Quote:
Originally Posted by DNSB
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.
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.").
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I did the cereal box thing at a very young age, too!
I'd have thought that we can take in more than 280 wpm, too, and that many of us do it regularly in very short bursts, reading detailed signs and such. But some of that is probably recognition that doesn't require us to interpret in the ways we would if we don't know what the details are of what we're about to read. In other words, a sign in a window is different than the next paragraph of a novel.