
The Truth About Speed Reading - fraqed
http://lifehacker.com/the-truth-about-speed-reading-1542508398
======
graeme
This is of interest to me, as I have much practical experience with teaching
people to read faster.

I read rather fast, around 500-600 WPM. My comprehension is high, and I am
also excellent at "skimming": reading far faster than normal to identify
specific parts of the text.

Professionally, I teach people to do better on the law school admission test
(LSAT). The exam has a section on reading comprehension. Student must read
four dense passages in 35 minutes and answer questions.

Most students complain that they don't have enough time. Invariably, when I
test these students, they are reading 200-250 WPM. That's half my speed! At
the low end (sub-200) students actually vocalize words - their lips move when
they read. Other students, who have enough time, read 280+

For the past year, I have been experimenting with training students to reduce
subvocalization and read faster. A sizeable minority of students report very
rapid increased, perhaps 60-100 WPM within a week. Perhaps 40%. Many other
report improved skimming (important on the test), even if their speed doesn't
increase. About half report no improvement, but many of them simply don't try
the method, as they are skeptical.

I'm not a believer in 1000+ reading speeds, but I do think many people have a
latent capacity to read better. My own results support this, though my
research methods leave something to be desired.

Does anyone know of studies that test whether improvements within the normal
band of reading speed are possible?

~~~
krelian
Do you feel that speed reading hurts your enjoyment of fiction? I'm a slow
reader and one the one hand I want to improve so that I can read more stuff
but on the other hand I feel that it will ruin literature for me. Some
sentences lose all impact when you blaze through them at 100KMH.

~~~
jonnathanson
I can't say if this is generalizable, but it certainly hurts my enjoyment of
fiction. I read a metric shitton of fiction. I used to read fiction
professionally, in fact. I remain a very slow fiction reader, at least
subjectively, based on my assessment of my friends', peers', and family
members' fiction-reading speeds. But speed isn't really the point when I read
fiction.

Speed reading has its place, but I will never comprehend the desire to apply
speed reading to pleasure reading. Those two goals, speed and pleasure, seem
orthogonal at best to me.

