I took a speed reading course one summer when I was in college. My mother thought that it would give me an edge. First they test you and my reading speed was already on the high end of normal.
In the course I did theoretically more than double my reading speed. But my comprehension was based on the test they gave me. Plus I noticed that I tired quickly doing speed reading. I was a kid who loved to read and had no problem doing it for hours on end without tiring.
After the course I quickly discovered as I suspected that my real world comprehension suffered greatly by speed reading.
So what value did I receive from the course? After college there have been times I needed to quickly get the gist of a document and was under extreme time pressure. I found speed reading worked fine though in my business career I doubt that I used it more than once a year.
Bottom line my personal ROI would have been much higher if my Mother have hired a tutor to help me over the summer learn to paint or play blues harmonica instead.
I think the skill many of us need to cultivate is the opposite one -- slowing down and carefully reading a challenging text. It took me a while to get out of "the final is tomorrow so I've got to blow through the rest of this book today" mode.
Beyond slowing down, a real challenge for many of us in this age of distraction is to keep one's attention focused on a single text for extended periods of time.
I know I struggle with this myself despite being a life-long reader from the pre-Internet days who used to have no trouble staying focused through a full book.
I think this is just your brain autocompleting the rest of the sentence. You probably aren't even reading this second sentence, because you already know how I'm going to justify the claim of "brain autocompletion."
Though new paragraphs, or otherwise unexpected characteristics like long groupings of numbers such as 747-838-919-884, stick out and pique our interest.
I think a lot of good writing lies in playing with your internal "branch predictor" as it were.
This article feels like a vindication of sorts, for my own speed reading experience. Years ago, I read a book on speed reading, and just as we think everything that is in a book must be written by an expert, starting adopting the techniques without second guessing it. Blamed myself for not being smart enough for loosing comprehension when these techniques have obviously worked for everyone else. Reading this is somewhat liberating.
I think the value of speed reading is more when you're reading about some familiar topic and you want to decide whether there's anything new in front of you. For instance you may want to skip the rehash of some intro material. Works better for some subjects than others.
I'm what I've come to call a 'slow thinker'. My perception speed is normal, but the gray matter ticks over at a very slow rate of knots and my comprehension of what I'm seeing/hearing/feeling unpacks over the course of several seconds. I've noticed I often have an initial reaction to things, then a 'slow reaction' that is sometimes quite different and factors in more things I know.
It's like it takes some time to 'dial in' on what my response to a particular stimuli is going to be, but often the situation demands a response faster than I can provide one that I feel is properly considered. This leads to interesting social stuff sometimes, and sometimes a kind of short-duration l'esprit de l'escalier social anxiety.
As I've got older, I've learned that in a lot of cases the initial reaction is fine, and I can suppress the desire to issue a follow-up correction once the brain has caught up. Younger me was less able to do that and would often blurt out a second response to nobody's particular benefit, or hold off on a response to the point the moment is lost.
So perhaps for this reason, speed reading has never really clicked for me to the point that I've always been 'suspicious' of it. It's as the author says, comprehension is often the bottleneck. Even with fiction, I find I'm relating the current occurrences I'm reading with whatever world the author has built up, and considering ramifications.
My SO reads very quickly, and I often wonder how much of it is being deeply considered as she makes her way through something. It makes me hesitant to recommend any text I've enjoyed for the richness of it, as I fear a superficial read somehow does it less justice than just not reading it at all.
I tested this at age 18 with comprehension tests. The figures escape me but at a pace that was sustainable for no more than 45 minutes, if I recall like 900 words a minute, my comprehension dipped down all the may to mid 70%. But that was roughly 2.5x the pace you would read a textbook at. Maybe more.
Worth it? I don't know. But if its meaningless calories, sometimes just finishing helps. There is a ton of day to day "reading" in the form of emails and whatever you do on a computer. For everything else its context dependent.
I'm a bit like this, I think. My raw reading speed is decent. But when I'm reading, I'm constantly stopping to flip back and check something, or to stop and think through the implications of what I've just read, or, when the internet is to hand, to look up some related information. As a result, my net reading speed is diabolical.
But to me, this isn't about thinking slowly, it's about thinking thoroughly. I think I pick things up from texts that faster readers skate right over.
Of course, I haven't actually measured any of this, so it's probably just comforting nonsense.
I've always been a fast reader, but I totally resonate with the slow pace of cognition. My wife thinks at a much faster pace than I -- but slow thinking can often get things done faster! (E.g., if reflection helps improve the task approach).
I think reading fast is a really helpful skill though. It requires inhibition (knowing what words to skip) and selection (what words capture the attention) and some specialized knowledge of things like the typical structure of scientific papers.
My initial reaction in a stressful situation I often regretted, it wasn't a calm and considered response but a knee jerk reaction. Meditation has really helped me. Lets me respond initially in a thoughtful and considered way and it's a lot quicker that having a spike in emotion and saying WHAT!, then sorry, then trying to calm down and think and respond.
The best way to speed read is if the writer reduces the number of words required to communicate and educate. Of course this takes extra effort, and is also goes against human perception of value. E.g. if you reduced Tim Ferris's book to a single sheet of A4 you could get the point across, but who's going to pay $20 or so for a sheet of A4? Well some execs might pay $2000 - but you won't sell millions of copies like that. Anyway...
To sum it up that book:
To work fewer hours per week in the long term, set up a business, and figure out how to automate, speed up and delegate as much of the work as possible. Imagine a few cool inspiration inducing anecdotes alluding to a cool lifestyle. Read elsewhere for the bit about how to set up a successful business in the first place, or the details of how to automate and delegate effectively.
There you go - 200 or so pages you don't need to read :-)
I read a book that could literally be summed up in a sentence (it was called "the asshole rule" or something similar, and the gist was "don't hire assholes"). There was nothing at all in addition to that, except for a bunch of feel-good anecdotes and specious data that misrepresented correlation for causation.
I hated it so much that I made a (now defunct) website where I would post summaries of these books so people wouldn't have to be subjected to all the filler.
Sounds like the book was doing something different though. Why should you believe that one sentence? The author has to sell you on the idea and demonstrate why it is a bad idea to hire assholes. A singular sentence isn't going to be enough to convince you, and it shouldn't be.
I'd want a definition of 'asshole' as well, and a ranking of asshole characteristics to weigh against positive traits, and how to correct them where possible. The topic does warrant more than just a sentence.
