Sorry, You Can’t Speed Read
nytimes.com
Sorry, You Can’t Speed Read
1–10 of 133 posts
Re: Sorry, You Can’t Speed Read
#2I run text through text-to-speech while reading visually to double my attention.
Re: Sorry, You Can’t Speed Read
#3I skimmed this article in about 20 seconds and then went back and read it more closely. I don't feel like I missed much on the first pass.
Sure you won't get the full literary experience skimming through War and Peace. But fluffy articles with a single tweet's worth of information content I can "speed read" just fine.
Re: Sorry, You Can’t Speed Read
#4I run text through text-to-speech while reading visually to double my attention.
Yeah, when they mentioned speeding up spoken texts, that was when I had to disagree with the article -- I can easily listen to some material at 1.25-2x, though it's true that if my mind wanders at all, I miss quite a bit. Of course, that's also true when reading at normal speeds, but since it's then playing back slower, you'd miss less in the same amount of time, right?
In this case, I swiped down with two fingers to start iOS' speech function and it read the article quite quickly for me. I was able to better follow along with the reading as it highlighted words on the page. So while I won't say the article is wrong in absolute terms -- it's definitely a different experience to "speed read" in any practical manner than to read each word carefully on your own -- I do think some speed up with assistive tools or training is possible. :)
Re: Sorry, You Can’t Speed Read
#5I run text through text-to-speech while reading visually to double my attention.
This is either insane, or pure genius. Has anyone else tried this?
Re: Sorry, You Can’t Speed Read
#6Hmm interesting. But speed reading isn't just less eye movement while reading line by line. It's using your peripheralife vision to read longer chunks of words line by line. Like when driving you see a sign and just know what you saw without slowly reading it. Idk if I agree with this 100%.
Re: Sorry, You Can’t Speed Read
#7The linked article abstract from Psychological Science says:
> The way to maintain high comprehension and get through text faster is to practice reading and to become a more skilled language user (e.g., through increased vocabulary). This is because language skill is at the heart of reading speed.
So, in short, moving your eyes over the page faster only helps if your speed of language interpretation can keep up (the nytimes article has a slightly paraphrased version).
I wasn't really impressed by the article. It seemed to add very little to the abstract, just a couple of concrete examples of speed reading techniques (and one accompanying study).
Defining speed reading as 'eye movement speedups' and explicitly excluding 'language comprehension speedups' is fine, but it makes me want an article about what happens when you combine both, which I know for a fact can result in reading speedups by a whole number multiple.
Re: Sorry, You Can’t Speed Read
#8I skimmed this article in about 20 seconds and then went back and read it more closely. I don't feel like I missed much on the first pass. Sure you won't get the full literary experience skimming through War and Peace. But fluffy articles with a single tweet's worth of information content I can "speed read" just fine.
skip reading is perhaps a better name for it. I got the gist - speed reading doesn't work, saved myself a few minutes only skipping to the start of each paragraph.
Re: Sorry, You Can’t Speed Read
#9I don't get why anybody would want to speed read a novel. (Outside of a High School literature class where you're being forced to read Ethan Frome and you just want to get back to playing Minecraft, of course).
When I'm reading Hemingway, I'll go back and read individual paragraphs three times to squeeze the last drop of juice out of them. There are only so many Hemingway paragraphs in existence, so wasting one feels like cramming an entire bar of imported Spanish 70% Artisan Chocolate in your mouth and washing it down with soda. Why would you do that???
Take Sordo on the Hill from For Whom the Bell Tolls. It's just a few pages about these guys shooting at each other, but there's so much crammed in there. You learn an awful lot about that guy, his feelings about this war, why he's fighting it, how he ended up on this stupid hill, and why he's going to go ahead and die there rather than any of his other options. He's a real person with complicated motivations and after a few pages you come away knowing pretty much everything you need to know about him and why he was acting the way he was earlier in the book.
Of course you could skim that scene in a minute flat and get the Hollywood Blockbuster version with the crazy local militia yelling stereotypical catch phrases and dying in a blaze of glory.
But then can you really say you read that book? Wouldn't you still want to go back and read it for real some time?
Re: Sorry, You Can’t Speed Read
#10Sorry, NYT, I can.
Of course, speed reading gets some meaning lost. But the very skill of speed-reading amounts to developing a sense of look-ahead: first, intuitively establishing fast anchors in text to actually read a few moments later; second, to expand on this anchors, absorb the information and introduce feedback corrections in look-ahead patterns.
All my reading is "speed reading"; I even can't follow the linear text word by word anymore, this is way too boring. But I can regulate the time distance between look-ahead and absorbing passes, and thus the ratio between speed and meaning extracted. This is invaluable to find something in technical documentation, or prepare for exams.
And I can't listen to audiobooks or lectures; they are sooooo slow...