The Truth About Speed Reading

[Ninjalawyer]

There was a thread a little while ago that linked to a Staples site that measured how fast you read a short passage (basically, you read the passage, clicked a button when you were done and then answered some basic questions about the passage).

I was a little embarrassed when I took that test and was told that I read better than average (a few hundred words per minute, but I don't remember the figure), but only about what someone who completed high school could manage and well below what a college student could do. Since I did complete university, and read and write a ton for work, I definitely thought I would have done better than that, especially when quite a few people in the thread were seemingly managing hundreds of WPM more. When you're told that you're just okay at one of the few things you think you're good at, it's a real punch in the self-esteem.

Well take heed fellow slow readers! There's a Lifehacker article (here) that has some choice (self-esteem affirming) quotes from a cognitive psychologist and eye-tracking researcher that suggests that: (i) college-level readers generally do 200 to 400 words per minute (yay!); and (ii) most average readers probably can't significantly increase their reading speed without taking a hit to reading comprehension.

Quotes I like:

When you factor out the amount of time spent thinking through complex and unfamiliar concepts—a rarity when people read for pleasure—reading is an appallingly mechanical process. You look at a word or several words. This is called a "fixation," and it takes about .25 seconds on average. You move your eye to the next word or group of words. This is called a "saccade," and it takes up to about .1 seconds on average. After this is repeated once or twice, you pause to comprehend the phrase you just looked at. That takes roughly 0.3 to 0.5 seconds on average. Add all these fixations and saccades and comprehension pauses together and you end up with about 95 percent of all college-level readers reading between 200 and 400 words per minute.

Oh ya, that's just what my self-esteem needed! What else you got for me?

You can probably push yourself to get a little over 500 words per minute, but you're limited by the eyes and the anatomy of the retina. To understand text you need to move your eyes to put the fovea on the part of the text you want to focus. Acuity drops off pretty markedly outside the fovea and you can't discriminate the words and text far from the fovea. So, that's the rate limited factor, as is how fast the brain can process information.

You can practice going faster and you probably will, but when you start going too fast you'll start losing comprehension. Most speed reading methods involve getting rid of subvocalization. Research shows that when you do that and the text is difficult, comprehension goes to pieces.

The obvious conclusion is that those posting scores in the range of 800 to over 1,000 wpm in the last thread are either very good at skimming or (more likely) just outed themselves as superhumans.

[AlbertaCowboy]

Originally Posted by Ninjalawyer

just outed themselves as superhumans.

Note to self: Ninjalaywer knows too much. Take steps to maintain secrecy.

[eschwartz]

Well, I always knew that speed-reading was bogus! But extra proof is always nice, so thanks for the link ... er, that is, when you fix it, currently it makes a new thread in this forum.

[tompe]

I have for a long time known about how eye fixation works and I have not seen how that is compatible with really reading very fast (compared to just skimming). I have also noticed that when I try to read very fast so that the internal voice kind of disappear it seems that my comprehension is reduced.

One thing quoted I do not agree with is that people do not spend time thinking through things when reading for pleasuer. For a lot of people reading science fiction thinking through things are one of the main pleasures of reading science fiction.

[faithbw]

When I read for pleasure, usually, it's different than reading a book that is for school or a book that is for something other than absolute pleasure. This isn't to say that I never think when reading a novel for fun but in general, I read books for pleasure much more quickly and without nearly as many pauses. I also don't tend to highlight or make notes in the margins when reading for pleasure. So maybe that is what was meant in the OP's link.

[mojos]

Originally Posted by faithbw

When I read for pleasure, usually, it's different than reading a book that is for school or a book that is for something other than absolute pleasure. This isn't to say that I never think when reading a novel for fun but in general, I read books for pleasure much more quickly and without nearly as many pauses. I also don't tend to highlight or make notes in the margins when reading for pleasure. So maybe that is what was meant in the OP's link.

Same as me. I tend to read slower when I read books for school than with the books I read for pleasure. Maybe it's just because books for school are less interesting? Or otherwise it's much more difficult to understand and requires a lot of brainwork which can be very tiresome.

[crich70]

Originally Posted by mojos

Same as me. I tend to read slower when I read books for school than with the books I read for pleasure. Maybe it's just because books for school are less interesting? Or otherwise it's much more difficult to understand and requires a lot of brainwork which can be very tiresome.

I think it's a matter of psychology myself mojos. If you forget details about something you are reading for pleasure no harm is done, but if you forget details in a textbook for example, details that may be on a quiz or end of year test that's something else again. So we read slower to make sure we actually did read that text correctly.

