effort they have to put in to overcome their deficiencies. And right now, I have to put in a lot of effort to learn German. More than most. My memorization skills have improved since starting to learn German, but I have never had a good memory. Not even when I was young. I will never overcome that deficiency. I am competing against people who are absolutely fantastic with memory and that makes them a more natural linguist than me.
For all the effort I put in, it hurts when someone says "You need to learn German like [fill in the blank]." I've heard that at least three hundred times from various people. All of them who have said that to me do not understand the way I think and the way I learn. Even my wife has a hard time understanding the way I learn and we've been extremely close for over a decade. I don't retain information like most people do, but for every question they ask, I have a thousand. In a classroom, I have to suppress my inquisitive nature. It's awful not being the real me so I can pretend to fit in to such an environment. (I have never done well in a classroom.)
Yes, I am stuck learning particular ways. It is who I am. To say that I have some sort of neurological disorder is insulting. I'm sure you don't mean it that way, but I still feels personal because I am a "typical person". (I chose the name "Common Joe" for a reason.) Like many others, I know how I learn best. And yes, I have adapted the way I learn when learning German. Sometimes, though, people are too hardwired to change completely how they learn. Some of it is genetic. Some of it is learned at a very early age and irreversible.
I have a friend here in Germany who is from Africa. (His family recently had a scare with the whole Ebola thing.) He speaks 3 languages and learning German as his 4th. The weird thing? He is having just as many difficulties as I am with German. Why? He grew up with the other languages. That's why those languages are easier for him.
I put in more time than most people into learning German. In my first class during the 1 month break, I was the only one who didn't go back to their home country. Instead, I stayed here to continue learning German. Multiple hours every day. The things I've discovered have made other people who have already learned German to fluency say, "Huh... I didn't know that about the German language." I'm thorough. I've been tempted to throw in the towel a few times, but then I pick myself up and continue on. I do not expect to fail. But I also know that because of my "neurological differences", I have to study harder.
I had the same thing with the German umlaut. As an American, it's hard to hear the difference in the way words are pronounced with vs without umlauts. It's also hard to pronounce those differences. One difference between you and me: I have to have someone else help me with the pronunciation. My need other people to help me. I can't exactly practice speaking properly if there is no one else around. And unfortunately, those who can help aren't usually around when I'm studying. They're too busy working to earn money.
And before you suggest just speaking German with my wife in the evening: a thousand people have suggested that. It doesn't work. We fight too much when we do. One spouse often can't teach their respective spouse. And that's as personal as I'll get here.
I went into length here because most people (especially Americans) do not understand that learning a language is not easy. It often takes years of intense study and great sacrifice not only by you but by those who love you. Francis, you obviously understand that to some degree because of studying Mandarin or Cantonese. (I'm not sure which one you went after.) Just realize that my ability to earn money as a programmer is very much on the line. If there were an easier way for me, I would have found it by now. I've tried a lot of different things.
I will never learn another language in my life. And I could have never learned an Asian language no matter how hard I tried. At my age, it would simply be too taxing and too time consuming. My limitations would have prevented me from doing so no matter how much I wanted to be like other people.
(Score: 1) by Francis on Thursday September 10 2015, @12:10PM
Sigh, this is completely ridiculous.
You do realize that the plural of anecdote, isn't evidence, right? The reason why you see that phenomenon happening has absolutely nothing to do with learning styles. Some people just don't spend time problem solving on their own. They don't understand the systems they're using and are generally afraid of what's going on due to the status attack. There's absolutely no reason why we need to have learning styles in order to have that situation crop up. For the most part these are people that would have issues with other forms of direction as well. In fact, there's a good chance that they've been given instructions for it over other media as well. It's not unusual now to have instruction books that have pictures in them.
Ah yes, talent, there is no such thing as talent. I've yet to come across anybody that was "talented" at something. Seriously, anything at all. I do come across people that are driven and curious, but I've yet to come across anybody that's truly talented at anything. The closest I've ever seen are people that are good at hiding the incredible amount of work and frustration it takes to be good. The only meaningful difference between talented and untalented is the encouragement they get.