Content bloat with needless crap seems to have happened to novels, movies and tv shows. It’s interesting to read penguin classics - maybe they don’t represent their respective eras, but they are usually (very subjectively) quite short.
A lot of non-fiction is about trying to make a case or prove some thesis. As such, a book may try to show lots of evidence, deal with many potential counter arguments, or demonstrate that different lines of analysis lead to the same conclusion. If you become convinced of the thesis early on a lot of the book can seem redundant.
When I find myself in such a position I usually just stop reading but include the ideas I got out of it in my notes. Later, if I find myself needing the details I skipped, it's easy to go back.
Business books (most good writing actually) are frontloaded. The first paragraph tells you the gist, the first page the important ideas, the first chapter most of what the book has to offer. The rest is there to go into detail and support that first chapter with facts arguments and anecdotes.
But here’s the kicker: you often won’t fully grok the first chapter if you don’t read the rest. (or don’t already know it from other sources)
It’s interesting that you specify non-fiction, presumably since part of the point of reading fiction is the process of reading itself rather than simply the plot that unfolds. But of course, that’s also true of non-fiction books. Many people probably enjoy the process of reading Tim Ferris’ books.
>It’s interesting that you specify non-fiction, presumably since part of the point of reading fiction is the process of reading itself rather than simply the plot that unfolds
there's all sorts of "reduced Shakespeare" - most of it more parody than summary, but there is a tradition of summarizing literature and fiction, and the results are not always devoid of literary merit on their own.
These guys [0] do what you're talking about. They digest non fictional books, summarize them and even turn them into audio books. Quite good to go straight to the main points without missing anything important.
One way to verify your thesis is to read summary books. If they do it diligently and industriously, all books will look alike and contain just common senses. Like Blinkists ;)
I've worked with some programmers who were so slow at typing I would find myself reluctant to help them with their "hands on" work, like directing them to try something in the REPL for example, or even just asking them to run a shell command. It was a struggle for me not to excuse myself as soon as possible once they started typing. They seemingly couldn't get a single word out without a typo, and would frequently hunt down other places in the code so they could copy paste that 6 character variable name, etc.
Being able to type 30~40 WPM is good enough though, no need to be super speedy.
One of the best courses I ever took was a 2 week summer school class in typing in the 8th grade. We were taught to touch type on a heavy mechanical typewriter where you really had to hammer the keys.
Those few hours have paid off enormously for me. Not having to look at the keys while typing about doubles the speed. The letters painted on my keys have long since worn off anyway :-)
> One of the best courses I ever took was a 2 week summer school class in typing in the 8th grade. We were taught to touch type on a heavy mechanical typewriter where you really had to hammer the keys.
In my school, we had a full semester of touch-typing on mechanical keyboard in both the 7th and 8th grades. Everyone had to take it.
I had a couple of friends who, like me, were very interested in computers and programming. But instead of taking the opportunity to hone a skill that they knew they'd be using several hours a day for the next 60 years of their life, they screwed around, and left the class hunt-and-pecking as much as they ever had; and as far as I know they do that to this day. It never made any sense to me -- like, you have to be here anyway, why not just get something out of it instead of being bored?
(I meanwhile practiced with Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing on my home computer until my speed drills were consistently between 90 and 100 WPM.)
> In my school, we had a full semester of touch-typing on mechanical keyboard in both the 7th and 8th grades.
It's good they offered the class, but two full semesters of it sounds like terribly inefficient teaching.
What's funny is I don't know what many of the commands are for my text editor. But my fingers know. Sometimes I'll just watch my fingers to see what the command is, but I have to be careful - when I think too much about "what is the command" my fingers forget it.
A big part of this is what kind of measurement your doing. I can easily boost my typing speed with a few errors. However, I would much rather type at 99.98% accuracy at 35WPM when programming or doing data entry than 80WPM at even 99.9% accuracy.
However, if your spending most of the day emailing people extreme accuracy is effectively pointless.
> couldn't get a single word out without a typo, and would frequently hunt down other places in the code so they could copy paste that 6 character variable name
The latter seems a good strategy for coping with the former, does it not?
it's similar to people who spend years doing "hunt and peck" typing. if you practice enough, you can get up to a decent speed, but you would have been much better off taking a couple weeks to become a mediocre touch typist.
I was a mediocre touch typist, and then spent many years doing hands on, IT support. I usually had to type on other people's keyboards while I was offset to one side, or even on the other side of the desk. I'm now a terrible touch typist, but a pretty good upside down, one handed typist!
A far better solution would be setting up their IDE to have autocomplete enabled, no time searching for variables, as they come up with the first few letters entered.
The search and copy suggests method they're not using their tools to their best extent.
It requires more effort and more precision. So I'll say no. Having trouble with something and compensating by doing a more difficult task is only a good coping strategy when it's something you very rarely have to do.
Usually you can just start typing and then use some kind of automatic completion, much more efficient than hunting down multiple variables in code and copying them.
That said, I've been pushing to hit 100 wpm typing with minimal typos for years just because it's a nice round number and I keep ending up just shy. Character typos aren't even that big of a deal, as I find a good chunk of mistakes are actually "thought-os" where I type in the completely wrong giraffe. So being able to recover dynamically from misakes is valuable too.
I wonder why some people type faster. If tested, I average around 125 wpm in reasonable tests (625 cpm really). I've never tried to learn to type quickly. I've never had anything beyond a $10 keyboard and I don't even type like it's taught (my hands overlap on some characters). Despite that I type quite fast with few errors - most of my mistakes are also related to typing in something completely different. It was quite shocking to me when I found out that my friends typed at below 80 wpm when trying to type fast.
I think it's like Amdahl's Law. Programming is thinking followed by typing. If you spend half your time thinking and half your time typing, then doubling your typing speed will increase your programming speed by a third. But doubling it again will only increase your programming speed by a sixth, and even with infinite typing speed, you've only doubled your programming speed.
Time spent typing might not be a bottleneck, but I think latency between thinking and having code can be. Typing quickly isn't the only way to reduce that latency though.
I disagree, reading speed at full comprehension level can slow you down and accelerate everything you do.
I'm an extremely slow reader and that has been a major bottleneck in my life, it has slowed me down in everything I do and everything I've been interested in.
Bill Gates is rumored to read several books per weeks and fully understand and remember most details. That in itself isn't enough to have made him who he is, but I'm sure it helps. If I could get one thing from him that's what I'd pick, yes over money and programing abilities, reading slowly is that delibitating.
