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Speed reading promises are too good to be true

sciencedaily.com

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Re: Speed reading promises are too good to be true

#31

Post by philipwood »

Reading used to be supremely difficult. A piece used to be read aloud - after several personal practice sessions to gain familiarity with the text.

In the 4th century being able to read silently was notably strange.

We've refactored the process quite a bit since then:

Splitting individual words. Introducing capitals to highlight paragraph boundaries and proper names. Punctuation to speed up parsing. Inter-paragraph spacing and semantic and syntactic conventions to improve concept parsing. Etc., etc.

I see no reason to believe we are done yet. :-)

Re: Speed reading promises are too good to be true

#32

Post by vpeters25 »

sosuke wrote: post #27
vpeters25 wrote: post #26

Link to the actual paper: http://psi.sagepub.com/content/17/1/4.full?ijkey=0GSjhNaccRK... I took on speed reading in college after realizing I needed to study and learn faster or I would fail miserably. The book I picked up seemed like a lot of common sense steps the first one being to inhibiting subvocalization, the internal voice we are used to hear while reading since we where taught to read out loud. The idea her…

Did you find a personal improvement when inhibiting subvocalization? I find it an interesting idea. I'd love to be able to process two streams of English at once but find the inner voice has only one channel it can work with. I can't listen and read but that would be awesome.

In my personal experience just inhibiting subvocalization resulted in increasing my reading speed to around 300 wpm. With other techniques (using peripheral vision to read multiple words per "shot") I got to around 440 wpm. All this based on the tests in the book I used.

The book[1] claimed you could reach up to 1200 wpm by doing all the exercises, I never got to finish all of them.

[1] "Superlectura veloz" (fast super-reading) - Carlos Quiroga

Re: Speed reading promises are too good to be true

#33

Post by teraflop »

philipwood wrote: post #31

Reading used to be supremely difficult. A piece used to be read aloud - after several personal practice sessions to gain familiarity with the text. In the 4th century being able to read silently was notably strange. We've refactored the process quite a bit since then: Splitting individual words. Introducing capitals to highlight paragraph boundaries and proper names. Punctuation to speed up parsing. Inter-paragraph s…

> In the 4th century being able to read silently was notably strange.

I've seen it argued that this is actually a myth, popularized by Nietzsche. See e.g. http://hour25.heroesx.chs.harvard.edu/?topic=reading-silentl...

Re: Speed reading promises are too good to be true

#34

Post by wapapaloobop »

vpeters25 wrote: post #32
sosuke wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you find a personal improvement when inhibiting subvocalization? I find it an interesting idea. I'd love to be able to process two streams of English at once but find the inner voice has only one channel it can work with. I can't listen and read but that would be awesome.

In my personal experience just inhibiting subvocalization resulted in increasing my reading speed to around 300 wpm. With other techniques (using peripheral vision to read multiple words per "shot") I got to around 440 wpm. All this based on the tests in the book I used. The book[1] claimed you could reach up to 1200 wpm by doing all the exercises, I never got to finish all of them. [1] "Superlectura veloz" (fast sup…

There seems to be some ambiguity in the term 'subvocalization'.

Should it refer strictly to (A) the internal monologue, (B) micro-movements of speaking muscles, or (C) both?

Correct me if I'm wrong, but my suspicion is that parsing and comprehension of text would be impossible without A. But also that A is slowed by B; thus reducing or eliminating B is beneficial.

Re: Speed reading promises are too good to be true

#35

Post by adajos »

vpeters25 wrote: post #26

Link to the actual paper: http://psi.sagepub.com/content/17/1/4.full?ijkey=0GSjhNaccRK... I took on speed reading in college after realizing I needed to study and learn faster or I would fail miserably. The book I picked up seemed like a lot of common sense steps the first one being to inhibiting subvocalization, the internal voice we are used to hear while reading since we where taught to read out loud. The idea her…

I can't imagine that it's possible for me to inhibit subvocalization. It seems intrinsic to the way I read.

