
Sorry, You Can’t Speed Read - karmacondon
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/17/opinion/sunday/sorry-you-cant-speed-read.html
======
jasonkester
I don't get why anybody would want to speed read a novel. (Outside of a High
School literature class where you're being forced to read Ethan Frome and you
just want to get back to playing Minecraft, of course).

When I'm reading Hemingway, I'll go back and read individual paragraphs three
times to squeeze the last drop of juice out of them. There are only so many
Hemingway paragraphs in existence, so wasting one feels like cramming an
entire bar of imported Spanish 70% Artisan Chocolate in your mouth and washing
it down with soda. Why would you do that???

Take Sordo on the Hill from For Whom the Bell Tolls. It's just a few pages
about these guys shooting at each other, but there's _so much_ crammed in
there. You learn an awful lot about that guy, his feelings about this war, why
he's fighting it, how he ended up on this stupid hill, and why he's going to
go ahead and die there rather than any of his other options. He's a real
person with complicated motivations and after a few pages you come away
knowing pretty much everything you need to know about him and why he was
acting the way he was earlier in the book.

Of course you could skim that scene in a minute flat and get the Hollywood
Blockbuster version with the crazy local militia yelling stereotypical catch
phrases and dying in a blaze of glory.

But then can you really say you read that book? Wouldn't you still want to go
back and read it for real some time?

~~~
isomorph
When I was a kid, I used to speed read each Harry Potter book when it came
out, just to find out the plot so nobody could spoil it for me, and then I'd
read it again later for enjoyment

~~~
lmm
Aren't you just spoiling it for yourself then?

~~~
dgacmu
There are many ways to skin a wizard. (Who's to criticize how someone enjoys
their leisure reading? I too spped-read the later honor Harrington books, for
precisely the reasons noted above.)

I do it with academic papers,too - but because my goal is to index it and to
identify quickly if I need to read it more carefully now, or just to know
enough about it that I can remember it exists if I need it later. Of course, I
don't pretend it's even speed reading - I literally skip most of the interior
text.

------
jobigoud
Regarding audio they say:

> Doubling the speed, in our experience, leaves individual words perfectly
> identifiable — but makes it just about impossible to follow the meaning.

Wow, sorry but this is very misinformed. A lot of people me included can
listen to audio at 2x. I constantly listen to podcasts (so _not_ a slow
narration to begin with) at 2x in English which is not even my native language
and I understand everything and enjoy it very much.

Blind users listen at 4x without loss of understanding.

You just need to train it.

~~~
jwr
Seconded. After I saw and heard how blind people use screen readers (with
experience), I started accelerating audio. You can train your brain to become
better at understanding — I started at 1.25x and slowly worked my way up. I am
now at 1.75x - 2x (plus Overcast's silence removal) and I have no problems,
even though English isn't my native language.

Two requirements: headphones (you need much more processing power to deal with
crappy speakers and poor audio in general) and lack of significant
distractions (you can't afford to think about something else). Also, some apps
have crappy audio acceleration algorithms. Overcast does it so well that I use
it also for listening to audiobooks.

I also think the article is misinformed. You _can_ speed read by regularly
training your brain. Just don't expect miracles and don't believe the
"experts" who try to sell you miracles.

~~~
ash
I didn't know about Overcast. Volume normalization for listening in noisy
places, smart speed with silence removal - I want those features!

Unfortunately Overcast is iOS only. Could anyone recommend an _Android_ app
similar to Overcast?

~~~
Cyph0n
Pocket Casts [1] is the closest you can get on Android.

I use Podcast Addict [2], but it's a bit bloated to be frank.

[1]:
[https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=au.com.shiftyj...](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=au.com.shiftyjelly.pocketcasts)

[2]:
[https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.bambuna.po...](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.bambuna.podcastaddict)

~~~
myko
Pocket Casts is amazing. I use it on iOS and Android. It has silence removal
and variable speed playback.

------
aidanhs
The linked article abstract from Psychological Science says:

> The way to maintain high comprehension and get through text faster is to
> practice reading and to become a more skilled language user (e.g., through
> increased vocabulary). This is because language skill is at the heart of
> reading speed.

So, in short, moving your eyes over the page faster only helps if your speed
of language interpretation can keep up (the nytimes article has a slightly
paraphrased version).

I wasn't really impressed by the article. It seemed to add very little to the
abstract, just a couple of concrete examples of speed reading techniques (and
one accompanying study).

Defining speed reading as 'eye movement speedups' and explicitly excluding
'language comprehension speedups' is fine, but it makes me want an article
about what happens when you combine both, which I know for a fact can result
in reading speedups by a whole number multiple.