Yeah, certainly. That's why I said "not really" instead of an absolute statement, to leave room for cases like that (and I probably should've been more clear). But for the most part input speed isn't the bottleneck that people get stuck at indefinitely.
And it's also possible for this to change. With programming, for example, if you lose the use of a hand, you quickly find out typing speed is the new bottleneck.
Actually, I'd say they're different because of their position in cache. The reason it doesn't work for reading unfamiliar material is that you don't have the information yet. You need to assimilate to build the picture. In fact, I recall speed reading material I was familiar with and absolutely achieving significant comprehension.
Writing is different. Increasing throughput almost has continuous gains all the way to blitting to computer. This makes sense. Everything is hot cached. Right now everything between my thoughts and the machine is just in the way.
Being quick on the keyboard is about reducing friction. The faster I can physically manipulate an idea in space and the more automatic it is, the less cognitive overhead I have to waste on the process. If you work with a keyboard you will be well served by mastering that tool.
Between documentation, comments, issues, miscellaneous emails, and chat, I would be shocked if half the typing I do for a living is actual source code.
I can't imagine doing this job without fast and accurate typing, just like I can't imagine sharing this comment if it took me longer than 45 seconds to type it out.
It has its uses, but you aren't going to speed read poetry, literature, etc and get much out of it. The same thing with memory maps and other tricks. They have their limited uses, but aren't a panacea for learning and knowledge.
It depends on what you're programming as well. I suspect for cases when you can type faster than you think you'd be able to use a macro or some IDE snippet feature for it.
> It’s simply not possible to comprehend what you’re reading and avoid using that inner voice. So reading faster means being able to use this inner voice faster, not eliminating it. To further that, expert speed readers who were studied also subvocalized, they just did it faster.
I’ve seen this argued elsewhere, and am not convinced they’ve found readers who do not subvocalize to study. Most readers subvocalize. Even if you don’t, if you ask about it, then you do (like asking someone to not think about their breathing).
If you do not normally subvocalize, you become painfully aware of it when you drop into it, feels like slamming on the brakes, and very difficult to let go of again.
I suspect the studies referenced[1] have simply not studied those who don’t subvocalize, akin to studies missing the phenomenon of aphantasia until 2015. Or, they’ve established experimental conditions where the reader cannot help but think about it, causing it to occur.
I find it hard to believe I'm subvocalizing when I read at my normal pace on "average" text (i.e., not academically-dense), on the grounds that I can't read aloud at anything even remotely resembling the speed with which I normally read, no matter how hard I may try.
I can believe that various stray neural impulses may still end up getting sent, or that I subvocalize key words and my conscious self doesn't notice. But in the sense that I think people expect, where we could just take the subvocalizations and somehow lift them up to vocalizations with some obvious transform and understand the results? No way.
There's a world of difference between "everyone whether they realize it or not are fully reading aloud every word they read, just too quietly to hear" and "various small stray impulses may make their way down to the vocal cords". Perhaps there is lack of clarity about what "subvocalization" means?
I also find it hard to believe on the grounds that while by no means can I sustain this for long periods of time, I can be speaking to someone while reading something else. Generally I have my sentence "queued up", so to speak, so it isn't consuming the executive function, while I'm using the executive function to read. Even thought this may be for small single-digit number of seconds, that's still plenty to find it hard to believe that I am simultaneously "subvocalizing" what I'm reading while I'm also vocalizing a completely different set of words, which may not even be on the same train of thought.
I, as a non-native English speaker who mainly interface English through written language and rarely via spoken language, find this fascinating. I am able to read articles and blog posts in English rapidly and with full comprehension, but I'm totally NOT able to speak out loud most of the words. I find that it's mostly through visual medium the words "come" to me.
I wonder if there's anyone out there who can read a non-alphabetic language (e.g. Chinese) but doesn't even know how to pronounce what they're reading.
Maybe an experiment could involve a fictional ideogram language, and compare peoples subvocalizing (or lack thereof) versus their native one.
Japanese was my first foreign language. I could read a lot of Chinese while having no idea how to pronounce it. Furthermore, once I learned some fairly basic grammar in Chinese, I could read some texts with a fairly high level of accuracy.
All that said, I’m pretty sure I sub-vocalized in Japanese.
I will also say that there are words in both languages where I have forgotten the pronunciation of certain characters, but I remember what the characters mean.
Thinking more about this some more, I’m pretty sure that there is a conceptual and/or visual “sub vocalization” that I have experienced where I clearly knew what something meant, but the words to say it in any language didn’t readily come to my mind. Specifically, there are concepts in Japanese (esp classical four characters combos) that I almost certainly didn’t know the pronunciation of, but I knew exactly what they meant, and the idea didn’t really directly translate into English (e.g., 不惜身命, which was use by Takahanada/Takanofuji when he became yokozuna).
>Thinking more about this some more, I’m pretty sure that there is a conceptual and/or visual “sub vocalization” that I have experienced where I clearly knew what something meant, but the words to say it in any language didn’t readily come to my mind.
Isn't this a common occurrence when you just can't think of a word, but it's on the tip of your tongue? Another thing that's similar to this would be all the symbols we run into in real life. Things such as traffic signs, trademarks, settings buttons, hamburger menu etc.
Tip-of-the-tongue definitely is a part of symbolic knowledge/cognition.
That said, what I am speaking of is much more complex. The example I gave for Japanese, while most educated native speakers would have known the pronunciation, the meaning was not obvious. As a non-native speaker, the translation was something like "with the devotion of a Buddhist monk", but that doesn't really convey the intensity of the phrase. Even today, when I try to translate it into English, my explanation does not do the phrase justice. When I try to explain it to not-so- linguistically-gifted Japanese people, I can provide a gist fairly easily (just as in English), but the weight of the phrase is tough to convey.
In English, I might equate this to when someone uses just the right Latin or Greek term. The literal translation is fine, but the depth of the meaning is almost impossible to describe while being almost palpable to those in the know.
We consider it a tip-of-the-tongue moment when the word we want to say actually exists. However, I think the process by which this works is the same or very similar in which your translation problem works. You have a concept in your mind that you are unable to properly translate into words. You know what you want to say, but you just don't know the right words.
>I wonder if there's anyone out there who can read a non-alphabetic language (e.g. Chinese) but doesn't even know how to pronounce what they're reading.