Speed reading is all well and good when you have more on your desk than you
can handle, and you need to get the gist of everything quickly. It's a triage
technique.

~~~
Tarrosion
I'd love to speed read for pleasure. That's because most of my pleasure
reading is nonfiction. I don't particularly enjoy the reading; I just like
learning new things and having my mind expanded a bit. If I could breeze
through nonfiction at 1000wpm with great understanding, I'd be all over that.
The ability to do so would be worth thousands of dollars to me.

But in my experience, things like Spritz, Spreeder, or just moving eyes faster
are fine when the sentences are short and repetitive: "Most people read at
250wpm. You are now reading at 350 wpm. That is 40% faster than most people.
And this isn't even hard, right?" When I try to use such techniques to read
about, say, relativity, quantum mechanics, or international development, my
comprehension approaches 0.

------
Jugurtha
Oh God, speed reading ...

I like it when people mention how it's awesome and how it "totally works"..

I can read fast through light content, but some parts of a text need
comprehension, not just to be read. They need a mental effort that you don't
exert reading an article about a movie star.

Like many of you, I spend a lot of time reading technical doc. It's not
necessarily "complicated", but it certainly is complex. Speed readers don't
seem to get the subtlety of this, and when anyone says it works, I'd love to
hand them the IEEE articles and the bunch of journals I eat all day long and
dare them to just summarize the state of the art part.

As I said, there are parts you can read fast because the content concentration
isn't that high, and, thanks to plagiarism in the scientific community, a
_lot_ of articles are worded in an uncomfortably "similar" -cough verbatim-
way. There are parts though you need to stop. Read, re-read.

You can't speed read parts where a comma matters. Where there are a lot of
interconnections between several works, etc..

The reason, I think, some people think speed reading works is that they don't
read much and don't read much stuff that matters to be able to tell it doesn't
work.

Most people have a short attention span. Heck most wouldn't even be able to
read a "paragraph", so I wonder where they had all that "experience" speed
reading. That's like claiming to have test driven a Ferrari in a 20 feet
track. I'll simply say "Good for you".

Try to post that link to your friends who claim to speed read, most of them
won't even read it entirely. Ask them how they liked X part (that doesn't
exist). They would probably answer you assuming it's really there. There you
go, you proved my point.

------
tokenadult
My base reading speed for most English-language books and other publications
is about 500 words per minute, with good comprehension by test. I have never
had any trouble at all finishing all the sections of a standardized test with
time to spare, for example, whether the SAT or the GRE or the LSAT. There is a
huge published literature on reading skills improvement, for readers of all
levels of reading proficiency, and when I was in university I read many books
about that topic, including some books that made incredible "speed-reading"
claims, to see what I could do to improve my ability to finish my homework
while working my way through my university courses. One distillation I have of
all the advice I read is that it helps reading speed and comprehension a lot
to improve vocabulary. English vocabulary improvement can build on studying
common Greek, Latin, and French word roots that show up over and over in
English words. Doing that seems to have done the most for my reading speed and
comprehension, which was never bad in English. A book I recommend for
vocabulary development is _English Vocabulary Elements_ 2nd edition.[1] To
bolster my reading speed in other languages, I've also had to focus on reading
practice and acquiring reading vocabulary. In Chinese for foreign learners,
the materials by the late John DeFrancis, his _Chinese Reader_ series in
beginning, intermediate, and advanced levels, are still the best available for
that purpose, although they appear to be going out of print.

[1] [http://www.amazon.com/English-Vocabulary-Elements-Keith-
Denn...](http://www.amazon.com/English-Vocabulary-Elements-Keith-
Denning/dp/0195168038)

------
xenophanes
One thing the anti-speed-reading folks never take into account is
comprehension _per time_. They always look at comprehension for one reading of
the material.

My regular reading speed is around 220 wpm. But I can speed read or speed
listen at much more than double that. Therefore, I can do TWO speed readings
in less time than one slow reading.

So for a fair comparison, you have to look at TWO speed readings vs ONE slow
reading. In that case, the speed reading might win on comprehension, even
though it was behind after its first reading. Reading stuff twice improves
comprehension a lot, and can still be done in less time.

Or if I really really care about something, I would do a slow reading and
several speed readings, and I think that's way more effective than doing
multiple slow readings, for the same amount of time or less.

Also with speed reading I can do over 500 wpm with very good comprehension.
The point where I can't keep up mentally or with my eyes is (after a lot of
practice) above 500 wpm. But my regular reading speed, if I just use Kindle
app or a paper book, remains under half that.

I can also speed read at over 1000 wpm, for light reading but not dense
philosophy. Yes comprehension drops, but two readings at 1000 wpm for light
reading may still beat one reading at 500 wpm for the same material. Or FOUR
readings at 1000 wpm could beat ONE slow reading, in less time.

It's important to be able to read at many different speeds, and also use
several skimming methods, and think of them as different tools in your
toolbox, and then figure out which is appropriate for what you want to
accomplish. If you always read everything the same way, you're doing it wrong.

~~~
gress
If you have to read a document multiple times in order to understand it then
you have to divide your WPM claim accordingly.

------
mbesto
> _Speed reading anything you need to truly comprehend is probably a bad idea.
> However, if you have a few documents you need to get through or you 're
> reading something that isn't that important, these methods can still be
> worthwhile._

If the purpose of reading something is to understand it (aka comprehension),
then doesn't this supplied conclusion basically defeat the purpose of anyone
trying to attain speed reading?

~~~
sitkack
As in everything, Not Always. Sometimes you just need to get the gist,
sometimes the information density is really low, sometimes you just need to
get primed so you are _more_ prepared for face to face meeting.

Skimming == Speed Reading, it can be a useful skill even for hard to
comprehend documents like scientific papers.

------
drakaal
I can "read" a technical book at faster than 1600 WPM.

I don't read all of it, and that makes all the difference.

Most people don't learn Skimming, Scanning, and Skipping.

Skimming is when you go over the page quickly jumping sentence start to start
judging the sentence to see if you want/need to read it. If a sentence starts
with info you don't need, or already know you jump to the next bit.

Scanning is where you go looking for certain words on the page. I'm reading on
Data Storage stuff, and I only care about Raid 5+1 so I scan for those words
on the page.

Skipping is like hitting the next chapter button on your Shiny Disc player. If
the chapter isn't relevant you skip it. And go on to the next. This is useful
for books where 80% is beginner stuff.

This isn't how you "read" Harry Potter. You wouldn't have any fun. So a novel
in 90 minutes would have to be for people who don't enjoy reading. I can't
imagine that fast. (Like my minds eye, and ear can't do all of the Lord of the
Rings movies at 8x)

~~~
JetSpiegel
If you skip stuff, then you aren't reading at 1600WPM.

