Like most of us, by which i mean intellectual types who define our selves and worth in part by the relative level of our perceived knowledge, speed reading seems like a holy grail. There's so much out there to read, and not enough time in my life to do it. But it is to us as fad diets/exercise regimes to people who care primarily about their looks/weight.
I say this because its apparent I'm a relatively fast reader, i have to read a lot for work, and i have professional colleagues to compare myself to. In all these speed-reading fads in professional environments, I've never actually met a single person, NOT ONE, who can actually read these materials faster than an intelligent, well read person. (barring perhaps abnormalities like Kim Peek, but newsflash, you know if you're Kim Peek and if you are/aren't, there's not much you can do about it). Get someone into an actual environment where they have to read lots of stuff, have to comprehend it, and its professionally demonstrable, and suddenly all the "speed readers" vanish.
Do you know why I'm a relatively fast reader? I'd say probably: a) genetics b) reading a lot.
b) is about the only thing I've seen that has a big effect and is demonstrable, and is in our control. The fastest readers read a lot. The slowest readers don't. Those who didn't read a lot, and then started reading, got faster.
And barring genetic abnormalities and usual statistical variance, no one I've met, EVER, has been able to read more than 3/4/5/6 hundred words per minute with accurate comprehension.
Which brings us of course, to the comprehension debate. Lets avoid the ridiculousness of the comprehension stats that are usually poorly designed and created by people trying to sell you things, they are worth about as much as fad diet testimonials and figures. And this is where a lot of speed reading salesmen try to get you. "I can read this at 1000 wpm with just slightly less comprehension!". "I can skim and pull out the important parts really fast!".
To which my feelings can be summed up: Anyone can purport to increase their reading speed by including words they didn't read or comprehend in their wpm. Frankly, if you are not reading something with %100 comprehension, you are not reading it. Taking a sample and taking a census are two different things. That you can take a 10% sample in 10% of the time does not make you a "speed-census-taker". Ditto skimming, summarizing, or any other weasel-word used to gloss over the fact that someone is trying to speed up their "reading" by reading or comprehending less.
I'm not saying skimming doesn't exist. I am saying its not the same as reading/comprehending, and that "speed-readers" show heavy drops in comprehension.
My parents signed me up for the Evelyn Wood speed reading course the summer before college. They thought that it might give me an edge over other students.
Speed reading took away all the joy of reading for me. Thought my comprehension was way lower but they give you tests afterward and I scored highly. But studying the tests revealed they were super simple.
The whole idea was to build your confidence and convince you it worked so you'd bring them more customers. There was no way it was going to help me in the real world classroom.
But my parents meant well, Evelyn Wood's marketing was really well done. Just found out the courses are still on the market.
> Frankly, if you are not reading something with %100 comprehension, you are not reading it.
This is too dogmatic to be (IMO) a useful definition for the unadorned word “reading”.
After all, what does it even mean to comprehend something 100%? Without being inside the author’s head (and perhaps not even then) it’s impossible to know all of the ideas associated with every word and phrase by the author at that particular moment, or the precise rhythm and intonation the author would use in saying the words aloud, or the precise feelings the author was trying to evoke.
Or for that matter, is it possible to comprehend something 100% without deeply thinking about what it means to the reader, all the ideas and feelings the words (in context with the rest of the world at the moment of reading) dredge up. For instance, I personally can’t read something in a truly deep way, and really know what I think about it, without writing (often lengthy) comments of my own. But I wouldn’t say that shallower types of reading aren’t still “reading”.
Language inherently distorts thoughts, which are impossible to perfectly package and unpackage in a serial format.
And I think that's a fair criticism. We get down into the details and not much can be said with such certainty. Even measuring comprehension as a metric is fraught with dangers, biases, and questions of how to do it.
As many people are pointing out, anything over and above green eggs and ham often requires several re-reads and some digestion at normal speed.
But if we must talk in generalities (and i think that's appropriate for the medium and context of hacker news), if we want to talk about measurable comprehension as its used in speed-reading discussions, what level of it actually constitutes reading, and place it on a scale of 0-100%, then I think its reasonable to consider actual "reading" as arbitrarily close/adjacent to 100%.
This we actually can measure - speech recognition's comprehension rate is a big problem for its implementation.