~~~
ozim
I agree. I feel that for me reading in my native language or English goes as
fast as I can see sentence. So I assume my language interpretation for those
languages is high and maybe I could speed up by doing fancy things with eye
movement.

But I am learning Dutch right now and I have to spend a lot more time to get
correct meaning of sentence. So no eye movement technique would help me.

------
m3mnoch
this article seems to confuse speed reading with skimming.

i took a full semester class back in high school where all we did was train
speed reading. i was able to get to 800 wpm with 90% comprehension on tests.
that was from a baseline start of ~150 wpm with 80% comprehension. (the tests
afterwards weren't easy "what was the name of bob's dog?" questions)

i've, of course, lost it all in the past 25 years of no practice, but i
remember the keys being swallowing entire lines instead of words, achieving
"flow", and dropping the subvocalization of what you're reading. (when you
pronounce words in your head)

------
wink
Also, the part about not listening to stuff at double speed. As if all
recordings (and thus people speaking) were using the same speed. Sure, there
are people who talk too fast anyway, but I've had an online course where I had
to move to 1.5x speed to even be able to follow along and not drift off
constantly...

~~~
forgetsusername
> _I had to move to 1.5x speed to even be able to follow along and not drift
> off constantly..._

I'm an avid audio-book listener, and I use both 1.5-2.0x and 0.8-0.9x,
depending on my mood. The slower speeds definitely allow you to "think" more
about the content, rather than concentrating solely on the narrative.

~~~
therealdrag0
Ditto. I also got a pair of head phones that have a mic/play/pause button on
the Y of the cable. This is GREAT for quick pauses without having to reach for
my phone.

(I use MEElectronics M6 PRO IEMs because of replaceable cable.)

------
simula67
The reason people want to read quickly is because writers often digress. Maybe
the focus should be on writing text that can be absorbed easily and quickly
and finding and promoting such text.

~~~
kaikai
Yes! I often scan low-density writing, and love finding technical blogs and
tutorials that convey information with clarity and concision. We value writing
with strong personality and style, and that's not always aligned with high
density.

------
wodenokoto
I once took a speed reading course and my conclusion was, just as the article,
that it is glorified skimming.

But some text are written to be skimmed (large parts of many college textbooks
for example - the author is paid by the word, so there's often a lot of
filler. Most people only need to get squinted with most journal article they
meet)

~~~
pjscott
Is it just skimming? When I saw the headline of the article I decided that,
rather than skimming it, I'd try just _reading all the words really fast_. I
haven't taken a class or anything, so maybe my technique could use work, but I
understood it just fine at a little over 1300 words per minute. The writing
wasn't very dense, and even then I didn't have time to think critically about
what it was saying until after reading it, but I wasn't just skimming.

(n = 1)

------
PhantomGremlin
What slows things down for me (and for most people) is subvocalization.[1]

It should be possible to get in the zone and not subvocalize, but I can only
do it for very brief periods. And it's something that I can only do for "light
reading" rather than when trying to understand highly technical information.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subvocalization](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subvocalization)

------
Htsthbjig
I do speed reading: It is real, I am part of a group in Europe that could read
a novel in 30 minutes. We are more than 50 people.

The big drawback: we can't read anything that fast. We have to format the
content in an specific way that we trained with. For example, reading long
lines is a big no no. The idea is to maximize the circular area that you could
read on a single eye stroke. With training you make the circular area bigger
and bigger.

That is, we need to OCR the book or something that let's us create our own
book in digital format(tablet) or decrypt the epub-pdf. That is illegal.

Why people love to speed read things like novels? Because normal reading is
boring and too slow. It is like being told to play football at 1km/hour max.