This is actually how many people learn Japanese. They get an anki deck with kanji and their meanings and learn from that. The decks might have some pronunciations of the kanji, but typically not all of the pronunciations (or people don't learn them). This leads to a situation where they can read text and understand most (all?) of it, but would have difficulty reading it out loud.
Japanese kanji (and Chinese hanzi) are logographic. Each symbol denotes a word or a phrase and depending on the context it can have a different pronunciation, however the meanings generally stay rather similar.
But that wouldn't help with avoiding subvocalizing. If you know one pronunciation, even if it's not the correct one, you can still subvocalize.
One thing I noticed about myself is that I often subvocalize large numbers (say, 64521) in my native language, especially when I'm reading a language I'm not fluent in.
Perhaps we're different then, because when I see a large number I just skip over it unless the specific number is important. I'll essentially leave it as a blank. I think sub vocalization for kanji that you don't know the pronunciation of would be the same.
On the other hand, perhaps this is not the best example, because somebody learning the language would already be slow enough at reading that sub-vocalization wouldn't make a difference.
Sure. I'm not fluent in 日本語, but I know a little and I learned the meaning of plenty of kanji before I knew the reading, and for many kanji, there can be multiple readings, as well. (onyomi and kunyomi)
In fact, a fairly popular way to self-teach Japanese involves utilizing a book series called "Remembering the Kanji", which teaches the meanings of kanji without any readings at all in the first volume. People are able to comprehend quite a bit on a basic level after volume 1 - no grammar and no way to speak or understand spoken word, but generally enough to get a rough idea of texts published at a fairly basic level.
However, I imagine most people at this point, for most words, are probably subvocalizing the english word or meaning in their heads. It's pretty common, even for people that know the proper pronunciation, to still keep translating in their mind vs. just using the word in the foreign language. Personally, I really only subvocalize the Japanese pronunciation for words where they aren't really directly translatable. Kawaii is a good example - it's easy to just translate as 'cute' and it's a word a lot of non-Japanese speakers know, but it doesn't really convey the full meaning of the term and all of the cultural aspects of it. Shikataganai/shogunai are another common example. Phrases and words that don't have accurate direct translations are generally the first people learn to think of totally in their secondary languages, and a lot of people never progress beyond that.
Which is a long way of saying it's hard to tell on this because someone who knows another language could be subvocalizing in their primary language, and someone who only knows the non-alphabetic language but can't pronounce it is pretty unlikely to exist, since most kids learn to speak and hear before they learn to write and read.
The exception would be people that are born totally deaf - and then you don't need to use a non-alphabetic language. They wouldn't know the sounds to be able to subvocalize them even in an alphabetic language.
Doing some quick googling, it looks like even some people that are born deaf develop a subvocalization alternative, with pictures, sign language, etc., though some do not develop the habit at all: https://books.google.com/books?id=8PhwXf9uj1IC&pg=PA114&lpg=...
As a native English speaker who read a lot as a kid, there are many words I've found as I got older that I was pronouncing entirely incorrectly. So I think this is quite common (I know several others like this)
Yes very common among people considered "bookworms" as children. Learning vocabulary through reading not hearing. Can sometimes be embarrassing but it's better to know what a word means and pronounce it wrong than to not know the meaning at all.
The first time you type your newly created password, it's like executing a program/script that goes: "Type('a'); Type('b'); ..."
Once it becomes muscle memory, there's no longer a script (which is why the password is no longer consciously available) for you to execute: you trigger the first finger motion, then it all happens more or less automatically, since the individual finger motions are linked together by sensory cues. Software becomes firmware as it were. I suspect those who claim not to subvocalize could be in an analogous situation, which would mean that they aren't really adopting a fundamentally different approach to reading. Their 'reading program' still takes the same shape as normal people, only a component of it is outsourced and so is no longer consciously available.
Incidentally Charles Dickens wrote about Laura Bridgman (the first deaf-blind person to learn to 'speak' English by communicating with her fingers) and said you can literally visually tell when she's thinking since she'd be moving her fingers. That sounds like the analog of subvocalization for her.
> Her social feelings, and her affections, are very strong; and when she is sitting at work, or by the side of one of her little friends, she will break off from her task every few moments, to hug and kiss them with an earnestness and warmth that is touching to behold. When left alone, she occupies and apparently amuses herself, and seems quite content; and so strong seems to be the natural tendency of thought to put on the garb of language, that she often soliloquizes in the finger language, slow and tedious as it is. But it is only when alone, that she is quiet; for if she becomes sensible of the presence of any one near her, she is restless until she can sit close beside them, hold their hand, and converse with them by sign.[20]
I don't think I subvocalise, I read way faster than I can speak. There's certainly ideas flowing through my mind as I read, but not sounds. It feels like a mixture between words, thoughts and emotions, not a stream of (silently) spoken words.
I bought a book on speed reading because I was dissatisfied with my "slow" reading, only to discover that according to their tests I was way up there in both speed and comprehension :-D
I was shocked to learn from that book that many people subvocalise - it felt so foreign (and utterly cumbersome) to me. I hadn't even considered people did that.
Most of the book was about not subvocalising - which I don't think I do anyway, so I never read it to the end.
Indeed if I read to my kids I'm often simultaneously reading one sentence aloud, and reading 1...2 sentences ahead for myself so I get the voices right. So in effect I'm reading the entire text twice while speaking it once.
Subvocalizing is much faster than speaking. In general, subvocalizing refers to pronouncing the words in your head, which can be picked up by observing neural activity in the vocal chords.
Even if your vocal chords were doing the full range of motion (they are not), when speaking, you also have to open and close your mouth, move your tongue, take in breath and expel it etc. It's much more than simply some activity in your vocal chords.
I just wanted to chime in. I used to read solely visually (from what I remember) but now I cannot stop subvocalizing. I was already a neurotic person but I genuinely think about this every time I read now and it's kind of distressing.
It's also very hard to focus on what I'm reading because I'm constantly thinking on a meta level about how I'm reading. I find this is less intense if I'm reading something online and not in book form. Anyway my point was just that I think you are 100% correct in that there are people who do not subvocalize, but if you try to test it they will probably subvocalize.
I don't know if this has happened to other people, but I sometimes read a whole book and at the end I realize I do not know the names of the main characters.
I can recognize the names in written form by the shape its shape, but since I never bothered to pronounce them in my head when reading the book I just cannot tell their names.
It's impossible to get into the flow state of reading (when you are not aware you are reading) without subvocalizing. I've tried forever. It's impossible and anyone who claims to is lying or is just constantly skimming ("speed reading").
