Speed Reading? 68
Chacham writes "Anyone here have success with Speed Reading? I've seen complaints about less comprehension, that it is uncomfortable, and that it's just plain hard to do. I've also seen people say it is invaluable. What are your experiences? I am particularly interested about reading technical resources, but I am curious overall as well." We've actually asked this before, but it's been three years, might as well take a second look at it.
Slashdot ! (Score:3, Funny)
and try to get the interesting answers
(or if there was a bias in the moderation system)
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Re:Slashdot ! (Score:2)
Would have been great in College (Score:3, Insightful)
A big problem, aside from being inherently slow at reading, was that I would fall asleep within 30 minutes of starting to read. This seemed to happen no matter where I was -- library, dorm room, sitting on the grass -- and regardless to how much sleep I'd had or how much caffeine I ingested. If I could read & comprehend quickly, I would have had a 4.0. I guess I should have taken a speeed reading or reading comprehension class or something, but I guess I had too much stupid pride.
Re:Would have been great in College (Score:2, Informative)
(BTW - I have ADD, and drugs help out quite a bit).
Re:Would have been great in College (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Would have been great in College (Score:1)
(though to be completly honest, I take them religiously, and I think they do do something, I just have a big ego and can't admit my life is ruled by a chemical)
Re:Would have been great in College (Score:1)
Re:Would have been great in College (Score:1, Interesting)
I have a 155 IQ, yet I'm attending a 3rd tier University.
And I'm struggling my way through, both academically and financially.
To top it off, I barely squeaked through high school -- 2.8 GPA, #145 out of 300 in the graduating class.
To respond to your post without this turning into an IQ/Penis size contest: do you only have concentration problems when reading texts, or other fairly boring material? I've had that problem from time to time myself; and yet I can read recreational reading material in record time.
Re:Would have been great in College (Score:1, Interesting)
I too find recreational reading insanly entertaining and easy. This semester I have read the last two HHGTTG Books, Red Mars, and I am in the middle of Green mars right now. I have learned to cope with my disorder by utilizing the Internet, without it I would not be doing as good as I am now. I CANNOT DO Library research, I try to read those boring books, and get tried really fast. But the internet lets you read blurb about almost anything. I also find almost any aspect of computers intuitive. If you are not a CS major (or were not) consider moving that route. Make sure you dont end up having kids with someone else who has an LD, your kids will probably have asbugers(sp?).
Seriously without the internet I would be working at McD's getting $5.50. (Ok maybe not, I would probably be in the EE field :))
I am not the only one in my family with a LD. My mom has one and went through high school being told she was dumb, and lazy. Given shes not that smart, (book smart) she picks things up pretty rapidly. And one of my brothers is also diagnosed, he did take advantage of the Resource room in HS, and he has a 3.9 GPA and was just accepted to RIT (with scholarship). He's smart but can't spell for shit. (He's worse them me)
Your not the only one. there are lots of people who are, keep it a secret; people will just assume your dumb if you tell them.
Re:Would have been great in College (Score:1)
Re:Would have been great in College (Score:2)
Anyway, the point I'd like to make is that IQ != good marks at school/college/university. Learning things by rote can get you a passing grade in most subjects. A high IQ should give you an advantage in analyzing questions to get good answers and give you a few (lot?) more marks, but if you haven't got the learning bit done right, an IQ of 200 isn't going to help you get a top grade mark.
Re:Would have been great in College (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Would have been great in College (Score:1)
huh? (Score:1)
Hopitalized... (Score:5, Funny)
I hit a bookmark.
-- Steven Wright
Re:Hopitalized... (Score:1)
I was after trying to speed read the whole of
Speedreading (Score:3, Insightful)
Most of the things I'm willing to read have a high content/words ratio - my bottleneck in "time-to-comprehension" performance is usually not "how fast can I read". But I suppose it might be if I was into reading the Sunday paper.
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Reply to AC:Speedreading (Score:2)
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Re:Speedreading (Score:2)
I wondered when someone was going to get around to mentioning Katz.
The straight dope about speed reading (Score:5, Informative)
Computerized speed reading (Score:5, Informative)
Recently, I tried out GnomeRSVP to find out what that is all about...
Much to my surprise, I must say that, for texts which are available on the computer, it is a very convenient and fast tool to quickly absorb huge amounts of text.
I can read somewhere around 1000 to 1200 words per minute and remember about 90% of it for about 12 hours.
