Is it real? My girl swears it’s true but I don’t really believe her. She bests me on ‘competitions’ but I think she’s cheating/lying. And when I tested her comprehension it wasn’t as good as mine was…
Anyone ever take speed-reading lessons/courses and actually learn to speed-read?
No liars or salespeople, please.
I used to speed read. I can’t remember what course I took but it worked. It is a skill that needs to be practiced. My comprehension was good but I don’t see it being useful for technical reading.
So you’re saying it’s good isofar as what’s being read with the speed-reading technique isn’t any more complex than a john grisham novel?
[quote]disciplined wrote:
So you’re saying it’s good isofar as what’s being read with the speed-reading technique isn’t any more complex than a john grisham novel?[/quote]
I would agree with this statement. You can easily skim a book and get the basic gist of the plot or thesis, but if you want to get the nitty-gritty detail, or understand the technical aspects, you need to read closely.
The holdup of reading is synthesizing what you are reading. You can train your brain to absorb faster, but there comes a point where you must slow down and let your brain digest what you just read. When reading a technical book, you have to slow down to grasp the concept.
With a fiction book, you usually don’t have to slow down to get the basic plot, but you’ll slow down (or even re-read) if you want to get the details of the plot or notice the literary style of the author.
[quote]disciplined wrote:
So you’re saying it’s good isofar as what’s being read with the speed-reading technique isn’t any more complex than a john grisham novel?[/quote]
Lol. Speed reading just got pwned.
[quote]disciplined wrote:
So you’re saying it’s good isofar as what’s being read with the speed-reading technique isn’t any more complex than a john grisham novel?[/quote]
Exactly. Almost every single speed reading book I have read says (usually toward the ending of the book) that “technical” material will need to be read more slowly. They also usually throw in a cautionary note about reading fiction too quickly, because you should slow down to enjoy it. The logical conclusion being… the things I want to speed read I can’t, and the things I can, I shouldn’t. Lame. Way lame.
I’ve given it a fair shake, and I don’t think there are any shortcuts. The people I know who speed read regularly tend to have poorer comprehension, and some of them accidentally read the same novel twice, because they’ve forgotten that they read it and the details of the plot only seem vaguely familiar.
[quote]disciplined wrote:
Is it real? My girl swears it’s true but I don’t really believe her. She bests me on ‘competitions’ but I think she’s cheating/lying. And when I tested her comprehension it wasn’t as good as mine was…
Anyone ever take speed-reading lessons/courses and actually learn to speed-read?
No liars or salespeople, please.[/quote]
Read the first and last paragraph of every chapter. Read the first and last sentence of every other paragraph.
You’ll be surprised how well this works.
Question… Can one speed read a speed reading book?
I’ll have to agree with what has been said already. It works but not to an extent at which it would be really useful.
Learned how to speed-read at a very young age. Never really had any problems with reading comprehension at all, except when I let my attention wander. As a result I can blow through pretty much anything but the densest, most pedantic books in a day or so.
Took me like two days to get through “Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell”, whereas “Cell” only took me about 4 hours. However, I do find myself slowing down for the meatier stuff.
[quote]Coldiron wrote:
Question… Can one speed read a speed reading book?[/quote]
Better than that: just look at the title and claim you’ve read it. Total time spent: 1 second.
Then continue reading as you’ve always done, since, as Nephorm pointed out, that’s pretty much what it’ll come to in practice.
The only speed reading ‘trick’ that seems to work, at least for non-technical text, is to use a computer program that will flash the words successively at the center of the screen.
By doing that, your eyes don’t move and you don’t need to scan from line to line. You can get up to rather impressive speeds when reading novels.
The shortcomings of that method are that you need the book in a format the program can read (the one I had was called “vreader” (for Velocity Reader if memory serves) and would only read .txt files. Project Gutenberg ( http://www.gutenberg.org ) was quite useful for text now in the public domain. The other shortcoming being, of course, the requirement of reading while sitting at the computer.
For texts requiring a bit more thought, such as technical manuals or philosophy treatise, it’s worthless. With those text, reading speed is not the ‘bottleneck’; understanding the concepts presented in the material is.
[Edit: the program was named “Vortex Reader”, not velocity…]
[quote]pookie wrote:
The only speed reading ‘trick’ that seems to work, at least for non-technical text, is to use a computer program that will flash the words successively at the center of the screen.
By doing that, your eyes don’t move and you don’t need to scan from line to line. You can get up to rather impressive speeds when reading novels.
[/quote]
I learned to speed-read when I was about 10. I cannot pronounce on any courses but the best way to describe my technique is as follows.
You have to stop reading along the line and grab a block of text of 2-6 lines instead. I have never dissected it completely, but it is possible to absorb the visual pattern as a flow of information.
I would assume that reading ideograms work in about the same way?
At my fastest in my late teens, I could read about 1800 words/minute, 2000 if a were prepared to skimp on full comprehension. Today, progressive glasses has slowed my down substantially;-(
TQB
[quote]pookie wrote:
For texts requiring a bit more thought, such as technical manuals or philosophy treatise, it’s worthless. With those text, reading speed is not the ‘bottleneck’; understanding the material is.
[/quote]
I totally agree with your statement, and also with what Nephorm wrote. I am hardly the sharpest tool in the shed, but sometimes I have to read through technical writings (books/manuals) two or three times.
If it is a complex electronic system. I have to at times, read the theory, walk away, and come back to it before I can piece all the aspects together in my mind.
Photoreading is another great technique, although it takes longer to learn/master than speedreading.
[quote]JokerFMJ wrote:
Photoreading is another great technique, although it takes longer to learn/master than speedreading.[/quote]
Photoreading is a scam. Plain and simple. I saw a Navy study on it… you can imagine that the military would be eager to use any learning technique that would cut reading time down to almost nothing. When they compared the comprehension of photoreaders to the comprehension of people using normal skim and scan techniques the skimming/scanning group did better.
I’ve tried some speed reading “tricks” that I learned in a course, but they don’t seem to work. And as others said, it won’t help you in heavier material anyway.
That said, I find skimming skills, immensly important while searching for information on the internet. Not many shortcuts there either, but developing strategies and skills for quickly identify and skip redundandt info works very well. Not sure if it counts as speed reading.