------
mds
I skimmed this article in about 20 seconds and then went back and read it more
closely. I don't feel like I missed much on the first pass.

Sure you won't get the full literary experience skimming through War and
Peace. But fluffy articles with a single tweet's worth of information content
I can "speed read" just fine.

~~~
chadcmulligan
skip reading is perhaps a better name for it. I got the gist - speed reading
doesn't work, saved myself a few minutes only skipping to the start of each
paragraph.

~~~
lomnakkus
There's already a name for it: skimming

------
visarga
I run text through text-to-speech while reading visually to double my
attention.

~~~
karmacondon
This is either insane, or pure genius. Has anyone else tried this?

~~~
kranner
I have. Works great for (unabridged) audiobooks paired with their original
texts. I even put on the Quake and Deus Ex soundtracks _while_ listening to
the audiobook of Masters of Doom _while_ reading the paperback.

------
partiallypro
I did speed reading at Sylvan when I was younger, and I was really pretty good
at it. The only problem, is that during the tests which tested your
comprehension I was able to surmise the answers based on tropes & assumptions
rather than actual comprehension. I could get 100% on the tests of maybe 25
answers, strictly based on tropes and assumptions. To be honest, this might
have killed my love of reading fiction.

To this day, I can get to pages into a book and begin making major assumptions
about the rest of the book (usually it will be close enough), so when my
assumptions start playing out, I abandon the book, or skip to the last chapter
to find out if I was right (more often than not, the trope plays out.) If I
were to continue to read it, it becomes more of a chore than something
enjoyable. I don't know if this is a result of my speed reading classes, or
not...but it's something I just tied together after reading this.

I do enjoy reading history or things based on opinions, biographies, etc;
which are much much harder to speed read. But I do wonder, just how much of
speed reading is assumption and reliance on tropes...which underscores two
problems, I believe, in both speed reading and in writing.

------
sea6ear
I don't know whether to call what I do speed reading or not, but I definitely
read faster than most people I know. I've spent a lot of time analyzing what
things effect my reading speed.

I find that my reading speed is most heavily effected by how much my eyes have
to move to scan the words in the line. The best for me is if a column is
narrow enough that I don't really have to move my eyes side to side to get all
the words in the column.

As an example, a Thompson Chain Reference Bible has about the perfect size
columns (roughly 5-7 words per column) for me to be able to take in
essentially the whole line at once, so I can just run my finger down the
column and take in words about as fast as I can follow it with my eyes.

A related trick in this regard is one I believe I saw on Tim Ferris's blog
which (if I remember correctly) suggested focusing on the 6 words at the
beginning of a line and then the 6 words at the end of the line. For text that
is too long to take in the whole line all at one glance, this seems to work
pretty well for me.

~~~
simoncion
> The best for me is if a column is narrow enough that I don't really have to
> move my eyes side to side to get all the words in the column.

Interesting. I'm the opposite way. Part of how I speed read is being able to
quickly back-track if I detect that I've failed to notice something important.
Filling the reading surface with text means that I almost never have to scroll
around to locate what I missed.

------
stevetrewick
I read the first two sentences of each paragraph in the article, then I went
back and read it again. No difference in comprehension. N=1, but then this
article is a great example of the current trend in 'science communication' for
the 'single study so thing is definitely true with a clickbaity headline'
template, so I don't feel bad.

------
Fuzzwah
I use a chrome extension called jetzt [1] to read long form articles on
webpages.

I find that I'm able to read and comprehend comfortably at 650 - 700 words per
minute as long as the text is well written and on a subject where I already
know all the lingo.

[1] [http://ds300.github.io/jetzt/](http://ds300.github.io/jetzt/)

~~~
aluhut
Wouldn't be able to manage all I want to read without Squirt

[https://www.squirt.io/](https://www.squirt.io/)

------
Houshalter
I read this article at 450 words per minute using Readline, a speed reading
extension like spritz. 450 wpm is not a lot, and it's enough to process most
of the text. But it's faster than my default reading speed, and it also makes
reading feel more gentle and passive.

