
Ask HN: Do you guys use speed reading techniques? - elviejo
There are more books worth of reading than time to do it.
And since improvement on any area (hacking, swimming, etc) requires improved techniques and practice.<p>I was wondering what speed reading techniques, software, courses, etc. do people in HN use and recommend?
======
bemmu
Generally I find that it's not my reading speed that is limiting me, but my
ability to digest that which I read. Also these speed reading techniques get
me a bit on the defensive. I feel a bit bad being so skeptical without being
able to carefully articulate my reasons for it. Similar to neuro-linguistic
programming techniques, this seems like something that might be true and can
perhaps be even be proved to be so, but in some way it feels like you
shouldn't try to bring things like these into conscious thought.

When I read, I just want to read like I naturally do. When I interact with
people, I think it may make me act awkwardly if I try to consciously apply
some techniques. Of course as in anything there may be a learning curve, after
which it pays off to have expended the effort. I suspect I might have been
burned by a shortcut technique like this before, although I might never be
sure.

Before moving to Japan, I started studying the 3000 kanji characters that are
required to be able to read properly. Of course this seems like an utterly
monumental task, but never fear someone suggested to me this clever hack
called the Heisig method. Instead of learning the characters and how to
pronounce them by rote, the Heisig method splits the characters into subparts,
and the whole learning process into recognition and pronunciation parts. Like
in speed reading, the method tries to make you conscious of your learning
process.

Sounds great, right? Perhaps I didn't try hard enough, but in my two years in
Japan I was not able to complete that book. Even after coming back, I would
still open it and try to proceed, but somehow it feels wrong. Now when I look
back, I notice that the actual characters I remember are not from Heisig, but
from the rote exercises or the practical usage of characters in our
classrooms. This makes me suspect it may be better to let subconscious remain
as such, and just concentrate instead on practice. Checking characters as you
read, writing them in essays and emails. Interacting with a lot of people to
get more comfortable at it. Reading tons of books to become a better reader.
When you're really into a book, you might find yourself going faster just to
discover what will happen next. Let your subconscious take care of the
details.

~~~
Alex3917
"I think it may make me act awkwardly if I try to consciously apply some
techniques."

There is some interesting academic literature on the correlation between
perceived intelligence and IQ. I read one paper where they identified the
factors behind perceived intelligence, and then tried to get people to fake
them to increase their perceived intelligence. IIRC the only factor they were
able to successfully fake was eye contact, and the rest either had no effect
or else made the people look less intelligent.

As for reading, my biggest problem is that every time I get excited by
something I stand up and start pacing back and forth across the kitchen
thinking about it. I don't think speed reading will help much with that.

------
tom_rath
I don't. Quantity rarely corresponds with quality.

The greatest value I gain from books is in identifying how the subject
discussed can apply to my own circumstances. That insight often comes to me in
the pauses between pages and paragraphs where I find myself thinking on what
was just read.

I might be able to absorb a bit more information from speed-reading, but I
don't think I could process and internalize the text nearly as well. Since
that's why I'm reading the book in the first place, speed-reading seems of
little benefit to me.

~~~
tertius
I personally would like to get as much of the reading out of the way so that I
can process. This really doesn't take time away from processing, just saves
time reading. And we really can read much faster than we do and not have it
have an impact on our processing.

IMHO most of the content in the books (especially non-fiction) is of no use to
me. It's the 5% of insight that is added to my life that adds value and that I
really want to think about.

~~~
tom_rath
Finding and internalizing that "5% of insight" is why I read at a normal pace.

------
pg
Speed reading is basically an urban legend.

<http://www.slate.com/id/74766/>

Intriguingly, this legend was greatly encouraged by JFK's campaign staff:

<http://www.slate.com/id/74766/sidebar/74768/>

~~~
lincolnq
I'm not trying to brag -- just giving a data point which seems to suggest that
the tagline "nobody reads much faster than 400 words per minute" is false.