That’s a pretty strong statement. I don’t normally subvocalize while reading, and yes, I can still get into that flow state if I’m immersed in what I’m reading. I can subvocalize while reading if I think about it, but it’s honestly kind of distracting.
Can you spot incorrect use of "a" vs. "an" in text? You're subvocalizing.
Are you unable to read while talking? You're subvocalizing.
The idea of not-subvocalizing is to see text as images. You should be able to recognize chunks of words like you recognize different types of emojis or types of dogs. It is completely different from the way everyone learned to read.
I can not-subvocalize after much practice but only temporarily.
I don't recommend it. It's useless on the same level as learning Dvorak.
Your presumption that I'm wrong about my own experience is, well, presumptive.
Your tests for subvocalizing are not all correct (spotting "a" vs. "an" does not require subvocalizing).
I do experience text as visual stimulus without sound, and I do process it in clumps. As I mentioned elsewhere in the thread, I once experienced reading multiple lines simultaneously, perceiving not just sentences but paragraphs all at once.
It was quite a rush.
It's not something I can control, or something I can do on command, but I think it is decent evidence that I don't subvocalize.
Testing the notion that subvocalization slows you down should be reasonably easy. Just test people deaf since birth. Do they read faster? Visit some deaf communities.
It's not immediately obvious, but many deaf people don't know how to read at all. Sign language (hand gestures) is a completely different language, different from English, Russian, Italian etc. To complicate stuff, there's not a single global sign language.
I have read that some deaf people (with no inner monologue) can read a lot faster than average (e.g. 800wpm). Confounding that hypothesis, I have also read that some blind people can listen to synthesised speech at similar very high speeds (at which point it no longer sounds like speech at all, but they've learned to decode it by building up gradually).
Simpler test. Stop doing it and you will notice a meaningful increase. Perhaps that's not a perfectly controlled experiment, but at least enjoy the benefits! :)
I used to do that, but now listen at 1x as it gives me time to have creative thoughts over what was said which helps me to retain the meaning behind the words.
I listen to most things above 1x speed specifically so that I don't have time to have creative thoughts about what I'm listening to, as that quickly leads to me no longer actually listening. Instead I have to specifically pause it if I want to stop and think about it.
I often start with 1.5x and go up to 2x or 3x after a few minutes.
It's extremely important for online courses that would normally take weeks to watch and it starts feeling normal so quickly. When I go back to 1x it feels like people talk in slow-motion.
But I think quizzes are important in that context, otherwise the new knowledge won't solidify.
I'm always impressed of how much of my duolingo Spanish skills are still present, even if I didn't use the app for half a year or read any Spanish in that time.
Suppose it depends on what you're listening to and why, but I mostly listen to podcasts for entertainment, and I don't want to rush entertainment. I have enough trouble finding good stuff as it is.
I suspect this has a higher mental cost, leading to physical fatigue and slowed cognition later. We know chess players burn huge amounts of calories from thinking. IOW, there's no free lunch.
I find this also works great with instructional videos like pluralsight and lynda. It's easier on your working memory and concentration and if you relisten to tricky bits as you are going through you have a much deeper understanding that is more richly connected to your knowledge tree than plodding through at normal speed.
I was obsessed with speed reading at one point and still practice some of the techniques. I can attest to the author's recommendation to skim before reading. Especially with challenging material, I find skimming first reduces anxiety-induced procrastination. The material becomes less intimidating once you've "gotten to the last page," even if fraudulently. Then you can go back and read, perhaps selectively and non-linearly, until you understand it.
Speed reading attracted me because I easily get bored and drift off. If the pace is faster, I can stay engaged better. It's not really about speed or saving time (the irony of that while posting on HN).
I can understand a lot of Japanese words written in kanjis without knowing how to pronounce them. So I am basically forced to read without any subvocalization and it’s pretty tough to understand any text longer than 5 lines.
It feels like trying to understand a mathematical proof that has been written only with mathematical symbols.
That is odd to me because I can read French fairly fluently, but I can’t pronounce the words.
I took a summer course a few decades ago, and kept up with the literature portion as that could be practiced alone, but never found anyone to practice speaking with.
So I'm scrolling through this article, reading more carefully at first to model his thought processes, then picking up a few words per paragraph, formulating a hypothesis as to what he's saying in that paragraph, making a spot check to confirm my hypothesis, and moving on. I was oblivious to the irony here, as I was focused on reading. When I realized I was a counterexample to his thesis, I cracked up and had to stop.
The recommendations for more effective reading largely match those in Mortimer Adler's How to Read a Book, particularly chapters 2 (The Second Level of Reading: Inspectional Reading) and 7 (How to X-Ray a Book). Both address how to rapidly determine a book's structure. More generally, Adler suggests approaching reading with intent, that is, what are your goals in reading a book, often corresponding to the type of book. Fiction is different from poetry, practical books, history, science and mathematics, philosophy, and social science (each addressed in the book).
#1 trick: GNU grep is fast because it AVOIDS LOOKING AT
EVERY INPUT BYTE.
#2 trick: GNU grep is fast because it EXECUTES VERY FEW
INSTRUCTIONS FOR EACH BYTE that it does look at.
If you want to read faster, read less, and read more intelligently.
By "read less", I mean simply don't waste your time on irrelevant material. For pleasure reading, this doesn't mean skipping large parts of books, in general (there ... are exceptions), but it could very well mean skipping entire books, or deciding that you really don't want to read them. For nonfiction, it may very well mean sucking the marrow out of their bones without getting bogged into the detail. There are few writers who are highly synoptic and for whom all words matter (this is more common in philosophy than elsewhere, though I can think of other examples).
By "more intelligently", I mean understanding what you hope to gain (amusement/entertainment, general information, specific answers to questions, understanding or rebutting an author's arguments, etc.). Skip what doesn't address that goal, and stop once you've attained it.
There is a tremendous amount of published material. There have been about 300,000 traditionally published books annually in English since the 1950s, if not before, and over the past decade or so, "non-traditional" ("vanity", self-published, print-on-demand, ebooks, etc.) raise that number well over 1 million. Given roughly 300 million to 1 billion native English speakers, this means one book per 300 to 1,000 people.
Quality literature is far less common. Many authors have commented on the folly of reading other-than-excellent books. I'd suggest some sampling of the common genres, but ... don't get stuck there, if you can help it.