So we know 80% accuracy is not good enough to produce cogent sentences (1 miss in every 5 words). And we know 1 miss in every 10 still doesn't produce something we'd think of as accurate.
So I'd say you need about 90%+ comprehension to actually comprehend something. But that's leaving a lot of room for error anyway - how much stuff have you read and then thought "wait, what was the modifier to that specific phrase?"
I'm with you on the skepticism thing. When we read, at least when we read anything important, we aren't simply ingesting bits of information. We're usually reading something that was carefully crafted to have a logical flow, where what is presented early supports or leads to what is said later. To understand the structure of a written piece is not easy. For "dense" works (e.g., some philosophy) it might take reading and re-reading several times, jumping forward and backward, to fully figure out what is being said, whether it makes sense, whether it's to be taken as reliable or not. Even that might not be enough. The idea of speedreading for the "main points" is ridiculous. Even less dense works have a logical flow, they aren't just a list of bits of information. If you're going to read critically (i.e, with good comprehension), which is generally the proper way to read, speedreading is useless.
> Frankly, if you are not reading something with %100 comprehension, you are not reading it.
No one reads anything with 100% comprehension, and the assertion that such a thing as perfect understanding exists is absurd. Real meaning of words is fleeting and there certainly isn't any universal truth to every written work.
These new-fad speed reading tools are an alternative method of presenting text, the comprehension of which is a function of the speed setting. At what speed does reading become not reading and something else entirely? I say such a limit doesn't exist.
Maybe such tools aren't for you, not everybody is going to like them but some people find them useful. There certainly will be people that overstate their usefulness, but in the end a perfect scientific description of it isn't necessary.
A tool is useful if the person using it finds it useful, not if somebody can scientifically prove it.
You're a skeptic, so what?
I find it to be a useful tool, not for all reading but certainly for longer blocks of text or books which 100% understanding is less important than completion. I find for me it is easier to stay focused reading more words for longer periods, especially for things which I don't find particularly engaging or valuable, or when my mind isn't running at peak. I'm sure lots of others will find usefulness in it too.
You can speed read some things because they are highly redundant and mostly puffery. You can't speed-read an article which cares more about a clear and concise argument than padding itself with lots of fluff.
Of course, you're more likely to run into the former. The education system seems to lean toward articles people pretend to write, written for people who pretend to read them. I guess speed reading is useful, if it teaches you what teachers will be using to read your work. You'll know why it's so important to put your main argument in the topic sentences; and why flaccid padding in the rest is OK.
> A tool is useful if the person using it finds it useful, not if somebody can scientifically prove it.
This is a horrible criteria. People found blood letting useful as a treatment.
>No one reads anything with 100% comprehension, and the assertion that such a thing as perfect understanding exists is absurd. Real meaning of words is fleeting and there certainly isn't any universal truth to every written work.
"meaning of words is fleeting"
Maybe over long periods of time words change their meaning. That doesn't mean you can't fully comprehend SOME writing had you slowed down.
I think a core premise of the parent argument is the existence of '100% comprehension' when reading and believe arguments against this premise are very much not directed towards a strawman.
Sure the meaning of words flows with time, but more importantly our languages are imprecise and subject to much interpretation. How any one person translates the meaning of a word or passage into internal conscious and unconscious understanding is most certainly inconsistent. Ask any hundred academics the meaning of a passage of literature or a poem and you'll get 100 analyses. Ask 100 judges to make a determination of how the law applies to a case and you'll get 100 different judgements (even though the law is supposed to be very precise language by design).
My position is that complete comprehension is absurd therefore all comprehension is incomplete.
Given all comprehension is incomplete, arbitrarily setting limits on levels of comprehension based on tools and reading speed is absurd.
Any comprehension is useful, and doing things quickly is useful therefore a tool that provides some comprehension over meaningfully shorter periods of time for a given block of text has definite utility in some circumstances.
A person can be skeptical of the utility of a tool for their own purposes, but the absolutist opinion of the parent is a silly overstatement of that skepticism.