That is more than enough if you have to get a quick overview about a subject.
It is not enough to write a paper about a specific topic as you loose most abbreviations or references to other texts. You also can't really enjoy the experience.
I ran a test and held a talk about a topic I know exactly nothing about, just based on the texts I read... and my recall was comprehensive and precise.
After 12 hours, the rate of recall was down to about 60% though... so, in my case, the data is not permanently absorbed, as the context is lost and I can't recall longer paragraphs as a whole...
sure, it's ok (Score:1)
It was a one day intro with some stuff to study and practice. It actually did help comprehension, and did dramatically reduce time spent reading most material. However-- it was extremely fatiguing!! I figure that as I read more, quicker, I had to stop and take a break three times as soon (and thus, more often) as normal reading. However, time saved is time earned.
Not all materials are conducive, either. I think Lit was hard to speed read-- but I enjoy getting lost in the vicarious experience and tend to slow down and enjoy it better (hmm, works with love-making, too; definitely don't want to speed through that!).
Photoreading. (Score:1)
http://www.photoreading.com/
My own reading speed... (Score:5, Interesting)
I've found this book, Arco's Triple Your Reading Speed [amazon.com], a comparatively honest, straightforward look at the topic, without all the nonsense other books tend to contain. Essentially, reading is all about vision; you increase your vision area, you increase your ability to read more words at a glance. This book approaches speed-reading from this angle, and teaches you to increase your ability to "see more words" at a glance. It's not magic, and I haven't reached the claimed "triple" (1200 wpm for me) speed, but I've seen some improvement. Of course, technical books still slow me down, but I'm still quite a bit faster. I'm really hoping to get to the "page-turner" speed I used to see on That's Incredible. :)
To me, the best benefit of speed-reading is the reduction in reading time. The faster you read, the more time you have to re-read the material if you need it. Reading any material twice is better than a single slow-read, especially when studying. I have only noticed any particular discomfort when I am really trying to read terribly fast - up against my limits. At that point, I can read quickly, but I find my eyes start feeling strained, as though the ocular muscles are cramping. This sounds weird, it feels weird, and I generally slow down.
Good luck.
Re:My own reading speed... (Score:2)
I once looked at a book like that, and I wanted to find it again. Even it it didn't increase my reading speed, it was still quite interesting.
Re:My own reading speed... (Score:2)
I learned it naturally! (Score:2)
If there's a lot of it, I ramp it up to up to 3000 (I think; at least its about a 8 1/2 x 11" page in under 2 seconds at about 10 point font).
Its all about the purpose of the reading. At the greatest speed, I don't even have enough time to put together whole sentences in my head (though I read every word), so I can't even completely get the general idea. However, if I'm searching for important words, it works well. This is how I read the front page of the newspaper and freshmeat.
I got as fast as I am by reading a LOT. About 30 pages every day at least. As I did it more, I got to where I could alter the speed (and comprehension) of what I read to suit the various kinds of reading that I did. Sure, there are lots of tricks - seeing everything at once, skip the articles, etc, but they just sort of happen naturally if you TRY to read faster - except for the change in the way you think.
Others have spoken correctly - you have to allow yourself to take on varying degrees of understanding. At the lowest level is merely catching the words - the highest level is imagery. I think most people read at the speech comprehension level (which is not even the same as sentence comprehension level) and are missing out on the others.
Now if you're lucky, you may be capable of actually thinking much, much faster than you speak, and may be capable of reading at around 1000 WPM without having to lose anything, but that ability is usually only reserved for geniuses.
Sounds odd. (Score:3, Insightful)
It's not what you think... (Score:3, Interesting)
If you are reading proprerly (good, soft light and upright postion w/ little or no distraction) it becomes fairly easy to comprehend and you get done alot faster than you would think.
Here's my theory on why it works...first off, alot of ppl have TV/Music, etc on while they are trying to read. It's a distraction...if you must have noise, try classical music (something instrumental, nothing with lyrics). The other thing is, your mind can really only comprehend so much at one time.
So, here's the secret to speed reading...
The big trick to speed reading has always been to overcome the mind's natural tencency to "say" every word you read and therefore "wander".
I have found that it's really pretty easy to do, but the truth is the complaints about comprehension are true and it's a fact that becomes apparent after you try it for a while. Many ppl say that comprehension improves with practice. This might be, but it will certainly take a while to learn the technique.
By simply focusing on your reading, you will tend to learn how your mind works and develop techniques on your own.