Shopenhaer addresses this in "On Authorship and Style":
Writing for money and preservation of copyright are, at bottom, the ruin of literature. It is only the man who writes absolutely for the sake of the subject that writes anything worth writing. What an inestimable advantage it would be, if, in every branch of literature, there existed only a few but excellent books! This can never come to pass so long as money is to be made by writing.
Diderot the broader problem of a superfluity of books and information overload:
As long as the centuries continue to unfold, the number of books will grow continually, and one can predict that a time will come when it will be almost as difficult to learn anything from books as from the direct study of the whole universe. It will be almost as convenient to search for some bit of truth concealed in nature as it will be to find it hidden away in an immense multitude of bound volumes.
(This was, of course, a solutions-oriented pitch for a technical IT solution Diderot was launching, the Encyclpaedia.)
A depressing tendency of most speed-reading programmes, and discussions, I've encountered, is that few show any wareness of these extant models and guides. Which makes one wonder if their authors actually read intelligently....
“If I finish a book a week, I will read only a few thousand books in my lifetime, about a tenth of a percent of the contents of the greatest libraries of our time. The trick is to know which books to read.”
Just got done reading Adler's How to Read a Book a few days ago.
Recommend: Ward Farnsworth.
Apparently some law school dean who has written some books on law, none of which I have read. I personally just picture him more as a classicist.
His grasp on English writing knocks me off my feet. It is seriously something to behold.
His book on explaining chess tactics (also available online free[0]) is an absolutely amazing display of effective communication in writing.
In another writing style, he has three books[1][2][3] and apparently an upcoming fourth[4] where he presents an idea/concept, cites meaningful examples in the wild of their use, and provides his own commentary to touch up on his chosen topics. They make for delightful reading.
[0]: chesstactics.org
[1]: Farnsworth's Classical English Rhetoric
[2]: Farnsworth's Classical English Metaphor
[3]: The Practicing Stoic: A Philosophical User's Manual
[4]: Farnsworth's Classical English Style
Adler seems to stand pretty well by himself, and is the best I've found. There's plenty of subtandard works, and avoiding wasting time with those is its own reward.
Philosophy generally offers high mileage, and Peter Adamson's "History of Philosophy" podcast delivers much of this, as well as a suprising amount of historiography addressing how documents came to be made, lost, rediscovered, and reconstructed.
Edmund Burke Huey's The Psychology and Pedagogy of Reading has just turned up -- it looks possibly interesting though I've yet to give it a good look.
Jean Piaget's general work on intellectual development as well. And paced repetition.
Adler's "How to Read a Book" (the 1972 edition) also recommends to avoid subvocalization and to use your finger as a "pacer" to guide your eye across each line. I was surprised to see that the author of this article suggests that these two techniques are not supported by scientific studies. I'm glad I have not gotten far in adopting these!
Reading with intent gets me more of what I want than any of the speed reading techniques I've tried or practiced.
Business non-fiction books in particular tend to do a good summary in the first chapter, and spend the rest of the book expanding on the main concepts. I'll read the first chapter and call it good if I've got it, or listen on audible at 1.8x if I want more reinforcement.
Several times people have told me I’m an exceptionally fast reader. I notice if I’m in a group and we’re asked to read a sheet of paper (eg some training seminar) I’ll usually be done way ahead of everyone else.
I vocalise everything. It’s usually a lot faster than you’d say it out loud though, probably if I tried to read out loud that fast I’d trip over words.
The secret is rather boring: I’ve just read a lot. I rarely have problems recognising words, so that’s key. For many types of reading I also infer content a lot, and it seems like my brain completes sentences, then I’ll continue on and “jump back” if one of the words was not as expected. I very easily for those tricks where people write “gondolas in Vienna”, so my brain is obviously doing a lot of inference.
I’ll often read the economist cover to cover, and I used to do the same with newspapers where I was young. Maybe reading every single word on such a variety of topics fixes the “surprised by words” category.
My tip is: read thoroughly and carefully and vocalise, read enough and the speed will take care of itself.
Do people using languages like Chinese, Japanese or Korean read faster? In Chinese and Japanese a single character often means a word. In Korean, a single character is 3 letters. It's very simple: words use much less space in languages like that, so you need to move your eyes much less. Would a Chinese or Korean person read the same work of literature faster than an European - assuming they know all the words?
If "visually condensed" languages like that do facilitate faster reading, converting to a different language is the way to go! What a lovely research topic for neuroscientists!
I don’t know for reading speed but for speaking speed the interesting fact is that less dense languages are spoken faster and dense language slower, resulting in a similar information throughout no matter the language[1]
Most books have value, even if it wasn't what the author intended. Read a book like you would eat a meal, smell it, take small bites of a couple chapters and see if it is something you like or would like to make on your own.
So many people start at one portion and slog their way through like a backhoe excavating a building site. Skim, summarize, catalog and synthesize. Of course all of this is directed at non-fiction works.
I have learned to read both slower and faster. The trick is that you can use both in the same session, and for many materials, this is by far the best approach.
My comprehension went up massively when I started reading out loud in the evenings, despite how childish it feels sometimes. I noticed I got a lot more out of audio than text (I tend to read too fast and not let things sink in), so I started recording my own audio for on the go.
I realized while doing this that reading out loud works great for me
because it forces each word to sink in, rather than rushing ahead as was my habit.
Another thing I learned from listening to audio is, I come back to it many times, so I end up "reading" the same books sometimes dozens of times. And this is precisely what is at the core of many speed reading systems: multiple exposure.
Scott dismisses "read as fast as you flip the pages" courses. It's important to clarify this. This is actually his first tip later in the article, "Skim before you read!" The difference is, beyond just a skim and a read phase, there is an extra "photo-read" phase added on the front.
Have you ever opened a page, and a word or passage jumps out at you, visually? The word "sex" for example, has just such an effect. The idea here is you must read with purpose, with intention, with questions, and if you do, then while you are scanning the book with your eyes, you are building a map of the material, so when you come back to it later, you will remember where to look to find what you need.
In many cases, a book is large and we are only interested in a small fraction of the material. This is the case for most textbooks and their exams, or for a personal project only some aspects will be necessary to extract. The multi-pass approach to reading allows you to locate everything you need, learn where it is, ask questions and keep coming back to it as needed.
Reading slower to build comprehension when you need it can integrate perfectly well with this nonlinear approach: you find what you need faster, and then you give it all your concentration, making sure you understand each part before continuing.