As far as your friend goes, it has absolutely nothing to do with age. There is not now, nor has there ever been, any evidence to support the theory that adults learn languages less effectively than children. The only difference here is that adults have less time available. Hour for hour an adult will learn a language more quickly than a child every time. The reason being that we don't also have to discover what things are possible in a language as well as what we need to be able to express.
The difference between you and me is that I'm not spoiled. I had to work damn hard to learn what I learned to due a learning disorder. I didn't have the luxury of being able to demand that people cater to my needs and as a result if I wanted to learn something I had to actually do the work. For every 10 people I see making these sorts of bullshit arguments, at least 8 of them have no identifiable learning disorder. They fail to learn because of their ego and because they're expecting to be coddled. At least as far as education goes, Henry Ford was right on the money when he said, "Whether you think you can, or you think you can't--you're right."
(Score: 2) by hankwang on Thursday September 10 2015, @06:11PM
"Ah yes, talent, there is no such thing as talent. I've yet to come across anybody that was "talented" at something."
I think you have are using a different definition for talent than most people would use. To master some learned skill, you need talent and a lot (say 3 to 10 years) of practice. I would say that that is a definition of talent. The fact that everyone who has mastered a skill has practiced a lot does not mean that everyone who practices a lot will become a master.
I used to think like you: I thought that everyone can learn anything with sufficient practice, since that's how I acquired skills, and I couldn't be that special after all...
Maybe you're trying to say that there is only general intelligence or capability to learn, but no specific talent for specific skills (music, baseball, mathematics, socializing)? Even that I doubt.
Avantslash: SoylentNews for mobile [avantslash.org]
(Score: 2) by VLM on Wednesday September 09 2015, @08:27PM
made reading a lot less enjoyable
If you're reading for fun, why bother if its not fun? In the last year I crept thru some classic Holdstock and not so old Stross and I savored it like a steak dinner, I simply don't want the "binge down some McDonalds swill" experience. Holdstock especially, read a chapter, stop for the day, let it "settle" and percolate in your mind for best results. Some would describe that as merely intentionally wasting time, thats why it took me like one year to get thru Gibbon, but I really savored every word.
If I'm reading for work, I have practice and things are kind of formalized and I can skim something like source code incredibly quickly almost like a map to find the part I am thinking of, so asking how fast I read is like asking how fast a boat captain reads when he reads a chart, it doesn't really work like prose literature. Its very disconcerting to find things "where they shouldn't be". I believe this is the cause of some/many CLI users getting really pissed off about GUIs, I am already a master of visualization and symbolic operation with my CLI, making me use shitty widgets with pictures of centipedes fornicating really doesn't help folks beyond a certain (minimal) level of literacy. Its like asking why Shakespeare wrote prose plays instead of making coloring books.
If I'm reading for work and its not formalized and familiar, or its weird, my critical path is cognitive delay understanding, not reading. WTF was that lunatic thinking when he wrote that code? Oh F, that lunatic was me 3 years ago.
I guess I deny the claim of "drowning in words". Apparently my swimming speed is far enough faster than the possible word flow that its never on the critical path or a limiting reagent.
I would almost go as far as claiming its a manufactured ailment designed to sell products to "fix" it, other than there are some probably very rare reading dense jobs, maybe a copy editor, or a paralegal? Oh, I know, a high school/college english professor who has to read five hundred students pitiful attempt at a twenty page term paper and return graded results by the end of the weekend. I would imagine that is not fun at all.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by khallow on Wednesday September 09 2015, @09:28PM
If you're reading for fun, why bother if its not fun?
Sometimes trying such things can help those activities which are fun.