For a good material on the subject, and some more college study help...try the following:
Study Skills Links [ttu.edu]
Re:It's not what you think... (Score:1)
Re:It's not what you think... (Score:2)
Then again, purely factual writing generally doesn't include meaningless words. In technical writing the structure of the sentences and placement of words all have meaning. That is why "speed reading" doesn't work well with technical documents.
Powered by Ramen (Score:5, Interesting)
However speed reading has disadvantages, reading literature where the language actually has more meaning than what it says in context doesn't work well. I can usually use speed reading techniques on stuff like newspaper articles and novels which often times are getting more across contextually than dictively. Things with more figurative language like poems or more meaningful literary pieces I read in a normal fashion, same with technical documentation. Woe to he that skims over technical documentation. Though I find even reading in a normal fashion I can go pretty fast, I think it has to do with having shifty eyes. Anyways, look into speed reading if you want to get through the daily paper quickly or skim through a Tom Clancy book go for the speed reading, otherwise I'd say just set aside some spare time to get stuff read.
Re:Powered by Ramen (Score:1)
Recognising tokens without reading them aloud (Score:2)
Interesting; that's how I read Perl source code. I found that out when I read a thread on the pronunciation of certain characters and constructions and realised that I didn't have a pronunciation for $_ -- when I read code, my mind would see that pattern of symbols and fill in a meaning without assigning it a sound at all.
question regarding word per minute... (Score:2, Insightful)
Thanks.
Re:question regarding word per minute... (Score:1, Informative)
2) Pick a page that starts with a complete sentence and ends with a complete sentence.
3) Start stopwatch
4) Read page
5) Stop stopwatch
6) Count the number of words you read
7) Using simple algebra, divide the value you got in #6 with the reading you got in #5. Adjust to figure out WPM.
For extra credit, read the selection again and time yourself again. You should be able to retain more information on the second reading and improve your reading speed simultaneously. But, really, you'd expect that since you can mentally skip over stuff that you retained on the first go through.
Re:question regarding word per minute... (Score:1, Informative)
Read your usual reading material for a minute and count the words. The speedreading class texts had numbers at the end of each line counting the total words, so it was easy to check. Of course, you could have this rescaled - read for 5 minutes and have the numbers represent 1/5 the number of actual words.
Re:question regarding word per minute... (Score:1)
Speed reading SUCKS (IMNAAHO, YMMV) (Score:2)
Of course, this totally ignores the fact that a book doesn't have the keywords marked in bold so your eyes can fetch them quickly without actually reading the page (maybe this guy sped-read comics?).
It also ignores the fact that the teachers that assigned a book asked about the details in it, which you totally lose when you skim rapidly through it, even if you manage to understand what the book is about (extreme exercise: speed-read Beowulf, then tell us what did you understand).
The class-mates that tried this flopped miserably in the following midterm and whined to no end, rightly so (I do acknowledge they didn't have much experience speed-reading, but I still think it shows how much the method sucks).
There are some technical books where you can read the first two paragraphs of a section and skip the rest, but that isn't really "speed-reading".
Re:Speed reading SUCKS (IMNAAHO, YMMV) (Score:1, Interesting)
No interesting content is made up of solely 'the's, 'and's, and 'said's. Rather, it is usually an interesting tapestry of words and phrases that come together to form the content. In this content, you will usually find some words much more important than other words.
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.
Unless you are a lawyer, there is a little in there that you can skip and still retain full comprehension (or at least enough comprehension to be able to truthfully purport understanding of the main topics.
Taking out all the stuff we can infer from context, you get something like the following:
1. no law establishing religion or excerise thereof.
2. freedom of speech or press
3. right to peacefully assemble
4. petition government for redress of grievances
4 points, all fairly well understood even without the non-keywords included.
It takes practice to figure out what the keywords in a text are, but reading for comprehension practice (normal reading too!) will help the reader to figure out how to discern keywords from non-keywords.
Bah... (Score:3, Interesting)
Sure, it's great once in a while when you pick out details on something, but if you need to get real comprehension, you will end up reading it two or three times to get the proper amounts of comprehension.
What you gain is the ability to absorb the basic idea of an entire work quickly. But there is a certain specific rate at which your brain can absorb information -- your personal mental bandwidth -- and you can't go any faster. Speed-read too much and you will miss things.