(Of course, this will give rise to yet further questions you can explore the rest of the text with! :)
The practice of speed reading is not the same as the ability to read quickly. I don't speed read, I read very quickly and often at the rate of page at a glance (I often tell people not to leave confidential papers exposed so I won't accidentally read something I shouldn't be privy to). When people ask me how they can learn to read more quickly, I ask them if they would consider reading more.
My personal experience with speed reading is that the limiting bottleneck factor for me is the speed at which i can internalize complex grammatical structures.
I also sub-vocalize some words but not others. In fact, the claim that one must sub-vocalize every word is contradicted by my experience reading Chinese characters, sometimes I can understand characters without knowing how to say them.
This article kinda confirms what I've felt when I read about speed reading: if you're reading anything other than fiction/romance, comprehension is the bottleneck.
So reading half a page of a math book at the time would have been completely useless (I was in university at the time).
I trained myself on how to speed read at age 16 by accident (when compared to a medical school friend who went to a bootcamp and employed roughly the same techniques). Anecdotally the depth of the material is inversely correlated with reading speed.
For fluff magazine type pieces, the extra speed is helpful however if it's a textbook or anything dense, the bottleneck is usually somewhere else.
Still worth doing though. If you run the math out spending 40 hours like my friend did for even a 2% speed gain is likely a positive return over the course of your life.
The one downside is the feeling of annoyance when hearing anyone else subvocalize as they read. The nagging feeling of "you could be going faster!" is annoying.
In a similar vein: the millennial fascination with speed listening: consuming podcasts and audiobooks at 1.5 to 3x speed. The point about comprehension is key: if you complete Altlas Shugged in 8 hours but don’t understand the motivation of the characters, what was the point?
That's a fair question, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't listen faster. You should listen at the speed you feel comfortable at (and potentially work on increasing that speed.)
Some recordings of the same book have a several-hour difference between the different recordings. Different narrators read at different speeds, and most of them aim for clarity to all listeners. I don't think there's any specific reason to listen to the slowest recording, just like I don't think there's any specific reason not to speed up a recording to where you are comfortabl.
I completely agree: I can reread an audiobook at 2x or more but if I want to comprehend something meaty theN 1x with a few re-listens to selected sections is in order. And for dessert listening (podcasts) which are more about entertainment than learning are okay to zoom through.
About three years ago a buddy of mine suggested that listening to course lectures or general podcasts/audiobooks/Youtube tutorials saved him a massive amount of time counted in hours by simply putting the playback speed of everything he listened to as high as he could muster. At least 1.5x for Youtube videos, often time he listens to podcasts and books in 2x. I argued that this is tantamount to speed reading and that he’s losing half the comprehension anyway, may as well slow it. I’ve tried it and believe it’s about as successful as speed reading.
My speed reading method is just to skip every other paragraph. It's really surprising how effective this is for a lot of texts, and you can adjust how much you skip as you go, dependent on the text.
I think a better method is to read at least the first sentence of every paragraph and last sentence on short paragraphs. This way you have an idea on what the paragraph is about.
Another thing you can do is scan the paragraph you're skipping when reading the other paragraph for keywords.
Not familiar with the author, but good on him for admitting he was wrong. I find that most people are not able to admit their faults (without endless hedging), and those who can deserve some respect.
Mind map the book starting with the conclusion then toc.
If a book takes more than 4 hours to mind map it's either a good book or poorly organised.
The reading speed isn't the constraint. It's placing the knowledge in your knowledge tree without tiring yourself out. Only read the key parts of the knowledge tree slowly in depth.
Use A3 paper and a click pencil. Speeds the reading right up. When the books mapped, explain the mind map to someone.
And map Technical books that build on concepts backwards. Your brain wrestles away and it clicks into place by the time you are explaining the mindmap.
The full article claims that it's impossible to reduce saccades by reading multiple lines simultaneously.
I know that claim is false because I have experienced reading an entire book by perceiving two to four lines simultaneously.
I've only had that happen once, on incredibly easy double-spaced material, but humans are capable of it.
Note that I am a natural speed reader and aphantasiac - those may be contributing factors (I've noticed the most talented visualizers I know are all slow readers, and discussion leads me too believe it's partly because they can't help stopping to visualize, while I cannot stop to visualize).
This was about two decades ago, and it was a piece of fiction I didn't care much about, so I can't tell you what my recall was like. I do still remember a character name and very rough snippets of the setting and plot, so it didn't all evaporate.
It did not have filler words, but it did have simpler vocabulary than most of what I read (it was fiction aimed at school children).
I tried the Spritz link up to 700 wpm, after closing the page my eyes felt weird for a while. This may be due to the black background and the fact that I was focusing a lot on the text, but in any case I would not recommend it...
I've been reading (and writing) considerable amounts, pretty much every day all my life since I was 12-ish (and ~15), 37 as I speak. I'm cognitively no genius by any metric but certainly 'well capable' relatively to most people (strong points being speed of thought, clarity/precision to a fault, powerful synthesis). I however have a bad factual memory in general, I need to 'do' or 'understand' things to really memorize (e.g. I suck at poems, lyrics, can't even remember mine, but I love systems, physics, logic).
Without explanations or hazardous 'hypotheses' (hum) as to why, here are my observations and personal 'tricks'. Spoiler: no magic, just directed effort, solving for X.
- There is an inverse relationship between speed and depth of information input. The faster you take it in, even if you feel like you understand all of it (and may, factually), the shallower your actual intake will be in the long run. Generally. Emotions act as a catalyzer for memory, but cloud thinking temporarily.
- The more massive a piece of content (book, article..), the slower I want to go if I aim at a constant result (comprehension, food for thought, memory, etc). I may speed up when cruising if the content lends itself to that (repetitive, very structured, etc). Essentially, whenever recent memory won't cut it to think and remember, because there's too much content, or it's too complex, I need my long-term memory sparked into activation.
- I read fast in general, but it has nothing to do with 'techniques' related to the act of reading itself: it's entirely a mental 'mode' or 'state', that I only ever get otherwise in sports, this moment when you just trigger the beast and commit entirely to victory. When you just won't fail, when it's 'all-in'. That level of focus, of concentration, is best exercised with training, of any kind. So indeed you need to think, not just read, and actually want to even write and use the substance if you are to maximize its results on you.
- It's very important for me to begin slow, whatever the average pace later on. I need to get acquainted with the author, their go-to vocabulary and grammar subsets, the point they're making. Sometimes it never clicks and the whole piece is tedious for me. Sometimes it's so clear I feel like I could have written it myself, at least the structure of it. It's a thing, hard to explain. I guess why all we have our own favorites and dreaded authors.