When I read articles without it (which I do most of the time) I read a bit
slower. I get distracted much more often. My mind wanders. It feels a bit more
like work to make myself read the next sentence.

For the same reason I prefer audio books to written books, and lectures to
textbooks (although I prefer to listen to both at a sped up rate.)

The density of the text matters more than anything. You can not speed read a
math textbook at even normal reading speed. You can read a very light or
uninteresting article at 200 wpm above normal. I can listen to some audio at
2x speed, but sometimes I slow it down to make sure I have time to process
everything.

------
clarry
Well, reading speed clearly isn't a constant across the population or even for
one person. Some people read faster, and TFA article admits as much when it
points towards experience.

A few hours ago, at 5am, while checking two weeks worth of email, I was very
very drowsy and unfocused and couldn't read fast at all. I went to bed, slept
a few hours, and now, somewhat refreshed, I can keep in zone again and read at
a good pace. Reading speed for me definitely isn't a constant.

When I want to read faster still, I can make a focused effort to do so.
Emphasis on focus. The faster advancing eye movement takes focus. As does
trying to comprehend the larger amount of words or (short) sentences that the
eye consumed in a pass.

Properties of the text have an effect on success; "speed-reading" a math
textbook would be a complete waste of time for me, because the _comprehension_
part requires so much more time and effort than "seeing" and "reading" the
words. Same goes often goes for code or highly technical texts.

The layout has another effect. Back to the emphasis on focus. Give me the
right font size, short lines, and likewise short paragraphs, and I can read
much faster without stumbling. Yes, it _is_ about eye movement, about anchors,
about breaking the text into conveniently sized chunks that can be parallel
processed. If comprehension for the given text is easy enough, then this can
help speed up reading a lot. Still, it takes a bit of a focused effort, which
I would call speed reading?

I read the linked article pretty fast. And my speed slowed significantly as I
got back here, with the long lines stretched to almost full width of my
display. First I stumbled a few times, and that was a sign to slow down.

It is fair to say there's a limit to how fast one can read without sacrificing
comprehension, that's for sure. But you can totally make a focused effort to
read faster.

------
wbl
Hyperlexia is real. I wouldn't say it always works, and in math it can be very
dangerous. But I still have enough retention to participate in undergraduate
level discussions of the text after I'm done. Sadly, we don't know how to make
ordinary people hyperlexic.

~~~
neffy
So true - I didn't realise there was a name for it. There's both a lot more
natural variation than I suspect this article writer wants to believe - and a
lot more training benefit if people want to learn to read faster. Just like
any other human activity really.

------
SimonPStevens
I use audible a lot. I've found that as I've got used to it I can increase the
speed to around 2x. When I first started using it I usually set it around
1.25.

It depends a bit on the narrator and the content. I find I often need to start
with a new narrator at around 1.75 and then bump it up to 2 when I get more
comfortable with their voice. But I would say that provided the speaker is
clear and not heavily accented my language processing quite happily works at
2x speech speed. (Perhaps they deliberately speek slower for audio books
though?).

Whenever my wife hears it she says it sounds like nonsense to her, so I do
think it's something that you get used to over time.

------
AaronHatch
From my experience of speed reading classic novels, I actually go faster and
with higher comprehension when I slow down and stop trying to comprehend.

I don't read words allowed or to myself in my head. I look at them and move
forward. After a few years of doing this, I've been able to go through novels
at surprising speeds. It's like I can parse an entire page and visualize
everything without trying.

Also, using my finger to guide me only slows me down.

~~~
robbrown451
"I don't read words allowed or to myself in my head."

I had to read that allowed to know what you were saying.

------
ldjb
The authors of the article mention Spritz, but I have to wonder whether
they've actually used it. They argue that speed reading involves skipping over
words. However, when you use Spritz, you do read every word -- you simply do
so faster.

Research [1] suggests that whilst use of Spritz does negatively impact reading
comprehension, that impact is relatively minor. My own personal experience of
using Spritz agrees with that finding.

I'm not saying there are no downsides to speed reading, but there are times
when you do need to read something quickly and you can sacrifice a small
amount of reading comprehension. In those cases, speed reading can be
immensely useful.

