This is the second in articles in the last few months on speed reading and both basically say the same thing: "There's no way to read at a ridiculous speed and retain anything you've read".
I'm a speed reader. It did involve a sheet of paper that had "eye exercises" to practice but this was a tiny part of the class. The vast majority of the study was on scanning and skimming[1] text for information. It's a different way to read technical/programming books and I find it way superior to word-for-wording books. I can read a book this way several times. I can focus (word-for-word) on areas of weakness and skip areas that I know well. I can get through a large volume (with enormous effort) in a weekend with retention that is significantly higher than what I would have experienced if I had read it word-for-word (at least in part because I'd have only gotten through a small part of the book by then if I was reading word-for-word).
It's not magic, but intuitive, when you stop thinking about "speed reading" as a way to read fiction -- or really as anything other than a different way to consume large volumes of information for learning and it's particularly well suited to the huge technical books that plague our industry. Here's how it works in practice (for me; since I can't speak to anyone else):
- First read: 1 hour - a major part of this is simply determining if the book is worth studying. There's no shortage of huge books on complex topics in our industry and many of them aren't effective at teaching the topic they're trying to convey. If I approached reading word-for-word, I might not discover that until 5 hours later or I might miss some useful sections toward the end. In the word-for-word scenario, my choices now are to drop the book and mark that time as wasted or succumb to "loss aversion" and give up on it after several days when I'm exhausted from reading it. This also allows me to eliminate any parts that cover areas I know well, already, which is a huge problem for me when reading programming books.
- Second read: Covers only the parts of the book that were identified in the first read as "worth reading". How long this takes depends a lot on the first part. I still mostly scan/skim but with much more attention to detail. I take a lot of notes here.
- Subsequent reads: Deep reading (word-for-word) of truly useful material. Here's where I'm probably going to start doing exercises if the text includes any. This may or may not be done in the order presented in the book (especially for programming books which often introduce many concepts, dig into each, then way later cover "advanced techniques" of specific topics -- I hate this practice)
For a book that has 90% "new and useful content" to me, I can get through it in half the time it would have taken me to read word-for-word but with much higher retention. The reason for the higher retention is because when reading word-for-word I've forgotten significant portions of the early parts of the text weeks later when I've reached the latter quarter of the text. Technical books build on material chapter-by-chapter so losing the earlier parts drastically affects my understanding of the latter parts. When I sit down with a book, I block out my time in advance so that I can get through a "step" in my process from start to finish in order to avoid this problem. If I reach a latter part of the book and feel like I'm not understanding things well (I rarely feel "lost" mainly because of this technique), I consult my notes and know where to look for the information I'm missing. It makes consuming information efficient by reducing wasted time being lost, reading things that are redundant, and mentally organizing the information effectively.
On "speed reading apps" and courses, I think there's one point that is extremely misleading. That's the idea that you can use an app or take a course and over night become a speed reader. My course helped quite a lot, almost immediately, but it took 10 years before I was really good at it. This should surprise nobody. Any adult with children learning how to read understands what a complicated process reading actually is. You have to practice and when you read you have to think about your reading technique in addition to consuming the material. Thinking about it in the way I think about running: every read is about reducing the time/mile, reducing the amount of effort required to do a run, keeping your heart rate in the right place and increasing the distance you can run. You can practice running without thinking of these things, but if you're not deliberate about it, your returns on practice will become less and less.
Lastly -- I can't stress this point enough -- it's terrible for fiction. I hate reading any other way and as a result I simply don't read fiction at all. So I stick with audio books -- having a book narrated is the ultimate in word-for-word immersion. Enjoying the formation of sentences and the poetry of the text is impossible for me when speed reading.
[1] As it was described in the course: "Scanning" is reading parts of the page: headings, first paragraph sentences, intro paragraphs, etc. This gets a rough idea of context. "Skimming" I think is best described as "reading words but not sentences". You rapidly read the important words in every sentence. I can blow through a text this way in 10% of the time it takes to read...with about 1% of the information actually reaching me. It's not a way to learn material, it's a way to identify more deeply what the material is about.