In a similar vein: the millennial fascination with speed listening: consuming podcasts and audiobooks at 1.5 to 3x speed. The point about comprehension is key: if you complete Altlas Shugged in 8 hours but don’t understand the motivation of the characters, what was the point?
I Was Wrong About Speed Reading (2015)
131–140 of 170 posts
Re: I Was Wrong About Speed Reading (2015)
#132I took a speed reading course one summer when I was in college. My mother thought that it would give me an edge. First they test you and my reading speed was already on the high end of normal. In the course I did theoretically more than double my reading speed. But my comprehension was based on the test they gave me. Plus I noticed that I tired quickly doing speed reading. I was a kid who loved to read and had no pro…
speed reading ruined my reading comprehension and I never recovered from it. :-/
I just read out loud, louder if it doesn't work.
Re: I Was Wrong About Speed Reading (2015)
#133In a similar vein: the millennial fascination with speed listening: consuming podcasts and audiobooks at 1.5 to 3x speed. The point about comprehension is key: if you complete Altlas Shugged in 8 hours but don’t understand the motivation of the characters, what was the point?
That's a fair question, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't listen faster. You should listen at the speed you feel comfortable at (and potentially work on increasing that speed.)
Some recordings of the same book have a several-hour difference between the different recordings. Different narrators read at different speeds, and most of them aim for clarity to all listeners. I don't think there's any specific reason to listen to the slowest recording, just like I don't think there's any specific reason not to speed up a recording to where you are comfortabl.
Re: I Was Wrong About Speed Reading (2015)
#134This article kinda confirms what I've felt when I read about speed reading: if you're reading anything other than fiction/romance, comprehension is the bottleneck. So reading half a page of a math book at the time would have been completely useless (I was in university at the time).
> So reading half a page of a math book at the time would have been completely useless (I was in university at the time).
There's a world of difference between mathematics textbooks and regular reading.
Re: I Was Wrong About Speed Reading (2015)
#135In a similar vein: the millennial fascination with speed listening: consuming podcasts and audiobooks at 1.5 to 3x speed. The point about comprehension is key: if you complete Altlas Shugged in 8 hours but don’t understand the motivation of the characters, what was the point?
That's a fair question, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't listen faster. You should listen at the speed you feel comfortable at (and potentially work on increasing that speed.) Some recordings of the same book have a several-hour difference between the different recordings. Different narrators read at different speeds, and most of them aim for clarity to all listeners. I don't think there's any specific reason to l…
I completely agree: I can reread an audiobook at 2x or more but if I want to comprehend something meaty theN 1x with a few re-listens to selected sections is in order. And for dessert listening (podcasts) which are more about entertainment than learning are okay to zoom through.
Re: I Was Wrong About Speed Reading (2015)
#136Earlier quoted context omitted.
I, as a non-native English speaker who mainly interface English through written language and rarely via spoken language, find this fascinating. I am able to read articles and blog posts in English rapidly and with full comprehension, but I'm totally NOT able to speak out loud most of the words. I find that it's mostly through visual medium the words "come" to me.
I wonder if there's anyone out there who can read a non-alphabetic language (e.g. Chinese) but doesn't even know how to pronounce what they're reading. Maybe an experiment could involve a fictional ideogram language, and compare peoples subvocalizing (or lack thereof) versus their native one.
Do people subvocalize emoji, I wonder?
Re: I Was Wrong About Speed Reading (2015)
#137I have learned to read both slower and faster. The trick is that you can use both in the same session, and for many materials, this is by far the best approach.
My comprehension went up massively when I started reading out loud in the evenings, despite how childish it feels sometimes. I noticed I got a lot more out of audio than text (I tend to read too fast and not let things sink in), so I started recording my own audio for on the go.
I realized while doing this that reading out loud works great for me because it forces each word to sink in, rather than rushing ahead as was my habit.
Another thing I learned from listening to audio is, I come back to it many times, so I end up "reading" the same books sometimes dozens of times. And this is precisely what is at the core of many speed reading systems: multiple exposure.
Scott dismisses "read as fast as you flip the pages" courses. It's important to clarify this. This is actually his first tip later in the article, "Skim before you read!" The difference is, beyond just a skim and a read phase, there is an extra "photo-read" phase added on the front.
Have you ever opened a page, and a word or passage jumps out at you, visually? The word "sex" for example, has just such an effect. The idea here is you must read with purpose, with intention, with questions, and if you do, then while you are scanning the book with your eyes, you are building a map of the material, so when you come back to it later, you will remember where to look to find what you need.
In many cases, a book is large and we are only interested in a small fraction of the material. This is the case for most textbooks and their exams, or for a personal project only some aspects will be necessary to extract. The multi-pass approach to reading allows you to locate everything you need, learn where it is, ask questions and keep coming back to it as needed.
Reading slower to build comprehension when you need it can integrate perfectly well with this nonlinear approach: you find what you need faster, and then you give it all your concentration, making sure you understand each part before continuing.
(Of course, this will give rise to yet further questions you can explore the rest of the text with! :)
Re: I Was Wrong About Speed Reading (2015)
#138I'm what I've come to call a 'slow thinker'. My perception speed is normal, but the gray matter ticks over at a very slow rate of knots and my comprehension of what I'm seeing/hearing/feeling unpacks over the course of several seconds. I've noticed I often have an initial reaction to things, then a 'slow reaction' that is sometimes quite different and factors in more things I know. It's like it takes some time to 'di…
I'm a bit like this, I think. My raw reading speed is decent. But when I'm reading, I'm constantly stopping to flip back and check something, or to stop and think through the implications of what I've just read, or, when the internet is to hand, to look up some related information. As a result, my net reading speed is diabolical.
But to me, this isn't about thinking slowly, it's about thinking thoroughly. I think I pick things up from texts that faster readers skate right over.
Of course, I haven't actually measured any of this, so it's probably just comforting nonsense.
Re: I Was Wrong About Speed Reading (2015)
#139Reading speed strikes me similarly to typing speed when it comes to programming. It's fun to read/type fast, but it's not really the bottleneck.
This is true to some degree. I'd like to think of a better analogy. Typing in programming is like running in soccer. It's definitely a problem if you type slowly or can't type for a long period of time. Passing the certain speed and endurance, typing faster doesn't help much. It's the same with soccer.
I think it's like Amdahl's Law. Programming is thinking followed by typing. If you spend half your time thinking and half your time typing, then doubling your typing speed will increase your programming speed by a third. But doubling it again will only increase your programming speed by a sixth, and even with infinite typing speed, you've only doubled your programming speed.
Re: I Was Wrong About Speed Reading (2015)
#140In a similar vein: the millennial fascination with speed listening: consuming podcasts and audiobooks at 1.5 to 3x speed. The point about comprehension is key: if you complete Altlas Shugged in 8 hours but don’t understand the motivation of the characters, what was the point?
If you can listen to Busta Rhymes, Aesop Rock, even Eminem, and make sense of what they're saying, you can listen to an audiobook at 1.5x speed.