Speed reading is not a technique that will make you more brilliant or anything. Your brain pretty much wired itself up when you were five or so, so you can't take a course on speed reading and become brilliant. It'll just give you a skill of seeming to be more brilliant because you can read fast and pick out the important aspects of a document that may or may not prove useful to you.
Impossible (Score:1, Informative)
Analyse your own habits (Score:2)
Other bad habits include compulsively re-reading lines several times (when you don't need to), skipping segments of the text (when you don't need to), forcing you to go back, and general wandering eyes. Note the first two are sometimes desirable.
As for the speed reading claims, they are bunk, and it's easy to see. You essentially have a fixed bandwidth along which you can recieve information from words. This is not entirely correct, but at the scales we're discussing, it good enough for government work. Speed readers claim order-of-magnitude increases, which is absurd. The fact is, nothing you do will increase your comprehension (read: download) rate that much, once you have maxed out your vision bandwidth. (Note that was the focus of my first paragraph.)
Speed reading works by dropping the amount of information obtained from the text, despite all claims to the contrary. There are times when it is useful. You might even practice it; in school it's usually called "skimming". But it's not a miracle.
The best way to increase real bandwidth is to practice, by reading difficlt things. This includes technical stuff, but also older books or novels. For instance, stuff written in the late 1800's is a little harder to read, both because they weren't afraid to use English to the fullest (without fear they'd lose readers because it was too hard), and because the language has shifted. See how far back you can go. You'll become more literate, too.
Homonyms (Score:2)
True story. What kind of reader are you? Did you notice the too homophones I used? Ok, there were three.
Re:Homonyms (Score:2)
Long and short of it is, it definately hurts your ego when in high school you do things like pronouncing "dachshund" (wiener-dogs) as "dash-hound" not only to be laughed at and later hear it pronounced "doxond". Even still, I pronounce composite as "KOM-pahzit" instead of "kom-PO-zit" or "KOM-PAH-zit"
Re:Homonyms (Score:1)
Thanks for the heads up on dachshund -- you just saved me some future embarassement! So far in my life I (luckily) haven't to spell either doxen or pronouce dachshund.
Re:Homonyms (Score:2)
My method (Score:1)
I'm not totally sure how I do it, but it's along the lines of making a realisation that this paragraph is going nowhere, is too verbose, or is just something I know already. I find myself scanning ahead to look for keywords that indicate that I probably already know what this paragraph is trying to put across.
For example, if i'm reading a magazine article on some new whiz bang technology, and a paragraph starts of talking about XML and XSLT, i'll very quickly scan the rest of the paragraph to see if it looks like it will add anything to my existing knowledge of XML and XSLT. If the last paragraph said "so therefore you can use XSLT to translate an XML document into HTML.", i'd realise that I don't need to read the whole paragraph.
I think.
Speed reading /. ? unpossible... (Score:2)
But the system doesn't work for everyone and it works a lot better on well-written literature.
After not using the system for a few weeks he was almost back where he started...
Only speed read when you have to. (Score:2, Insightful)
If you just want to be able to read more books in less time, it's not worth it. Anything that can be speed read without losing any meaning isn't worth reading.
Here's what I got out of it... (Score:2)
Flip through your tech book very fast. See what the book is made of -- lots of picture? Small font? Now, go back and do it again at a rate of about 1 second/page or so. Look for headings. Figures. Code examples. Don't read any of the actual text body. This will give you a feeling for the pace of the book -- such as, how many paragraphs on average will I be expected to read before I see a code example? It's not a specific measure, it's just a feeling.
Once you've done this, look at the table of contents. You'll know more about the chapters than you did before. Choose the chapters you want to read, based on what you've scanned. If you scanned a chapter and didn't see any code examples or headings that caught your eye (literally), skip it if you like.
When reading free form text, put your finger under the word you are reading, and follow along. Keep the two matched. If you want to read faster, move your finger faster. Try to move your finger at a constant pace, though, so if you speed up, stay sped up, don't "skim" (ironic, isn't it?) and then slow down at the good parts. NEVER STOP AND GO BACK. If you feel like you've missed something, read it again in some other pass. Get through the whole chapter (or logical break). Then if you want, go do it again.
Not exactly what people think about when they think speed reading, but it's what the first few lessons were about when I tried it. And the above is the only thing I use regularly. I never developed that thing they do where they just whip a hand straight down the page and then flip. But, what I do use works better than my old method of eyes glazing over and turning pages periodically before realizing that I'm not paying attention to what was on the last 3 pages.