Re: Speed reading promises are too good to be true

#36

Post by vpeters25 »

wapapaloobop wrote: post #34
vpeters25 wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my personal experience just inhibiting subvocalization resulted in increasing my reading speed to around 300 wpm. With other techniques (using peripheral vision to read multiple words per "shot") I got to around 440 wpm. All this based on the tests in the book I used. The book[1] claimed you could reach up to 1200 wpm by doing all the exercises, I never got to finish all of them. [1] "Superlectura veloz" (fast sup…

There seems to be some ambiguity in the term 'subvocalization'. Should it refer strictly to (A) the internal monologue, (B) micro-movements of speaking muscles, or (C) both? Correct me if I'm wrong, but my suspicion is that parsing and comprehension of text would be impossible without A. But also that A is slowed by B; thus reducing or eliminating B is beneficial.

The book I used on speed reading claimed subvocalization (internal monologue) was a "bad habit" that can be eliminated with practice. As far as my personal experience, it does.

Re: Speed reading promises are too good to be true

#37

Post by vpeters25 »

adajos wrote: post #35
vpeters25 wrote: post #26

Link to the actual paper: http://psi.sagepub.com/content/17/1/4.full?ijkey=0GSjhNaccRK... I took on speed reading in college after realizing I needed to study and learn faster or I would fail miserably. The book I picked up seemed like a lot of common sense steps the first one being to inhibiting subvocalization, the internal voice we are used to hear while reading since we where taught to read out loud. The idea her…

I can't imagine that it's possible for me to inhibit subvocalization. It seems intrinsic to the way I read.

I initially thought the same and found it was really hard to shake it off. It took me several weeks of frustratingly sticking up with the exercises until I was able to do it.

But I still tend to fall back into it when I'm reading something hard to understand, specially when reading english which is not my native language.

Re: Speed reading promises are too good to be true

#38

Post by radicality »

mdip wrote: post #25

On its own, you're not going to magically be able to reduce your reading time by 95% and still maintain the level of retention you get by a slow word-for-word read from a few weeks with an app/course. As the article states, there's more to reading than just swallowing a word more quickly. But the techniques enable you to change the way you consume information by eliminating the bottleneck and associated procrastinati…

So this 1000 page book you can read in a few hours are technical or fiction books? What about the 500 page book over a weekend? Both sound extremely impressive. What type of technical books are these? Any technical/programming book I read usually has a lot of exercises to do, or is just non-trivial and requires more time from me. For example I can't imagine it being possible to speed-read something like 'Introduction to Algorithms', or anything technical really.

Re: Speed reading promises are too good to be true

#39

Post by lhopki01 »

wapapaloobop wrote: post #34
vpeters25 wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my personal experience just inhibiting subvocalization resulted in increasing my reading speed to around 300 wpm. With other techniques (using peripheral vision to read multiple words per "shot") I got to around 440 wpm. All this based on the tests in the book I used. The book[1] claimed you could reach up to 1200 wpm by doing all the exercises, I never got to finish all of them. [1] "Superlectura veloz" (fast sup…

There seems to be some ambiguity in the term 'subvocalization'. Should it refer strictly to (A) the internal monologue, (B) micro-movements of speaking muscles, or (C) both? Correct me if I'm wrong, but my suspicion is that parsing and comprehension of text would be impossible without A. But also that A is slowed by B; thus reducing or eliminating B is beneficial.

It is almost certainly the internal monologue. I can read in two ways. One in which I have the words in my head as I read them and the other in which I just 'comprehend' entire sections of sentences at once. In the second there is never an internal monologue just comprehension. The second method lets me read most books in an evening, not sure what that works out in wpm but I was always significantly faster than anyone else at school at reading.

Re: Speed reading promises are too good to be true

#40

Post by lhopki01 »

adajos wrote: post #35
vpeters25 wrote: post #26

Link to the actual paper: http://psi.sagepub.com/content/17/1/4.full?ijkey=0GSjhNaccRK... I took on speed reading in college after realizing I needed to study and learn faster or I would fail miserably. The book I picked up seemed like a lot of common sense steps the first one being to inhibiting subvocalization, the internal voice we are used to hear while reading since we where taught to read out loud. The idea her…

I can't imagine that it's possible for me to inhibit subvocalization. It seems intrinsic to the way I read.

I never consciously inhibited subvocalization, it just must have happened at some point as I got faster and faster at reading. I think it just comes down to speed. I comprehend the word or phrase before I can even begin a subvocalisation and so I'm already onto the next section.
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