Anyone having any notable experience with speed (rapid) reading ? I came across it again in a Study Skills book that dealt with the art of selecting information (among others) Have you seen any notable improvement in your reading pace and information retention?
I've never seen much value in deliberately trying to read faster than one's natural pace. Then again, I say that as someone who has read faster and faster and faster throughout life,without any effort other than just reading a lot of books. If I were constantly reading and never getting any faster, I guess I might get frustrated. But all the same, why do you want to speed read? Are you buried in far too much academic material?
I sometimes use rapid serial visual presentation (e.g. spreeder) to speed read. It works wonderfully for light reading, but not so well for dense material.
You present fair arguments; one thing is that I know I'm a slow reader which is a bit annoying when confronted with readers who "down" a book ten times faster than me - not that it matters. But another thing is that I somewhat lose the will to finish a started book, so I basically multiple-read many books. I know my pace is natural to me, however the prospect of finishing my reads faster is...attractive. There's a pile I would like to reduce. Those are books I've purchased, so it's a kind of a personal commitment to finish them (faster)(or sometime, at least).
Stop saying the words to yourself and you'll use more of your brain on reading and consequently read faster and remember more.
I have to disagree with both "use more of your brain" and "remember more"...if you read with just your eyes, you use one part of your brain, read out loud and you use a second part of your brain, write it out as you read and you use a third part...it WILL be slower, but that's how to use more brain and remember more. However, unless your aim is to be able to quote verbatim (as in an exam) why would you need to memorize what you're reading?
@daemon, that speeder is a good tool. It's uncomfortable to use at first, sort of weird, but it's interesting. Thanks for sharing!
Yes ! It's a great tool, thank you for sharing. I wonder whether I'll see any improvement by using it...
Because you are using less of your brain It's NOT just conjecture, my wife studied "how we learn" quite hard as a prelude to educating our children...just because you haven't tested it yourself doesn't make it untrue.
Actually, this makes sense...I've read about this...the information enters one's brain multi-modally, thus entailing better retention... There seems to be quite a hazy discussion around this. I have a friend who can read at amazing 1000 words per minute and he does not miss a word, an important piece of info or suchlike and he understands 95% of what he reads. For him speed reading obviously works. But for me a mere mortal I don't know what works. Mabye reading slightly faster than is my average and see what happens in a month or so.
I love reading excellent prose. When I get my hands on a book by a good stylist, I read very slowly because I like to savor the sentences. I'll read many passages aloud if they impress me enough. I usually don't bother with badly-written books (Dan Brown, Clive Cussler, etc.) because they don't give me the pleasure of good prose, but when I do read them, I read more quickly. Such books usually aren't very challenging or worth remembering, anyway. The upshot of all this is that I read slowly because the books I like to read deserve to be read slowly. They're that good. If a book is lousy, I zip through it or put it aside entirely, because it isn't worth my time.
This makes me feel better. I am a very slow reader (only with fiction) and was always ashamed of this.
Not only am I a slow reader, I often have to re-read what I've just read much of the time, as I don't always absorb what I've just read. It can be frustrating at times.
Thank you guys, I feel much better too. Some texts deserve to be read with dignity. It would be an offend to speed read Shakespeare or a piece of poetry. I have the first two books by George R.R. Martin - I was pondering speed reading them as they're quite sizeable for fantasy books but after two pages realized his prose is a dense one and has to be read with attention.
i'm a fast reader, my last score was 623 wpm. (something close to that) it's cuz i read alot of books. i was able to read treasure island (and understand it) in a day.
I read pretty quickly. I skim the uninteresting things and I really focus on dialogue. I've been getting through my reading material quite quickly lately.
Well, the first time I tried to read it I was in 6th grade (failed miserably, dat old english doe) Then after 3 years I gave it another shot. I was able to understand and get into it.
Now that I've found this website: http://www.majortests.com/sat/reading-comprehension.php ...speed reading is pretty much debunked for me. It supports my slow-paced reading style. Sure, the texts presented there are much more information-dense, but still it tells me something. Try it out, I wonder how you perform guys.