[piper28]

Hmm, the link to the lifehacker article seems to be not correct? I was just kinda curious on who they were quoting and whether I knew them or not . Professional curiosity, since for a number of years I worked for a couple of faculty that did this type of research (I actually wrote the software we used to do this research for our lab). The numbers quoted above definitely sound about right.

Now, the weird thing is, I don't completely discount speed reading. I took a class for it way back in junior high, and while I started on the high end of the people in that class, I did find I was able to significantly increase the speed of my reading while still retaining very high comprehension rates. However, not everybody is really cut out for it, there were definitely people in our class that made no progress at all. That said, in general, since about all the reading I do these days is for pleasure, I probably don't read anywhere near what I used to be able to do, because I don't see the point in it when reading for pleasure.

I'm not quite as in touch with the research in the area that I used to, but I'm not sure anyone was really doing any real eyetracking research on anything of much more than single page type things, and for real speed reading type research I'd really like to see that done over things that are more than a few pages of reading to get a good feel for speed vs comprehension. Part of the reason for the lack of that is quite frankly, the eyetracking setup isn't really conducive for longer stints of reading, and ergonomics of the situation would likely throw people off a little (I know *I* wouldn't have wanted to sit there reading multiple page type things even with the later generations of eyetracking devices we used, and believe me, I've spent a sizeable chunk of my life hooked up to eye trackers).

[mojos]

Originally Posted by crich70

I think it's a matter of psychology myself mojos. If you forget details about something you are reading for pleasure no harm is done, but if you forget details in a textbook for example, details that may be on a quiz or end of year test that's something else again. So we read slower to make sure we actually did read that text correctly.

Hmmm never thought of it that way. I just thought that reading books for a test or studying would mean I'd read slower because hey it can be a bit dull if you don't like the topic. But then again, maybe I'm unconsciously just remembering important details. Psychology can be really cool.

[Ninjalawyer]

Originally Posted by eschwartz

Well, I always knew that speed-reading was bogus! But extra proof is always nice, so thanks for the link ... er, that is, when you fix it, currently it makes a new thread in this forum.

Drat; it's fixed now!

[crich70]

Originally Posted by mojos

Hmmm never thought of it that way. I just thought that reading books for a test or studying would mean I'd read slower because hey it can be a bit dull if you don't like the topic. But then again, maybe I'm unconsciously just remembering important details. Psychology can be really cool.

Well there could be something to the idea of finding the topic dull if it is something that doesn't interest you, but which you have to read as well. I remember reading an article that Steve Allen wrote about classic books and the right age to read a given one. He'd had to read "Moby Dick" when in school and found it a chore because he didn't like the book at that age. Years later he picked the book up again and enjoyed it.

[tompe]

Originally Posted by crich70

I think it's a matter of psychology myself mojos. If you forget details about something you are reading for pleasure no harm is done, but if you forget details in a textbook for example, details that may be on a quiz or end of year test that's something else again. So we read slower to make sure we actually did read that text correctly.

Well, if you read a detective story were you are supposed to try to figure out who is guilty as a big part of the pleasure than you cannot forget details in the book.

And if you read a math text book the most important things is to understand things so that you can derive specific details when needed. You actually do not need to remember them.

[FacebookVirus]

Also a factor is the formulaic nature of many fiction works.

A relative of mine boasts about his reading speed, and yet almost everything he reads is by one well-known author who wrote a zillion books - all of the same type. Many of these books he has read before.

He didn't write one hundred books, he wrote one book a hundred times. The same idea applies to reading.

[caleb72]

Speed reading is a funny thing. I've never consciously tried to develop that skill and I think I probably read quite slowly (never actually measured). But it can depend on what I'm reading.

I find with technical reading, I can often skim or jump blocks of text. As my familiarity with a topic grows, I can often tell what a paragraph reads before I get to it. Since most professions these days are engineered so that you have more work that you can possibly complete in the allotted time, this abbreviated approach to reading documents becomes a survival mechanism.

However, with fiction I tend not to use these approaches often. If I'm doing it it's either a sign that I'm not enjoying that section of the book very much or that I'm trying to get to the end of a chapter in a big hurry for some reason.

I wonder if I'll ever bother testing myself or become interested in enhancing reading speed.

[crich70]

Originally Posted by tompe

Well, if you read a detective story were you are supposed to try to figure out who is guilty as a big part of the pleasure than you cannot forget details in the book.

And if you read a math text book the most important things is to understand things so that you can derive specific details when needed. You actually do not need to remember them.

But you do need to retain the information contained in the formula's even if it's as simple as 2 *2 =4 or 4/2=2 .