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Speed reading promises are too good to be true

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Re: Speed reading promises are too good to be true

#41
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…

I call bullshit. What he describes would be a major accomplishment worthy of publication in the most prestigious scientific journals but of course it's simply not true.

He may delude himself into believing he's actually getting anything out of the books he's speed reading but I bet if put to the test, his performance in terms of comprehension would be abysmal.

Re: Speed reading promises are too good to be true

#42
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…

Actually, it's only technical books (programming specifically) that I'm referring to. I do not read fiction that way (I actually prefer audiobooks for fiction mainly because speed reading fiction is less enjoyable).

To be fair (and to handle "bullshit" being called by another person's comments), the books usually cover a topic I am already at least partly (and sometimes very) familiar with. And many programming books contain pages of "just code" that are sparse in text. Books on topics that I am less familiar with I read more slowly, but rarely take more than a few hours (3-4) to get through the first read. I've explained in more detail in other comments, but the first read is a skim/scan without notes and without doing any exercises. It's to get a 30,000 ft view of the book to help identify areas I need to study more deeply.

Subsequent reads I focus on exercises, but hone in on areas I am less familiar with. The second read is much slower than the first. The most recent example I can think was Bjarn Stroustrup's "The C++ Programming Language". I've done little with C++ in about 10 years so this was almost all "new material". I started on Saturday morning and completed the first read in about 3 hours. I spent the day Sunday doing the second read, taking notes, but still without exercises. I spent the remainder of the week on subsequent reading doing exercises in 2-3 hour sessions every night.

This book would have taken me a month to read, the first time, before (I recall a Novell Netware book of 800 pages taking me almost a month to complete). And I would have gotten much less out of it as a result of the gaps of time between topics. I am not presently a "C++ genius" having read the book, but I've written a few programs and am comfortable with the material. And I know I'll read it again and refer to it.

You can't become a proficient speed reader over night or with just "some training" or "a course" without a lot of practice. I love reading programming books of any kind and approach it partly as an exercise to become better at consuming information, so every book I hope to get a little more efficient (though the law of diminishing returns applies).

Re: Speed reading promises are too good to be true

#43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I call bullshit. What he describes would be a major accomplishment worthy of publication in the most prestigious scientific journals but of course it's simply not true. He may delude himself into believing he's actually getting anything out of the books he's speed reading but I bet if put to the test, his performance in terms of comprehension would be abysmal.

I'm not sure what else I can write to convince you -- I've detailed how I "read" so quickly in a few comments on this topic. It's true but I don't think it's all that unusual (your comment is making me think it may be which I'll try to keep from going to my head).

I used to work in Infrastructure in the early 2000s and a coworker and I had a running contest on how many certifications we could amass (my company had a library of reading materials). It was my coworker who pushed me to take a speed reading course. We'd each read 600+ page books covering the material around 3 times (maybe 4, but later reads are not complete reads) over a week while testing each other at work. Both of our pass rates were perfect[1] (Novell CNE, CNA, MCNE, A+, Security+ -- do those still exist? -- and a myriad of other certifications of dubious worth) -- failing meant we had to pay out of pocket, so we passed.

The "first read" is a skim/scan, very superficial read, and it's easy to get through a large book this way, especially if it's material I'm already comfortable with. The 1000 page books are technical books (points I made elsewhere) that aren't all wall to wall content, lots of diagrams, code, etc. I read a book more than once if I want to learn the content (the first read is partly to weed out a book that has no value to me).

At the end of the day, it's the equivalent time it takes to learn the material that matters. After a 2 hour "read" (skim/scan/speed-read) of a 1,000 page book, I'm nowhere near where I'd be if I had read the entire thing, slowly, word-for-word while taking notes and doing exercises. If I feel the book is worth it, I'll read it again, then read parts of it carefully, to the point where I've likely read the book 3-4 times with notes and exercises included. I'm at "equivalent to reading it slowly" by the end of the second read. But that's a low bar for a book of that size. Considering that same exercise would have taken me a month to complete the first read. How much of Chapter 4-6 will I remember on day 30 of multi-evening broken-up reading sessions reading it "slowly"? How likely am I to be burned out by then? By doing it this way, much more of it is fresh in my mind and (most important to me), I'm more likely to devote the time to learning the material knowing it will take a week, not a month+, to get what I want out of the book. After finishing a C++ book recently, I was writing in the language. I'm nowhere near proficient, having only two books and a 10-year gap in my C++ code experience, but "the old way" I would have been more likely to let it sit on the shelf half-read, never completing it. If I did, I wouldn't have been able to write more than a "Hello, World" program without having it pulled up along-side my IDE, constantly referring to bits I hadn't read in over a week.

[1] Pass rates, not scores. There were some tests I squeaked by one question over passing. I scored perfectly on more than a few, though, too.

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