(Score: 2) by vux984 on Wednesday September 09 2015, @09:25PM
Yeah, suppressing the inner voice basically turns off my speed limiter. BUT it also dramatically reduces the amount of information I retain, and how long it is retained. And I don't really turn it off, i just don't wait for it to keep up. And I process in chunks... so my inner voice will basically 'read' the first couple syllables of every chunk before lurching to start over the next chunk. Its like weird burble in the background.
I use it to skim news or articles for content I find interesting enough to slow down and read properly, or for information I need in books etc. But I could never use it to actually process articles at that speed.
And most articles are written at pretty low information density level. If I read something denser, i just get word salad with no real idea what it means.
For example, I find I get the SAME effect reading a calculus textbook theorem proof. Even reading it at my usual reading speed is too fast to absorb it. I'll finish it and still not really know anything. For example the "Proof of the Sum Rule for Limits" as presented on wikipedia.
https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Calculus/Proofs_of_Some_Basic_Limit_Rules [wikibooks.org]
If I just "read" those proofs at the same speed I read I read a newspaper article, I'll get a sense of it, but not a true understanding of what it really is saying. I need to stop and really think about what its saying.
Likewise, if I speed read subtle wordplay in a novel, I come away with that same sense of it, without really understanding it.
I can speed read really low informational density material and retain the information, articles like "Top 5 cars people are flocking to avoid in 2015" -- I can grok that crap at speed-reading speeds, but that's because there's nothing there anyway but filler around a couple simplistic bullet points.
But anything I'd WANT to read? Is probably complicated that I'd need to read it at normal speed to really enjoy it.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 09 2015, @10:48PM
How about following the words with a finger while moving my lips? Does that slow me down?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 10 2015, @04:09AM
I attended a course in speed reading while in grade school. The main theme of the class was not to recognize letters, and then words, but instead to treat the words as individual letters in a very large alphabet (this was extended to recognizing certain combinations of words atomically as well). Subjectively, I feel that it worked. We also did a lot of testing that seems to confirm this. Today, I always read words / combinations of words at a time. And, if I am trying to go through a lot of material quickly, I will use another technique from that class-- read the firs sentence of every paragraph, and decide based on that to either read the paragraph, skim it, or skip it entirely. Comprehension suffers for the latter technique, because you can only comprehend what you actually read, but in testing I have always scored very high on comprehension of material I read in that manner.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Wednesday September 09 2015, @07:45PM
It was either University of Southern Maine or Maine State University; I expect you could look it up in their online catalogs then order it online. If it's out of print then try Alibris [alibris.com].
That book taught chunking. It actually worked pretty well for me; you won't lose reading comprehension if you don't push yourself too hard. If you learn to play piano fast you won't play well. But if you play your scales and other finger exercises quite slowly and evenly, then speed up only very gradually, then slow down again any time your playing becomes uneven, in no time at all you will be playing flight of the bumblebee.
The key is to read for comprehension not speed. But do chunk to the extent you retain your previous level of comprehension.
The problem I've got know is that my Attention Deficit Disorder is so bad that by the time I get to a paragraph I have totally lost what the paragraph is even about, and so must read it several times. That makes technical material intolerable.
Adderal - a blend of Amphetamine and Dextroamphetamine - effectively treats that but if I take it I get nothing but crap from my dear friends at Kuro5hin. So instead I carry around two books that I try yet fail to read; were I to read so much as one of them I'd be billing $65.00 but I don't request Adderal from my doctor - who is happy to prescribe it - so as to keep my dear friends at Kuro5hin off my fucking back.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 1) by Post-Nihilist on Wednesday September 09 2015, @09:18PM
if you need Adderal then take Adderal ... If someone give you shit use that argument : would you ask someone with diabetes to stop insulin ?
If they still give you shit after that, they are not your friends....
Be like us, be different, be a nihilist!!!
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Thursday September 10 2015, @12:24AM
recovering drug addicts who are also mentally ill: their fellow twelve-step culties are all over them like cheap suits to stop taking the antipsychotics that enable people like me not to hallucinate.
There are special dual-diagnosis twelve-step groups just so those poor bastards don't have to deal with such bullshit.
