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posted by cmn32480 on Wednesday September 09 2015, @07:14PM   Printer-friendly
from the i-didn't-catch-that dept.

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.


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  • (Score: 4, Funny) by NCommander on Thursday September 10 2015, @02:04AM

    by NCommander (2) Subscriber Badge <michael@casadevall.pro> on Thursday September 10 2015, @02:04AM (#234482) Homepage Journal

    I speed write. In the span of 15 minutes, I can make the SoylentNews Editoral Team collectively cringe.

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