I read the first article you linked to. I measured myself on it and got 630
wpm. (And I backtracked a couple times during the reading process. It's hard
to focus when you know you're being measured)

I'm by 40-50% the fastest reader I know, except for my father (we're about
equal; I've never measured much, just read over his shoulder). When other
people read over my shoulder they rarely get farther than through the left
page before I'm turning it; most of them only get through 2/3 of the left
page.

In a line such as the following (from the first linked article):

    
    
      several words. This is called a "fixation," and it takes about .25 seconds on average. You
    

My eyes seem to fix in four or five spots (I can't tell for sure): "several",
"this", "and", "seconds", and "you". So I think I can instantly read about 3
words at a time. When I stare at "called" I can read the whole phrase from
'this' to 'fixation' without moving my eyes. I get the sense that other people
only read one word at a time. Is that true for you?

(Edit: In a monospace font like it appears here, I seem to fixate on every
other word, so it's more like 8 fixations across the line. The tighter font on
the original page seems to let me read faster.)

I was reading before I turned 2 years old, which is pretty young, I think. I
am guessing this had something to do with how fast I read, although genetics
may also be related.

Edit 2: I should point out that I've never tried to study speed reading or
improve my reading rate. I did play around with Spreeder and I could read
every word at 1200wpm, but my comprehension was in the toilet. I played around
with setting it at 800 (with 4-5 words per screen) and it worked reasonably
well, although I never fully got past the distracting element of it flashing
lots of stuff in my face while I was trying to concentrate.

~~~
nomoresecrets
I tried that article, and clocked myself at about 730wpm (in your face! or
something...). But I was deliberately trying to read fast, although I do read
pretty quickly.

I am able (obviously) to skim read things quickly - I would read slower when
reading for pleasure though.

I've never tried speed reading techniques, mainly because the one person I
talked to about it said they found it hard to 'switch off' speed reading. e.g.
I was asking him about 'Watchmen', and he couldn't remember some of the stuff
I was talking about - he thought it was because he speed-read it.

I'd rather enjoy reading than focus purely on speed.

~~~
DTrejo
Yes, I've heard that one you learn to speed read you can't go back.

------
DarkShikari
I speed read--but not books. I like books too much to speed-read them.

But I do speed-read code. When coding, I am bottlenecked not by my ability to
program, but by my ability to come up with ideas. And one of the best ways to
come up with ideas is to read other peoples' code.

So, as a video encoder developer, I've gotten into a habit of reading through
the entire codebase of other video encoders and decoders. I've gotten it down
to almost a science where I can sprint through an entire codebase--
understanding most of the basic structure and spotting anything "interesting"
--at a few hundred lines per minute. I went through the entire libavcodec
H.264 encoder proposal ( <http://research.edm.uhasselt.be/~h264/> ) in just 7
minutes. I went back later and spent over an hour reading it--and found I
missed absolutely nothing of note. And then I stole its strategy for level-
code VLC tables for x264.

Other codebases I've read include most of libavcodec's MPEG-related code,
dirac, schroedinger, a lot of Intel IPP stuff, libmpeg2, and some proprietary
stuff I've had access to from time to time. And probably lots of stuff I
forgot.

It is quite easy to speed-read code, of course, if you already know everything
the code is going to _do_ , and you're only interested in the implementation
or algorithm.

Another thing I do is read _changelogs_ going back years (especially svn/git
logs). They often offer even more insight than the code itself.

------
tokenadult
I read a lot of speed-reading books when I was in college. I was working my
way through, living in my own rented place, so time was of the essence. But I
eventually decided that a lot of speed-reading techniques are less useful than
they appear. The most helpful book I discovered during that research phase was
Reading for Power and Flexibility

[http://www.amazon.com/Reading-Power-Flexibility-Sparks-
Johns...](http://www.amazon.com/Reading-Power-Flexibility-Sparks-
Johnson/dp/B000K6J898/)

which was a refreshing change of emphasis from most other speed-reading books.

