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Originally Posted by mirage
That's remarkable. Did you train yourself to read at these speeds? Or did it come naturally? That's a valuable skill to have. I'm a relatively quick reader when I want to be and I'm focused, but nothing like those speeds. I like to read that fast when reading informational stuff that I don't get great pleasure from reading, but am motivated to know the content. More literary writing, even if it's non-fiction, I've actually slowed down some over the years on purpose.
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I think it mostly came naturally. I started reading at a very early age—my mother used to reminisce about me reading the backs of cereal boxes when I was 3. My parents taught in the Northwest Territories and I spent quite a bit of time sitting at the back of the classroom (the small schools had a single classroom, the bigger schools had 2!) so I'm tempted to say I learned to read by osmosis.
Quote:
Originally Posted by mirage
I recall years ago that there were books and people on TV touting speed reading techniques. I read some stuff about it. Scanning large chunks of text without speaking the words in one's head was one of the techniques. The claim was that retention was better, too. I played around with it some, but didn't stick with it.
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One article dumping on the speed reading programs attracted my ire and the author and I engaged in a rather nasty exchange of message. Basically, the author claimed that no one could read over ~280WPM unless they were only skimming which seriously compromises comprehension. He continually restated that physics said that one can take in more than 7-9 letters in a "fixation" and we are limited to 4-5 fixations per second so no one can read faster than his proclaimed maximum. We sidetracked into saccades and the discussion ended in a mutual decision that the other heretic was wrong and no longer worth wasting electrons on.
Sadly, a collection of deviant data points did not disprove his theory. He was not a fan of Thomas Huxley (the man responsible for "The great tragedy of science - the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact.").