I once had a woman I was dating show up at the nuthouse I'd voluntarily admitted myself to, to desperately beg me to check myself out. I wouldn't do it despite her desperation.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 2) by takyon on Wednesday September 09 2015, @10:18PM
Here's a prescription from me: don't go to the toxic wasteland that is the remains of Kuro5hin.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kuro5hin [wikipedia.org]
Current status Inactive
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Thursday September 10 2015, @12:21AM
Rusty closed new user registration but there is a story posted to the front page that gives the login link:
http://www.kuro5hin.org?uname=MYUSERNAME&pass=MYPASSWORD
Rusty banninated me after Del Griffit complained that I was repeatedly posting the link to Child Pornography on the Internet [warplife.com].
Had Del actually read the article he wouldn't have requested my bannination: I hand the link out to every law enforcement officer I meet. I meet quite a few of them in Downtown Portland, I walk right up to them then hand it to them on a slip of paper.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 3, Insightful) by mtrycz on Wednesday September 09 2015, @07:47PM
I'm not a speed reader at all. On the countrary I dweel on the texts I read, often even too much. I find myself with the position of, it really depends on WHAT you're reading. Whatever needs your attention, active thought, processing and sedimentation will necessarily be "slow".
I think that the only kind of reading that speed-reding applies to is "bestsellers", ie. literature that was written *with the intent* of being easy on the reader, with lots of "pattern phrases", pacing, leading the action in one direction, etc.
I mean, c'mon, read through the latest Call Me Maybe (I love that guy) and explain to me as I'm 4 wtf is happening.
In capitalist America, ads view YOU!
(Score: 4, Funny) by Appalbarry on Wednesday September 09 2015, @07:54PM
Just to save time, people can no longer read books because of that damned Internet destroying their minds and ability to think longer than 3 seconds at a time on any subjec... ooohhh kitty!
(You're welcome.)
(Score: 0, Redundant) by ghost on Wednesday September 09 2015, @08:14PM
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 09 2015, @08:54PM
If it's an interesting book or article I take my time. If it's something I have to read, like a repair manual, I'll do the Evelyn Tweakerwood method to get the facts I need faster.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 09 2015, @09:13PM
...Gooooooohh!!
(Score: 1) by dogvomit on Wednesday September 09 2015, @09:27PM
I read about 10 times slower than my wife. Even when I'm reading bulk science fiction, I spend minutes on each page and often find myself going back over paragraphs to make sure I really didn't miss anything.
Of course that is silly, but it's a habit I can't break that developed over the last 30 years of reading Physical Review Letters. PRL is about the hardest thing there is to understand [nytimes.com].
So, cut back your journal reading and you can read faster!
—George
(Score: 2) by takyon on Thursday September 10 2015, @12:08AM
Sounds like you have the opposite problem of today's Millennials.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 10 2015, @01:00AM
This. I don't try to read PRL, but several engineering journals force me to read carefully.
My wife learned speed reading in high school (40+ years ago). She breezes through the newspaper (yes, we both like news on dead trees) and retains something from nearly all the stories. I cherry pick what to read and go slower. When we discuss a story of mutual interest, it's normal that she missed important details and I have to go back with her to explain things. The flip side is that she will send me back to read an interesting article that I skipped due to a bad headline.
Horses for courses?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 09 2015, @10:04PM
Sure, you can speed-read those huge thrillers that they sell at the airport bookstores (which is probably where those titles get most of their sales). In fact, it's hard to imagine to reading one of them slowly.
But that works because there's so little to reflect on, it's just a TV-paced drama that you're flipping through.
(Score: 1) by unzombied on Wednesday September 09 2015, @11:14PM
Is speed reading possible? Yes.
Is speed comprehension (for a few days) possible? Yes.
Is speed understanding (months or years) possible? No.
(Score: 2) by darkfeline on Thursday September 10 2015, @12:05AM
It also depends on the text in question being well-written, which is becoming rarer in this free-for-all Facebook/Twitter age.