[1] [http://sdk.spritzinc.com/www/1.0/psb/Spritz-PSB-
study.pdf](http://sdk.spritzinc.com/www/1.0/psb/Spritz-PSB-study.pdf)

~~~
mistercow
> However, when you use Spritz, you do read every word

You're presented with every word. Whether or not you actually read every word
is harder to gauge.

------
geocar
> Sorry you can't λx→x, but you might be λy→y.

I remember when I was in primary school, I overheard an explanation from one
of the teachers about the children in a gifted course: "[They're] wrong: They
aren't smarter than you, [they] just learn faster than you."

After a week, my memory of my experience of a book is _the same_ whether I
λx→x or λy→y, it's just that one of these methods took less time _in absolute
terms_.

I don't really know what the reading experience is like _for you_ , and I
don't know what _you_ call these things, but if I experience books faster than
you, you want more time in your life with no other downside that I can see,
then I can tell you about my experiences.

Now I say this because I'm certainly biased: I didn't enjoy the article, and
where's _why_ I think I didn't enjoy the article:

Here's the statements in the article in "support" of λx→x

• Professor Treiman concluded that it’s extremely unlikely you can greatly
improve your reading speed without missing out on a lot of meaning. _What
exactly do you mean by "greatly" and "a lot"?_.

• Skim readers spent more time reading text that was earlier in the paragraph,
toward the top of the page and in an earlier page of the document. These
findings were interpreted as evidence in support of a “satisficing” account of
skimming process. _And?_

• Have you ever tried listening to an audio recording with the speaking rate
dialed way up? _Yes, I used to read and transcribe legal dictation at +50% and
I got done faster. What exactly do you mean by "way up?"_.

And here's the statements in the article in "support" of λy→y

• Participants in a 2009 experiment showed reading half the words distributed
relatively evenly throughout the text versus losing the beginning half or the
end half had better comprehension. _No kidding_.

• You can learn to skim strategically so that you spend more time looking
where the more important words are likely to be, and if the words are
presented in a stream you may be able to learn which words to focus on and
which to ignore. _Sounds great._

I was unable to extract anything stronger than these statements, but then I
was λy→y. _What I nonetheless got out of the article_ , wasn't convincing to
me that I, doing λy→y am somehow missing out on something. Instead, I felt
like this was attempting to console people who λx→x, and perhaps maybe they
shouldn't feel so bad.

------
sbmassey
If I am reading anything worthwhile, I will usually be taking notes and
looking stuff up every page or two, or pausing to make sure I really
understood some concept, so I'm not sure speed reading would help much

------
runjake
You most definitely can speed read.

In high school, I took a speed reading course from the teacher who was on the
speed reading segment on the 80s show "That's Incredible!". By coincidence,
she taught at my high school in Southern California. I feel bad for not
remembering her name but it's been well over 20 years ago at this point.

Her technique emphasized exercising the eye muscles, improving peripheral
vision and focus. The downside to the technique is that it required one to
constantly do these eye exercises to maintain speed, although my peripheral
reading ability is still there.

------
ajcarpy2005
It's a skill that works by paying attention to different structural details in
the writing. Instead of breaking up individual words, it looks first for the
signal of the sentence parts and sentences as wholes with a higher level of
meaning. Given that individual words can have multiple meanings, it skips a
layer. Once you get the context going you should already have a predictive
model for what definition of the word is meant.

It helps if the writing is clear and flowing.

------
wapapaloobop
There's an assumption here that meaning or understanding is discrete and
limited but the reality is that there is an unlimited depth of meaning in any
text. So a claim that a reader has captured the meaning has to include "for
the purposes of X". Certainly it isn't captured for the purposes of most media
reviews. Just read the initial professional reviews for any book that you know
and love.

------
sna1l
There are a bunch of speed reading apps that have come out that basically just
flash single words in front of you super quickly. It seems like this concept
has really gained in popularity as people's attention span has shortened due
to smartphones, faster internet, computers, etc.

------
edwcar13
Hmm interesting. But speed reading isn't just less eye movement while reading
line by line. It's using your peripheralife vision to read longer chunks of
words line by line. Like when driving you see a sign and just know what you
saw without slowly reading it. Idk if I agree with this 100%.