------
ACow_Adonis
I am what you might call a speed-reading skeptic.

Like most of us, by which i mean intellectual types who define our selves and
worth in part by the relative level of our perceived knowledge, speed reading
seems like a holy grail. There's so much out there to read, and not enough
time in my life to do it. But it is to us as fad diets/exercise regimes to
people who care primarily about their looks/weight.

I say this because its apparent I'm a relatively fast reader, i have to read a
lot for work, and i have professional colleagues to compare myself to. In all
these speed-reading fads in professional environments, I've never actually met
a single person, NOT ONE, who can actually read these materials faster than an
intelligent, well read person. (barring perhaps abnormalities like Kim Peek,
but newsflash, you know if you're Kim Peek and if you are/aren't, there's not
much you can do about it). Get someone into an actual environment where they
have to read lots of stuff, have to comprehend it, and its professionally
demonstrable, and suddenly all the "speed readers" vanish.

Do you know why I'm a relatively fast reader? I'd say probably: a) genetics b)
reading a lot.

b) is about the only thing I've seen that has a big effect and is
demonstrable, and is in our control. The fastest readers read a lot. The
slowest readers don't. Those who didn't read a lot, and then started reading,
got faster.

And barring genetic abnormalities and usual statistical variance, no one I've
met, EVER, has been able to read more than 3/4/5/6 hundred words per minute
with accurate comprehension.

Which brings us of course, to the comprehension debate. Lets avoid the
ridiculousness of the comprehension stats that are usually poorly designed and
created by people trying to sell you things, they are worth about as much as
fad diet testimonials and figures. And this is where a lot of speed reading
salesmen try to get you. "I can read this at 1000 wpm with just slightly less
comprehension!". "I can skim and pull out the important parts really fast!".

To which my feelings can be summed up: Anyone can purport to increase their
reading speed by including words they didn't read or comprehend in their wpm.
Frankly, if you are not reading something with %100 comprehension, you are not
reading it. Taking a sample and taking a census are two different things. That
you can take a 10% sample in 10% of the time does not make you a "speed-
census-taker". Ditto skimming, summarizing, or any other weasel-word used to
gloss over the fact that someone is trying to speed up their "reading" by
reading or comprehending less.

I'm not saying skimming doesn't exist. I am saying its not the same as
reading/comprehending, and that "speed-readers" show heavy drops in
comprehension.

~~~
jacobolus
> _Frankly, if you are not reading something with %100 comprehension, you are
> not reading it._

This is too dogmatic to be (IMO) a useful definition for the unadorned word
“reading”.

After all, what does it even mean to comprehend something 100%? Without being
inside the author’s head (and perhaps not even then) it’s impossible to know
all of the ideas associated with every word and phrase by the author at that
particular moment, or the precise rhythm and intonation the author would use
in saying the words aloud, or the precise feelings the author was trying to
evoke.

Or for that matter, is it possible to comprehend something 100% without deeply
thinking about what it means to the reader, all the ideas and feelings the
words (in context with the rest of the world at the moment of reading) dredge
up. For instance, I personally can’t read something in a truly deep way, and
really know what I think about it, without writing (often lengthy) comments of
my own. But I wouldn’t say that shallower types of reading aren’t still
“reading”.

Language inherently distorts thoughts, which are impossible to perfectly
package and unpackage in a serial format.

~~~
zobzu
don't take things black and white. lets say if you don't have 90%
comprehension you're not reading it.