Good techniques I learned from various sources were pre-reading (for example,
making sure to read the whole table of contents, the whole
preface/introduction/foreword, and even the whole index before starting the
book proper); focused vocabulary development targeting words with Latin and
Greek roots used in the international scientific vocabulary; and daring not to
read a whole book if reading one section of it would answer my question.

Good vocabulary development books are

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

and

[http://www.amazon.com/English-Words-Latin-Greek-
Elements/dp/...](http://www.amazon.com/English-Words-Latin-Greek-
Elements/dp/0816508992/)

------
fuzzmeister
For books, I often use a very basic technique taught by my HS history teacher:
\- Read the first and last paragraphs of every chapter. \- Read the first and
last sentences of every paragraph.

This obviously doesn't work for novels or dense technical reading, but it is
very effective otherwise.

~~~
trickjarrett
This isn't technically speed reading, it's skimming.

------
noodle
there was a good piece here a while ago that got me speed reading effectively.
your brain can understand things much faster, the holdup is the input stream
of your eyes. trick is to make them faster.

the basic gist of it is this: instead of focusing with your eyes on the start
of every line and reading to the end, try and start indented in and read the
first word with your peripheral vision. end the line on the second to last
word in the same way. as you get good, you progress with this technique.

it does truly work, just using the basics of it speed up read time for me
substantially.

however, it makes it hard to use your imagination, so if you're reading for
enjoyment, don't do this.

~~~
mlLK
To extend the gist, speed-reading is more or less about reading sentences like
words and paragraphs like sentences. The trick is figuring how you can read
beyond your rate of comprehension, and actually forcing your eyes line-by-line
faster than you can vocalize each thought.

------
ojbyrne
Personally, I enjoy reading. Speed reading is for people who don't.

~~~
snprbob86
I do a lot of reading. I hate reading. However, I enjoy learning.

Sometimes reading is the best way to learn.

Sometimes re-reading is even better. Do this slowly.

Sometimes reading lots of different sources about the same topic is the best.
Do this quickly.

Other times, I learn by listening. Or watching. Or trying. And more often than
not, by failing.

Like anything else: Speed reading is a tool. Use it appropriately.

~~~
ojbyrne
As I said, I enjoy reading. I spent 4 years of my life getting an English
degree, and it shows ;-). I can easily enjoy a book that I learn nothing from,
if the writer shows a mastery of the English language. I think speed reading
techniques treat the writer's style/voice as irrelevant, and that's my
specific objection.

~~~
nomoresecrets
Agreed. As I mentioned above, I can read pretty quickly, but if you find
yourself speed-reading, say, PG Wodehouse, then it's just possible you may be
missing out :)

------
Silentio
I don't speed read per se, but I have developed some techniques that help me
digest what I need to digest when reading an assignment (I'm in grad school
and the amount of reading assigned is obscene).

I love to read, and when I read for fun I start at the beginning and read to
the end. This doesn't work when you have 500 pages to read spread across 4
classes.

Assuming you know what book you're reading and why you are reading it, and
that you've gone through the table of contents so you know the shape of the
book, let's say you're starting a new chapter:

 _Read the intro_ Read the conclusion *Read section headings and topic
paragraphs -Hopefully now you know where you need to read more carefully and
what you can skim

Sometimes you'll get sucked into what you are reading because it is so damn
interesting. You could view this as negative, but I think that is positive. If
you are really loving what you're reading, you're going to learn it better
than you will if you don't care.

Anyway, I've given some thought to bondafide speed reading, but the above
works well for me when I need to get through a bunch of pages and know I need
to learn it well.

edit: I've gone back and read your question, sorry if my post response wasn't
what you were looking for at all.

------
dilanj
You only remember about 20% of what you read at best. So the optimal approach
would be to pick the 20% you want to read.

Skimming over dull parts and reading the start and end of paragraphs helps.
I've also tried EyeQ and AceReader and felt the latter helped in learning to
read chunks of words at a time.

Personally though, the biggest difference was made by starting to use a Sony
Reader. It'll make a lot of your otherwise mundanely spent time usable for
reading.