~~~
niccaluim
Ironically, this point is addressed in the article. Maybe you didn't see it.
:) Here it is:

 _There is only a small area in the retina (called the fovea) for which our
visual acuity is very high. Our eyes are seriously limited in their precision
outside of that. This means that we can take in only a word or so at each
glance, as well as a little bit about the words on either side. In fact, since
the 1960s, experiments have repeatedly confirmed that when people “speed
read,” they simply do not comprehend the parts of the text that their eyes
skip over._

~~~
edwcar13
Ah, yes I must have missed that. Thanks.

------
atemerev
Sorry, NYT, I can.

Of course, speed reading gets some meaning lost. But the very skill of speed-
reading amounts to developing a sense of look-ahead: first, intuitively
establishing fast anchors in text to actually read a few moments later;
second, to expand on this anchors, absorb the information and introduce
feedback corrections in look-ahead patterns.

All my reading is "speed reading"; I even can't follow the linear text word by
word anymore, this is way too boring. But I can regulate the time distance
between look-ahead and absorbing passes, and thus the ratio between speed and
meaning extracted. This is invaluable to find something in technical
documentation, or prepare for exams.

And I can't listen to audiobooks or lectures; they are sooooo slow...

~~~
marvy
Ok, so you notice you lose "some" meaning. The question is, how much? One way
to find out is to read something the fast way and then the slow way and pay
attention to how much is new the second time. Have you tried this, or perhaps
some other way to see how much meaning gets lost?

As for comparing reading speed to talking speed (audio books and lectures): of
course talking is slower than reading, even if you don't speed read.

~~~
TheDauthi
I don't know about the parent, but I have tried this - repeatedly, in fact,
including taking a number of reading comprehension exams each way, just to see
the effects. Something that frequently happens is that I'll mix up side
characters. I can only juggle a few characters at a time when speed-reading. I
really made a mess of The Hobbit, back in the day, completely mixing up
several of the dwarves. And I miss a number of nuances of language - a clever
bit of wordplay might pass me entirely. Really, it comes down to the author's
style - someone like Stephen Baxter might be on the harder side of sci-fi, but
I'm able to chew through his books in hours because there are generally few
extra characters. Everything just kinda... proceeds linearly. There's little
to track other than what's immediately available. On the other hand, your
typical high fantasy fare has to be chewed over the course of a few days if
I'm to follow what's going on.

~~~
klue07
That sounds about right. More word play and characters would entail more
processing needed for comprehension.

------
hanswesterbeek
I've speed-read the nytimes article for you: the author is right.

~~~
caminante
Nothing of value to add other than I adore this comment!

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cygnus_a
I don't know what they're talking about, I speed-read that article in 20
minutes and my comprehension was great!

------
burritofanatic
Exactly, why would anyone want to listen to all songs in 300BPM? You don't,
because you'll miss so much.

------
AndrewOMartin
"Sorry, You Can't Read The Article At All", more like.

~~~
chris_wot
Try doing so at normal speed.

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colincarter41
If you are in a hurry, have don't much time to read novels or book you want to
read. You should focus on speed reading.

There are free speed reading software available on the internet which you can
use to improve your reading speed.

I would like to recommend spreeder.com

------
mentatghola
I'm really glad I sped read all these comments.

------
mdip
This is the second in articles in the last few months on speed reading and
both basically say the same thing: "There's no way to read at a ridiculous
speed and retain anything you've read".

I'm a speed reader. It _did_ involve a sheet of paper that had "eye exercises"
to practice but this was a tiny part of the class. The vast majority of the
study was on scanning and skimming[1] text for information. It's a _different
way to read_ technical/programming books and I find it way superior to word-
for-wording books. I can read a book this way _several_ times. I can focus
(word-for-word) on areas of weakness and skip areas that I know well. I can
get through a large volume (with enormous effort) in a weekend with retention
that is significantly higher than what I would have experienced if I had read
it word-for-word (at least in part because I'd have only gotten through a
small part of the book by then if I was reading word-for-word).