Writing, like coding, is fucking hard. It's all too easy to let your writing wander to and fro without a clear direction.
Join the SDF Public Access UNIX System today!
(Score: 4, Funny) by NCommander on Thursday September 10 2015, @02:04AM
I speed write. In the span of 15 minutes, I can make the SoylentNews Editoral Team collectively cringe.
Still always moving
(Score: 1) by Thanar on Thursday September 10 2015, @02:57AM
(Score: 2) by martyb on Thursday September 10 2015, @01:13PM
Reading for pleasure, I can generally manage on the order of one page per minute (approximately 1000 wpm.) There are exceptions, of course, like "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress" by Robert Heinlein -- the computer maintenance person's grammar was unlike normal English (Russian-based?) Example "Not good?" "Very not good." That slowed me down to less than half-speed.
So long as I can keep track of the character's names and plot, and it's generally pretty-much "information sparse", I can breeze right through. In other words, there's not much 'meat' to it, so relatively little effort is required to consume the data (words / story elements), and gather it into an information hierarchy where I get to know what is going on and finally come to understand the entire story.
On the other hand, when I am reading relatively information-dense material, my reading speed generally plummets.
Anecdote is not data, I know, but here's an example. I remember starting a contract at a company. I was to refactor and upgrade their existing multi-platform test harness and suite. I was working on an OS I'd never used before, upgrading code in a language where my only prior experience was one of four languages in a survey language course in college (and that was several years prior), and in a test harness that I'd never seen before!
I just sat down with the 6-inch stack of system and language docs and started reading. THREE passes. First pass was just to get a feel for the terminology. The next was to gather connections between the usages of the terms. And the third pass was for gathering more of the minutia and fine details. Much like an optimizing compiler, I was (1) gathering the symbol table, (2) generating a rough graph of the structure, and then (3) running an optimizer across the whole lot.
There were aspects of the material that were just minor variations on things that I already knew. In that case, I found myself doing more JIT compiler work and I could proceed much more rapidly.
As for reading the *code*, the more consistent the structure (indentation, language element usage, naming conventions, etc.) the faster I could read and absorb the code.
I am much better at reading than I am at listening. Maybe it has to do with my looking up words in the dictionary as a child, then seeing another entry that caught my eye, and the next thing I knew I'd read a few pages -- I have a relative large vocabulary. So, when listening to spoken English, I have a relatively large number of 'parse errors' with words like: their, there, and they're and with to, too, and two. I have to mentally stop, back up, and reparse what I heard. Whereas with reading, I seem to run into much fewer of those problems. So, compared to others here, I do NOT have an inner voice 'saying' what I'm reading. I'm chunking up entire words at a glance.
As for information-dense material, I think back to studying Calculus. Understanding the symbols presented, tying it in with what I'd previously learned, and coming to not only being able to parrot what I'd read, but to be able to fully understand the material and being able to apply it was a much much larger undertaking. I could easily spend 15 minutes to an hour just trying to 'get' a single theorem.
While I am reading, I am constantly merging the new information into my existing 'knowledge map.' Think the hierarchy of quadrilaterals and how all squares are rectangles but not all rectangles are squares. Then toss in quadrilaterals, trapezoids, rhomboids, parallelograms, and where does each fit in compared with the rest.
The more I know, the longer it takes for me to absorb NEW information and fit it in with the existing body of knowledge that I have accumulated over my lifetime.
Wit is intellect, dancing.
(Score: 2) by sjames on Thursday September 10 2015, @02:13PM
The problem with speed reading claims is that they give a fairly simplistic "comprehension test" right after the test reading. Sure you remember it, you just read it. But since you skipped all that time consuming thinking about it in terms of what you already know, you probably won't remember it next week.
That's fine if you were just skimming for the part you needed to read of needed to know it just long enough to do something, but otherwise you just wasted your time.
Much more modest speedups can be accomplished while retaining comprehension and retention.