I like people who speak relatively fast because I don't get easily distracted or bored when they talk to me, so speeding up audiobooks is a personal treat; but there's a limit if I want to retain anything more than fuzzy snapshots of partial points. I may understand 100% on the spot (I actually do nothing else but listen and focus), but it's evading memory, evaporating in the long run. Ultimately it means that book won't change me beyond a few impressions, it just won't make its mark, it never had a chance to imbue my consciousness — only my superficial cognition. However sharp, it can't substitute for the real thing.
An exercise I do if I really want to use or remember (be 'changed') by some piece of content — article, book, chapter, quote, podcast, piece of code... — is to do the "good student duty" of writing a short essay: summarize what you read, raise a few interesting points about it, elaborate a bit beyond (make that new material become food for your thought, use it like it's a new word you just learned, or a new math technique).
It only takes ~30 minutes or so, easily 10 minutes if the material is easy, an hour if it blew your mind, I don't know... well worth it, because it has a lasting power for years. But do it well, because that exercise you 'submit' to no one but yourself will become part of the memory of that content, you will see your own words sometimes before/above the actual author's.
Hopefully this helps someone trying it my way. The hard way. The no-genius no-magic no-trick way. The way that lets one play in the present with stuff learned 10, 20 years before.
TL;DR: the faster you read, the shallower it gets beyond some sweet spot, probably biological but trainable; speed is good when it forces you to focus, but not beyond that — it must not become a distraction from actual understanding. If that is your goal. Using at least in thought what you read is my preferred way to really internalize something, make it mine, thus remember it for long enough usually. At least I probably won't be able to forget that it exists, and then I can search it for finer points.
I have some problems with this article because of personal experience which differs. They talk about the constraints of 'working memory' which makes it unlikely, or even impossible to scan more than a few sentences at once and comprehend them. It just so happens that i sometimes scan a whole page at once, just by looking at it, and have understood it. But almost only on paper, and without formulas or diagrams in it. But not every time, or 'at will'. It just happens.
Not in the sense that i memorized it, and could repeat it word for word, but the gist of it, the point, message, whatever.
It even varies, because sometimes, when i need to recheck some datum mentioned like a point in time, or an amount of
something, or a cross reference, i recall exactly where on the page that was, and where that page was. This happens less on screens of any sort, but more so with real paper.
Makes no difference if fiction, or non-fiction.
I guess it happens from anywhere from 0,3 to 0,5% of everything i read, it would be up to 5% if i'd only read on real paper. So much for the 'haptics' of 'cyber'...
Anyways, i could read before Kindergarden, because my older Sister tought me, just for fun. I remember the first word i
could read was the neon signage of some supermarket called 'Hit', because i asked what it meant. That's how it began.
At the same time this introduced me to the concepts of different languages, different spellings for the same words, and different words for the same things in different languages. Because i'm german, and hit is english.
Early school was often boring torture for me because of that. I could read books and newspapers, and my classmates stuttered along excrutiatingly slow. This lasted maybe to the 6th grade, then they finally caught up(mostly).
Also around that time i finally realized that i had this ability, and it was something special. Interestingly again not in my native language, but in english.
Teacher said go to page xyz and read this, say ready when you are done. I did, and maybe 2 secands later said: 'Ready!' (Was something about the double decker buses in London)
I never read that before (at least not conscious) because everything in that book was boring to me, and of course got reprimanded, which i considered as unfair.
It's like having a photocopy before the 'inner eye' which slowly fades, but not exactly like a photocopy, because then i could read from it and repeat it letter for letter, and word for word, which i can't.
So i'm wondering what do they mean when they talk about 'speed reading', does this include the necessity of memorizing everything, being able to do it anytime, or just the 'lossy' compression of meaning like i (sometimes) do?
In case of the latter, then from my point of view that is like blind people (from birth on) talking about color.
I read extremely slowly compared to most, but seem to come up with more insights as well as debunkings.
A relative of mine is a natural born speed reader. She can read several 500+ page dense works a day. This is suggested to be impossible. I've personally tested her on her recall after having her quickly digest a work she's never seen before. She has perfect recall and can tell me what page a given passage appeared on, and recall from memory what comes next.
It's a savant ability. Probably less than 1 in a million, or perhaps billion.
She can't do anything with the ability. It's useless to her practically. She works minimum wage jobs, is married to an unemployed guy, and is always poor. She doesn't have any marketable talents. She continues to read huge amounts of material when she can find it. She long ago read all of the books in her small town library's fiction section. Discussing a topic she can cite references to it as if she is a search engine, but like the search engine, she doesn't have any insights into what any of it means.
I've suggested to her she try to market the ability, do a tour and show off. But she hates attention and craves nothing more than a quite reclusive life free from other people. Being publicly acknowledged as a freak would be the worst possible outcome for her, as far as she is concerned.
I can somehow relate to that feeling of hers. One thing other people tend to do if they recognize this ability IS using you as a 'search engine', which over time is a burden, because it is distracting you from whatever you are doing at the moment, and when you complain, you are accused of being unhelpful.
It is possible to speed-read TFA with no loss of comprehension, because it is information-light. Most things available to read are, and when you are obliged to look at them, often a glance at each paragraph tells you all you need to know.
Things that are really worth reading are information-dense. Then, the time to think about what is presented dominates, and the time to take in words is negligible. Sub-vocalizing can aid comprehension by slowing you down, and by providing additional information via the rhythm of the presentation.
The last book I read by Robert Sapolsky took me 30-60 minutes for each of the last 30 pages, because they were tying together all the material in the rest of the book, and really gave full value for those minutes.
So, speed read what you must read, but choose material that delivers for careful study, and read it as slowly as it deserves.
In the course I did theoretically more than double my reading speed. But my comprehension was based on the test they gave me. Plus I noticed that I tired quickly doing speed reading. I was a kid who loved to read and had no problem doing it for hours on end without tiring.
After the course I quickly discovered as I suspected that my real world comprehension suffered greatly by speed reading.
So what value did I receive from the course? After college there have been times I needed to quickly get the gist of a document and was under extreme time pressure. I found speed reading worked fine though in my business career I doubt that I used it more than once a year.
Bottom line my personal ROI would have been much higher if my Mother have hired a tutor to help me over the summer learn to paint or play blues harmonica instead.