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I 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.
I 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?
Sorry, 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 line…
>> Of course, speed reading gets some meaning lost. The whole premise of this article is that it does not, that "speed reading" is reading faster without losing meaning, and this is precisely what most people cannot actually do. The author calls the activity you are referring to "skimming", and says it is what most people do.
I 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…
I agree that it's a bit daft speed reading good works but, if you enjoy reading fiction, you'll find it difficult - you just want to enjoy it.
I 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…
Because most people don't understand that novels are for ideas, language and descriptions, as opposed to plot.
Except if we're talking about Grisham/Crichton/Dan Brown etc "novels".
I remember when I was in primary school, I overheard an explanation from one of the teachers about the children in a gifted course: "[They're] wrong: They aren't smarter than you, [they] just learn faster than you."
After a week, my memory of my experience of a book is the same whether I λx→x or λy→y, it's just that one of these methods took less time in absolute terms.
I don't really know what the reading experience is like for you, and I don't know what you call these things, but if I experience books faster than you, you want more time in your life with no other downside that I can see, then I can tell you about my experiences.
Now I say this because I'm certainly biased: I didn't enjoy the article, and where's why I think I didn't enjoy the article:
Here's the statements in the article in "support" of λx→x
• Professor Treiman concluded that it’s extremely unlikely you can greatly improve your reading speed without missing out on a lot of meaning. What exactly do you mean by "greatly" and "a lot"?.
• Skim readers spent more time reading text that was earlier in the paragraph, toward the top of the page and in an earlier page of the document. These findings were interpreted as evidence in support of a “satisficing” account of skimming process. And?
• Have you ever tried listening to an audio recording with the speaking rate dialed way up? Yes, I used to read and transcribe legal dictation at +50% and I got done faster. What exactly do you mean by "way up?".
And here's the statements in the article in "support" of λy→y
• Participants in a 2009 experiment showed reading half the words distributed relatively evenly throughout the text versus losing the beginning half or the end half had better comprehension. No kidding.
• You can learn to skim strategically so that you spend more time looking where the more important words are likely to be, and if the words are presented in a stream you may be able to learn which words to focus on and which to ignore. Sounds great.
I was unable to extract anything stronger than these statements, but then I was λy→y. What I nonetheless got out of the article, wasn't convincing to me that I, doing λy→y am somehow missing out on something. Instead, I felt like this was attempting to console people who λx→x, and perhaps maybe they shouldn't feel so bad.
I find that I'm able to read and comprehend comfortably at 650 - 700 words per minute as long as the text is well written and on a subject where I already know all the lingo.
"I took a speed-reading course and read War and Peace in twenty minutes. It involves Russia."
I 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…
The last sentence is obviously a reference to the statement by Woody Allen: "I took a speed-reading course and read War and Peace in twenty minutes. It involves Russia."