Argumenting for the sake of argumenting like you just did is a waste of time,
IMO. It's generally called nitpicking.

~~~
XorNot
This we actually can measure - speech recognition's comprehension rate is a
big problem for its implementation.

So we know 80% accuracy is not good enough to produce cogent sentences (1 miss
in every 5 words). And we know 1 miss in every 10 still doesn't produce
something we'd think of as accurate.

So I'd say you need about 90%+ comprehension to actually comprehend something.
But that's leaving a lot of room for error anyway - how much stuff have you
read and then thought "wait, what was the modifier to that specific phrase?"

------
amtab
Having tried out various of the recent speed reading sites and apps, I
honestly don't think they are useful for any dense or difficult material
requiring thought to comprehend. I almost always find that challenging text
requires nonlinear reading to really get, something not possible with these
tools. Perhaps they are useful for fluffy news articles, but not much more.

Does anyone know of any good techniques for improving time to comprehension
when reading technical work? I feel like I am very inefficient at getting
through math or computer science papers, which obviously resist any kind of
normal speed reading.

------
pistle
tl;dr

Instead of increasing bandwidth (since human CPU's aren't following Moore's
law), burden writers with improving value per word. Please read faster so I
can be less elegant?? How about you stop with 1000 word pieces that can be
summarized in 100. Oh, you can't slot enough ads in?

------
mbrock
I have to defend speed reading. It is in fact highly useful, and I will claim
that it can even aid comprehension.

I have two examples.

(1) Last night I went to a meetup to discuss a certain topic related to
religion, atheism, and a certain idea explained by Alain de Botton. So I
decided to check out his book about it.

I grabbed my notebook, bought the book on Kindle, and skimmed it in 30
minutes, making notes of what struck me as interesting fodder for discussion.
It's a pretty short and breezy book, so this was quite enjoyable.

Then I realized that Erich Fromm probably has something to say about this, so
I googled a bit and found that he wrote a book about "Religion and
Psychoanalysis," which seemed highly relevant from the preview. So I did the
same thing with that.

Before the event I had dinner while looking through my notes and thinking
about it. This all enabled me to be decently prepared, get a good start on the
material, bring some quotes to the table, and so on.

(2) I do a weekly blog series about museum visits, for fun and to practice my
writing. Sometimes I'm pretty clueless about the topic at hand, so in order to
keep the blog from becoming totally vague and uninteresting, I skim a book or
two. This lets me engage with the museum stuff in a more interesting way. For
example last weekend I skimmed Deleuze's book about Francis Bacon, and found a
couple of great ideas to build on.

So why would I say that speed reading can aid comprehension? Basically, books
are tedious. I mean, how many books do you own that you haven't gotten through
or even started? Speed reading, especially in combination with note taking, is
a way to start engaging with material without investing a huge amount of time
and attention, which are extremely scarce resources for a full time worker.

Maybe I'm just saying it's better than nothing. But I also really feel like
the sheer velocity of speed reading or skimming helps me somehow. I don't get
stuck as easily. I don't feel the obsessive need to "grok" everything. I don't
get bogged down.

Of course this is a staple technique for people in academia, and you don't
really need any special tools for it. E-book highlighting can be very useful,
but manual note taking works great too.

~~~
jeremysmyth
See, this is the first realistic comment I've seen that matches my idea of
"speed reading".

The OP, other articles in the last few days, and several comments seem to rest
on a misunderstanding of the term "speed reading". It is _not_ the same as
"reading faster", nor is it a method of inhaling the same amount of content in
a shorter time. It is, instead, a means of grabbing the key points of a large
document in a short space of time, either before studying it properly (so you
know its structure and end result), or after studying it properly (so you can
quickly remind yourself of the main points).

Semantic arguments are the boringest arguments.

~~~
mbrock
Exactly! Phillip Lopate has a short chapter on "research" in "To Show and to
Tell," and describes his way of researching like this:

"Here the creative nonfiction writer can follow the journalists' lead. Being
trained generalists—that is to say, quick studies who can leap
opportunistically on intriguing vignettes and facts, give them a vivid twist,
and forget the rest—veteran journalists know that they don't have to become
specialists, they just have to absorb enough of the material under scrutiny
this week or month to file an interesting story. When you are researching,
what you are looking for, subconsciously or not, is the oddity that will spark
your imagination—not necessarily the most important detail, but the one that
will excite your love of paradox or sense of humor."

This kind of "opportunistic" reading is discredited throughout this HN thread
as "not real reading." I get the point—it's not the same as reading carefully,
reverently, leisurely. It's a workaday tactic, it's somewhat impious. But for
me it's a wonderful and even liberating way to work with texts.

------
rjzzleep
i call selection bias on this. he keeps saying studies have shown. i always
use that terminology when i want to prove a point, and i want to shut up the
other side without arguing

the linked documents are the book the causes of high and low reading[1]. and
the paper by rayner[2]

i don't really have access to most papers, but from my quick search on google
scholar i'd say there are way more than a handful of papers on reading
comprehension at high speeds.

also, don't forget that you can train the human brain like a muscle. so it's
not surprising that reading comprehension on untrained people immediately
suffers when you move outside of their comfort zone.

another thing that's ignored is what graeme mentioned about subvocalization. a
lot of the speed reading practice aims to remove subvocalization from your
reading process. it's the crap they teach us in school.

if you ask me these are all hacks though. our encoding ie. language and text
is incredibly inefficient. in theory chinese characters are a much better at
encoding, ie. have higher entropy than our english language.

ideally someone would throw a couple million at me, and a couple of
neuroscientists, and nano engineers, and we build you the ultimate reading
hack(team applications welcome :P)

[1]:
[http://books.google.de/books/about/The_Causes_of_High_and_Lo...](http://books.google.de/books/about/The_Causes_of_High_and_Low_Reading_Achie.html?id=kSO6WvArafUC&redir_esc=y)

[2]:
[http://csi.ufs.ac.za/resres/files/Rayner%20(1998).pdf](http://csi.ufs.ac.za/resres/files/Rayner%20\(1998\).pdf)