~~~
psyklic
If you only read the 20% you want to read, then according to your first
statement you will only remember 20% of that!

~~~
dilanj
Good point, but what I meant was picking what you want to focus on, apologies
if the literal meaning confused you.

------
sown
I use a laxidasical reading technique: I read the document 3 times over, each
session punctuated by series of breaks. It sinks in eventually.

------
vchakra
I can read fast when I want to - easily upwards of 1000 wpm, but the main
focus IMHO must be to just read (without trying to comprehend), and then trust
your unconscious mind to absorb the information. The biggest problem I see
with people speed reading is that they always link reading with immediate
comprehension and understanding, rather than making it two independent
processes. This leads to re-reading and trying to make more sense of the words
by going back to them rather than acquiring more information in order to see
the big picture.

Especially when I'm trying to cover a new field (right now, dsp and speech
recognition) I just follow a scorched earth reading process where I read a few
dozen papers and articles. In the beginning none of it makes sense, but a
day/week/month later things just click, and the whole thing makes sense.

------
gjm11
My technique for speed reading is to read really fast. Doing so just comes
naturally, or at least it feels that way. I was a very early reader as a
child, which I bet correlates strongly with being a fast reader thereafter.

I do find that for material that's heavier going my retention is worse than
I'd like it to be. I don't know whether that's just because I'm
unrealistically optimistic about what ought to be achievable, or whether my
reading speed is tuned for easier stuff because, e.g., in those formative
childhood years most of what you read is relatively easy, syntactically at
least. (For stuff that's conceptually difficult, the prescription is the same
whatever your reading speed: put the book down and think/scribble/experiment,
read multiple times, force yourself to express the key ideas in your own
words, etc.)

------
bayareaguy
Here's a link I use occasionally:

<http://www.zapreader.com/reader/index.php>

Some older discussion on this is here:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=156464>

~~~
notauser
I have this set up as a bookmark to automatically load selected text into
Spreeder (also from a HN thread):

javascript:var%20sel%20=%20window.getSelection?%20window.getSelection()%20:%20document.getSelection?%20document.getSelection()%20:%20document.selection.createRange().text;%20sel%20+=%20'';sel%20=%20sel.replace(/'/g,'&'%20+%20'apos;');newdoc%20=%20open().document;newdoc.write(%22<BODY><FORM%20ACTION='[http://www.spreeder.com/'%20METHOD='POST'><INPUT%20T...](http://www.spreeder.com/'%20METHOD='POST'><INPUT%20TYPE='hidden'%20NAME='passage'%20VALUE='%22%20+%20sel%20+%20%22'></FORM></BODY>%22));newdoc.forms[0].submit();

(Edit: Might be better to get the link from here -
<http://spreeder.com/bookmarklet.php> )

------
Todd
You can improve your speed a great deal just by reading the introductory tips
in most speed reading courses. Most of it comes down to observing how your
eyes work mechanically and trying to make the input process more efficient.
Probably the biggest detriment to speed is the regression. Whenever you
stumble on a word or phrase and back up, you loose a tremendous amount of time
relative to the overall process. If you can just minimize or eliminate
regressions, you will notice a good improvement in speed--without any
reduction in comprehension. It just takes a little discipline to develop the
habit.

------
mlLK
<http://tinyurl.com/9mxrly>: was my first text on speed-reading. It's a very
quick read and overall a great speed-reading primer. If you're interested in
speed-reading you might also when check-out some SRSs (spaced repetition
system) available. I'm playing with Anki (open-source) and SuperMemo
(commercial) right now.

~~~
r7000
plug.. You could also try on online SRS @ <http://flashcarddb.com>

------
bloch
Tyler Cowen on reading fast:

"The best way to read quickly is to read lots. And lots. And to have started a
long time ago."

[http://www.marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2006/12...](http://www.marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2006/12/how_to_read_fas.html)