It's not magic, but intuitive, when you stop thinking about "speed reading" as
a way to read fiction -- or really as anything other than a different way to
consume large volumes of information for learning and it's particularly well
suited to the huge technical books that plague our industry. Here's how it
works _in practice_ (for me; since I can't speak to anyone else):

\- First read: 1 hour - a major part of this is simply determining if the book
is worth studying. There's no shortage of huge books on complex topics in our
industry and many of them aren't effective at teaching the topic they're
trying to convey. If I approached reading word-for-word, I might not discover
that until 5 hours later or I might miss some useful sections toward the end.
In the word-for-word scenario, my choices now are to drop the book and mark
that time as wasted or succumb to "loss aversion" and give up on it after
several days when I'm _exhausted_ from reading it. This also allows me to
eliminate any parts that cover areas I know well, already, which is a huge
problem for me when reading programming books. \- Second read: Covers only the
parts of the book that were identified in the first read as "worth reading".
How long this takes depends a lot on the first part. I still mostly scan/skim
but with much more attention to detail. I take a lot of notes here. \-
Subsequent reads: Deep reading (word-for-word) of truly useful material.
Here's where I'm probably going to start doing exercises if the text includes
any. This may or may not be done in the order presented in the book
(especially for programming books which often introduce many concepts, dig
into each, then way later cover "advanced techniques" of specific topics -- I
hate this practice)

For a book that has 90% "new and useful content" to me, I can get through it
in half the time it would have taken me to read word-for-word but with much
higher retention. The reason for the higher retention is because when reading
word-for-word I've forgotten significant portions of the early parts of the
text weeks later when I've reached the latter quarter of the text. Technical
books _build_ on material chapter-by-chapter so losing the earlier parts
drastically affects my understanding of the latter parts. When I sit down with
a book, I block out my time in advance so that I can get through a "step" in
my process from start to finish in order to avoid this problem. If I reach a
latter part of the book and feel like I'm not understanding things well (I
rarely feel "lost" mainly _because_ of this technique), I consult my notes and
know where to look for the information I'm missing. It makes consuming
information _efficient_ by reducing wasted time being lost, reading things
that are redundant, and mentally organizing the information effectively.

On "speed reading apps" and courses, I think there's one point that is
_extremely misleading_. That's the idea that you can use an app or take a
course and over night become a _speed reader_. My course _helped_ quite a lot,
almost immediately, but it took 10 years before I was really good at it. This
should surprise _nobody_. Any adult with children learning how to read
understands what a complicated process _reading_ actually is. You _have_ to
practice and when you read you _have_ to think about your reading technique
_in addition_ to consuming the material. Thinking about it in the way I think
about running: every read is about reducing the time/mile, reducing the amount
of effort required to do a run, keeping your heart rate in the right place and
increasing the distance you can run. You can _practice_ running without
thinking of these things, but if you're not deliberate about it, your returns
on practice will become less and less.

Lastly -- I can't stress this point enough -- it's _terrible_ for fiction. I
_hate_ reading any other way and as a result I simply _don 't read fiction at
all_. So I stick with audio books -- having a book narrated is the ultimate in
word-for-word immersion. Enjoying the formation of sentences and the poetry of
the text is impossible for me when speed reading.

[1] As it was described in the course: "Scanning" is reading parts of the
page: headings, first paragraph sentences, intro paragraphs, etc. This gets a
rough idea of context. "Skimming" I think is best described as "reading words
but not sentences". You rapidly read the important words in every sentence. I
can blow through a text this way in 10% of the time it takes to read...with
about 1% of the information actually reaching me. It's _not_ a way to learn
material, it's a way to identify more deeply what the material is about.

~~~
maus42
Scanning and skimming is very ordinary thing to do, I believe many learn to do
that without any special instruction, especially if they are in a field where
they read a lot. (Humanities majors, people who read magazines or NYTimes...)
It's very basic thing in the arsenal of efficient learning.

The thing is, the kind the speed reading the article is about is something its
proponents claim to be different than just "skimming".

------
acqq
The last sentence is obviously a reference to the statement by Woody Allen:

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

~~~
roywiggins
Did you speed read over the first sentence?

~~~
acqq
Well of course not, I've been speed-reading!