~~~
cowsandmilk
> my quick search on google scholar i'd say there are way more than a handful
> of papers on reading comprehension at high speeds.

The Rayner paper is what is called a review. It has 19 pages of references to
hundreds of papers on the topic that Rayner has read so the nonexpert does not
have to.

Generally, reviews are much better sources than individual papers for the non-
expert to read because the author has gone through the literature to
understand the feuds and arguments and how they have played out. In my field,
I regularly have people try to send me papers that were thoroughly thrashed as
wrong over a decade ago. That is generally what happens when a non-expert
tries to dive into the primary literature blindly without understanding the
general framework and consensus that a good review provides.

All that said, it is very hard for a non-expert to tell whether a review is
good or not. It is a conundrum.

------
mathattack
I used to speed read fiction. I found that I would get a couple pages ahead of
my understanding. As I aged, I realized that understanding a few books deeply
is much more important than understanding a lot of books superficially.

Why read Hunter S. Thomson if you can't pull out the few awesome lines. When I
raced through Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, I missed _" And that, I think,
was the handle—that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and
Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn’t need that. Our energy would
simply prevail. There was no point in fighting—on our side or theirs. We had
all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave. . . .

So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas
and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-
water mark—that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back"_

How many more of these did I miss? And this isn't even deep literature.

------
nslater
I am dyslexic, and have struggled with reading all my life. Saccades are
physically exhausting for me, and so I get fatigued quickly. I also
subvocalise, which slows me down to 180 wpm or thereabouts.

RSVP is helpful because it removes the need for saccades, and so reduce
fatigue. They also force you to stop subvocalising. As a result, I am able to
read at 600 to 700 with high comprehension now. And over 1,000 to 1,200 wpm
with enough comprehension to be useful for things I just need the gist of.

1,200 wpm. It's crazy. I never thought it would be possible. But I suspect
that if I continue to use RSVP, it will have a profound effect on my life.
There is so much stuff I do not read, because I find the normal experience so
painful.

Started contributing to this project:

[https://github.com/ds300/jetzt](https://github.com/ds300/jetzt)

It's the best OSS RSVP tool I have found so far.

------
crazygringo
I swear, I will never understand the obsession with speed reading.

Just like your coding speed has little to do with your typing speed (and
everything to do with your thinking speed), your reading speed has little to
do with reading, and everything to do with the level of comprehension you're
looking for.

Need to get the gist of something? Skim it quickly. You don't need "speed
reading techniques" for that. Need to understand it better? Read it slower.
Great literature? Read it word for word to savor the language.

None of it has anything to do with reading itself. It's just a question of how
quickly you can integrate new information into your brain, and how much of it
you want to integrate. And nothing's going to change that, unless you've
figured out a way to change your IQ. Except maybe some coffee or a good
night's sleep.

