

How to read faster - dpatru
http://personalmba.com/10-days-to-faster-reading/

======
hermanthegerman
Speed reading is a good test if the text is completely redundant and
worthless. Anyone reading math books faster than 5 pages / hour ?

~~~
Jach
You're essentially correct, so I +1'd you. I don't think speed reading only
works if the text is "worthless", but rather if the text is intuitively
friendly and fairly straightforward information. Stories fit this criteria,
news reports, lots of blogs, comments, etc. Math books require you to think
about abstract concepts and information has to be digested, you can't simply
get it through reading over something once like you can with stories.

~~~
nooneelse
Very true, but other techniques from the school of thought to which speed
reading belongs do still apply to math texts, I think.

For instance, many people, if they start getting hung up on some difficult
material in a math text will slow down (an ok thing to do), then if they have
more trouble, they slow down more (maybe also ok). But at some point as
progress approaches zero (several moves that seemed ok in isolation
accumulate), and the reward/effort falls below that needed to have the reader
keep reading the book, some other activity always occurs as a better use of
time (the accumulation of ok moves has defeated the entire enterprise).
Sometimes ending a book that way is probably ok, but surely it can't always be
for the best (unless pretty much every book is organized so as to have
monotonically increasing difficulty and monotonically decreasing worth-it-ness
to the reader). So the attitude of not treating the book as sacrosanct is
helpful here, if the material gets tough and there is any threat of motivation
dropping, just skip to the beginning of the next section, summary, or chapter
as the case may be. Later material may illuminate the previous difficult
material, or maybe something else later on will be worth learning even without
the stuff that got skipped (if one removed a random ingredient from every
sandwich you ate, they will still have nutritional value).

Speed reading is just one of a number of methods all built on a
presupposition, that between the realms of "worth reading start to finish
carefully" and "not worth reading" there is a landscape of books that can be
worth spending different amounts of time on. So then the issue becomes, for
book type x, and time one is willing to spend trying t, what are the
heuristics available for getting a positive return out of that book.

This has reminded me to order a copy of _How to Read a Book_. It has been
years since I gave that book a two hour reading, and it still shapes how I
think about allocating time for a book like making a bet and choosing
strategies based on the time and book type.

------
joelhaus
Test the limits of your speed reading ability with this app:
<http://spreeder.com> ( _pointed to in the article_ )

Kinda awesome.

------
acqq
I took a speed-reading course and read War and Peace in twenty minutes. It
involves Russia. (Woody Allen)

------
Tycho
I think if you want to read like that, you might as well skip the book and
pull a summary from Wikipedia. Although, it does discuss two things I've often
wondered about: can one read without subvocal narration, and could one read
more effectively using something like that Spreeder app.

It's always been concentration/focus that's slowed my reading though. My mind
wanders very easily.

------
pramit
Does this help? How You can Improve Your Memory: In under 300 words
[http://bighow.com/news/how-you-can-improve-your-memory-in-
un...](http://bighow.com/news/how-you-can-improve-your-memory-in-
under-300-words)

------
dpatru
The SQ3R (Survey, Question, Read, Recite, Review) system is very similar:
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SQ3R>.

------
Miscoffeles
Wouldn't putting all that forced effort into reading make psychological time
dilate to match the gains in real time?

