The Truth About Speed Reading

[gwhite]

Originally Posted by Salgueiros

So speed reading is not reading some of the text. Nothing we didn't know already...

It's rather more complicated than that.
When we are taught to read we read each word from left to right as we do with each line of text. As we advance however we become skilled in acquiring some perspective as to what the passage is about, and this means we can now predict what words are likely to occur and recognise them by their distinctive shape and length. When we reach this stage our eyes no longer move from word to word, but jump randomly all over the printed page extracting the meaning of the whole text from recognising word shapes and building the understanding of the text from doing this. Given that the processes involved in perception seem to form a large part of this, then this is far removed from being a simple mechanism.

The process was understood by experiments using special apparatus which allowed the tracking of a reader's eyes as they moved over the page.

[Nancy Fulda]

Originally Posted by gwhite

The process was understood by experiments using special apparatus which allowed the tracking of a reader's eyes as they moved over the page.

And it's exemplified by images like the following:



Most people parse the text as "A Bird in the Bush" the first time around. It takes quite a bit of effort to slow down enough to spot the repeated word.

I can totally imagine that some speed-readers have wired their neurons to parse entire lines of text in the same way that typical readers parse entire words. I can also totally imagine that not everyone's brain is capable of making the switch, and that for many people speed-reading is equivalent to word-dropping. The existence of one does not necessarily preclude the other.

[Nancy Fulda]

Here's another of my favorites:



In fact, the entire source web site is pretty awesome. Lots of fabulous word illusions, and plenty of temptation to waste twenty minutes. http://www.marcofolio.net/images/sto...first_last.jpg

[tompe]

I can totally imagine that some speed-readers have wired their neurons to parse entire lines of text in the same way that typical readers parse entire words.

I have a hard time understand how this can work since the eye cannot see one line at the time. So there will be a time difference when sensing different parts of a line. So the parsing till start when the whole line is not available.

[gwhite]

Originally Posted by Nancy Fulda

I can totally imagine that some speed-readers have wired their neurons to parse entire lines of text in the same way that typical readers parse entire words. I can also totally imagine that not everyone's brain is capable of making the switch, and that for many people speed-reading is equivalent to word-dropping. The existence of one does not necessarily preclude the other.

I would think that readers possessing higher reading skills, the process which I've described above, would be extracting the meaning from entire pages rather than lines. The perception process, once we have identified the context of the text, would allow us to identify words by their shape and also by those particular words' likelihood of occurring in the text. I imagine all of this would occur almost simultaneously.

I think that what I've described above is certainly a higher reading skill, but I suspect that "speed reader" may describe those who have the ability to carry out this even faster than those with higher reading skills.

[Tarana]

Speed reading isn't bogus. Learning to skim just happens to fall into the speed reading category and it's what everybody points to. However, it is not the main point of 'speed reading.' Speed reading is about picking up the speed of your reading so that you aren't plodding. A lot of students drop out of college the first year or two because they simply cannot keep up with the load of material that they have to read weekly. Usually the fault is one of two things - lack of time management or slow reading. Speed reading simply teaches you some skills to practice to increase your rate of reading. For some, it's pointless - they already read 500-600 words per minute. Any improvements are going to be slight. It's for the person reading 100-200 words per minute who will likely see significant improvement.

If all you read is technical stuff, your reading often slows down. You can use the same techniques to speed you up when reading novels, if your speed is bothersome to you.

All of this ignores comprehension. Your speed is going to be limited to your rate of comprehension. If the words and concepts are easy for you to understand, you will read faster than if they are not. That is why most people read novels far faster than they do technical books. There also can be physical limits. My speed is very low today because I have to often go back and reread (short term memory loss). I don't usually have the same issue with audiobooks because they use a different part of the brain.

Finally, as Crich70 mentions, if you enjoy what you are reading, you will likely read it faster than if you don't enjoy it.