 _That 's_ the truth about speed reading.

~~~
hessenwolf
Does anybody else have appalling typing skills due to coding, in that they
also live on the backspace key?

------
baldfat
I increased my reading speed by 50% in one semester of graduate school doing
one thing. No Music, No computer and No video. I use to read with music and
then I just tried reading 100 pages with music (No vocals mostly Jazz and
Classical) and 100 pages without music and I was at least 20% faster. I ended
up getting almost 50% faster do to my work load.

Was a graduate student in Theology. On average each class was around 4,000 -
6,000 pages of reading a semester. With 4 classes you could have 24,000 pages
to be read. That is around 500 pages a week, not including research and papers
etc.

Historical Theology and Seminar classes have been on average around 10,000
pages of reading. I have had to read over 700+ pages for one class in a week.
The issue was I HAD to read and comprehend. This was dense stuff with complex
context and thought.

------
benjamincburns
To... read between the lines... on this summary, I think The Zen of Python is
applicable here. Readability counts.

One technique that might work would be to "translate" content into a simpler
language which is optimized for fast serial consumption with high
comprehension. Sure, that's probably impossible to achieve with today's
technology, and there's the issue of internationalization (is it a version of
an exisiting language with strict rules, or a whole new language altogether?),
but those are "just" engineering problems, right?

Or maybe the inverse is really the problem - maybe it's not the language, but
the metric we're focusing on. WPM is as poor of a metric for "rate of
information intake" as LOC is for programmer productivity.

------
acqq
"I took a speed-reading course and read War and Peace in twenty minutes. It
involves Russia."

Woody Allen

------
benjamincburns
This is a complete aside, but am I the only one who finds it impossible to
read this piece and not be completely distracted by a sudden acute awareness
of _how_ I'm reading it?

------
vpeters25
I for one I'm grateful I came across a speed reading book while in high
school. I was reading about 150 wpm by then, after a month going through the
exercises I had increased it to around 450 wpm.

Comprehension is the biggest question from skeptics and it is understandable:
we are taught to read out loud so our reading speed and comprehension becomes
limited to the speed of speech.

Re-learning read (and comprehend) without vocalizing the words in your mind is
the hardest part. Once you get that, the sky is the limit.

------
shakeel_mohamed
So, here's something that bugs me. I know I don't read very fast (I got 160
WPM on the Staples.com test), but I find that I read faster than some of my
friends and classmates. My reading speed is supposedly slightly higher than
that of a third grader, to which I call baloney. So, I HIGHLY doubt that the
average college student naturally reads at 450 WPM as stated by the Staples
test.

I just don't understand, but I would love some insight on this.

------
dfc
I do not mean to be difficult but what does this mean:

    
    
      > In the case of Tim Ferriss' technique, he's using ideas grounded in
      > science, but I couldn't find research beyond Ferriss' own claims on
      > his blog post.
    

What are "ideas grounded in science" that do not have some body of
research/experimental-validation? Am I reading it too literally?

------
javanix
I read pretty quickly but have never expressly timed it (400WPM on Spritz
seems a bit slow anecdotally, but I don't comprehend Spritz even on low
speeds).

I think what I do is read pairs/tuples of words at once, and then move on to
the next set.

Eg, to quote graeme - I read _[This is of interest to me,] <move eyes> [as I
have much practical experience] <move eyes> [with teaching people to read
faster]._

------
im3w1l
I have an RSVP bookmarklet that lets me read selected text at 500 wpm. What is
interesting about it is that adaptation is a serious problem. If you don't
move your eyes, your vision fades. So I find myself having to consciously have
to make small eye movements to prevent that. But other then that it sort of
works.

------
zobzu
that's how i 'speed read' (note: its not voluntary, i just do that naturally):

\- i go through paragraphs very fast, condensing the content and getting the
keywords in my head. I read and comprehend about 30% of the paragraph

\- if it looks interesting my attention will be caught and ill start reading
100% of the words, rather slowly. in fact, i'll probably start from the
beginning. Lot of lines, not much content? That will NOT catch my attention.

Of course, that also means i don't read 99% of the blog posts on HN that are
more than a page long anyway. These tend to have a very VERY low content to
amount of lines ratio.

I think I'll go even further: people get seduced by thinking they can get
"smarter" by ingesting more content, and fall into the speed reading trap.
Kinda sad.

------
doctorstupid
The most crucial downside of speed reading for me is that it destroys the tone
of a phrase. Splitting a sentence into blocks makes it sound robotic,
eliminating the nuances of the author, and quite possibly the intended
meaning.

------
joyofdata
Instead of reading faster - I prefer to cut down on what I choose to read.

------
aneeskA
For people who read to relax, speed reading does the exact opposite.

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notastartup
I don't speed read, but I've learned to read faster and faster by just keep
doing it. When I was a little kid I used to read a lot faster because I was
reading more books back then.

One trick my teacher taught me that's not really speed reading but to get an
idea of an essay or an article is to read the first and last sentence of each
paragraph.