There's another aspect to the question - how engaging or how people feel about speed reading when it comes to being immersed in a story (assuming you read a novel with that technique, for example). Most of the Speed Reading demos out there focus on reading short paragraphs and that's it. Even if comprehension is not a problem, how fast and how feelings develop in your brain as you read may not be comparable between traditional reading and speed reading. That can make a huge difference on how much you enjoy the piece of text you are reading, not matter if you can still get 100% of it.
There are different levels of comprehension, ranging from internalising everything word for word to the point where you could recite it to high speed scans of the page for a particular word that don't comprehending any of the content. All are useful in different contexts. I don't need "accurate comprehension" to determine which HN articles I might wish to click on.
Ultimately a person incapable of progressing beyond verbalising everything to ensure they internalise every minute, insignificant detail and all the excess verbiage is unequivocally worse off than someone that can in the same period of time grasp the meaning and pertinent details of three texts by parsing them at high speed.
Frankly, I don't understand your point better by slowing down to marvel at your sentence construction[1], and even if I did, my recollection of what you'd written tomorrow would be exactly the same regardless of how quickly I skimmed it.
[1]though just in case I read a second time to see what I'd missed and noticed I'd subconsciously picked up on you beginning a sentence with "Frankly" when drafting my reply...
I don't know. I'd say I read your comment, even though I skipped some parts since you were being repetitive.
For example, one follow-up quoted "Taking a sample and taking a census are two different things", which was from a part of your text I explicitly skipped. (I kept track of what parts I was ignoring).
I would still say I read your comment even though I explicitly skipped that part, did not even alight over the area. I literally 'missed it'.
Likewise, if you look through my posting history I've written plenty that is a bit rambling. I don't expect my readers to read every word. Hell, you probably only need to alight on 20% of the words in this comment to get what I'm talking about...
I don't know, I mean what is "speed reading"? Whenever I "informally" clock myself, I read at around 600 wpm +/- 100 wpm or so. If that's "just reading" surely "speed reading" should be significantly faster, say 1200 wpm at the very least?
[edit: Hm, that might have been a bit optimistic, reading the article I clocked myself at ~420. I've never really tried to time myself on a dense paper -- say the first time I read Fielding's dissertation[1] for example. I doubt I'd have read that at the same speed as a somewhat vapid article on speed reading (as the author suggest, although I'm a little taken aback that email is grouped with news as things not to read carefully -- I guess it's a sadly accurate picture of the current state of most peoples online discourse. Sinser[2] would like a word with you! ;-)
[1] "Architectural Styles and
the Design of Network-based Software Architectures" (aka that ReST thing):
I'd say 1200 wpm is below skimming speed -- and there is something in-between -- but I'm not convinced that it's terribly useful as a skill. Being able to skim an article at great speed can be useful, for deciding if it's worth reading or not. I'm not convinced "speed reading" is very useful. The very term implies you speed through material at a speed greater than comprehension (which I'll loosely equate to "regular reading speed").
I do think it can be useful to train oneself to read faster -- by reading more, and occasionally by "forcing" oneself to read faster. For those that already read at reasonable speeds (~500 wpm?) -- it's probably useful to pick up tricks for skimming, and "backwards reading": starting with the conclusion, and reading articles backwards (conclusion, discussion, introduction -- or: conclusion, introduction, discussion -- and either way, probably conclusion again).
Speed reading is like speed sex... Choose between 1 hour with 1 person or 1 minute with 60 people? Okay I get that you might prefer 20 minutes with 3 people and that's fair.
Everyone can learn to read faster and everyone can claim to understand what they read. However, is that all there is to reading? There are things like imagery, sounds, feelings, etc and they can be invaluable both for the enjoyment axis and for the comprehension axis. Not to mention that I couldn't care less about your comprehension 5 minutes after the fact. Come back to me in a week and tell me how much you remember.
But let's look at these often forgotten parts of reading!
Imagery. IRL you can become over-whelmed by visual stimuli. This means there's a limited bandwidth there. Since we're mostly visual creatures there's a lot of bandwidth there but it's still quite finite(If you want convincing participate in one of those visual research experiments). When you read faster, you should expect more of this bandwidth to be taken up. As a consequence your brain will take shortcuts to minimize load and stress. It may feel like you're seeing it all but you probably aren't. It's the fast system of your brain working. The slow part of your system is taking a vacation.
Yes, you can improve your temporal resolution but not by much. Sounds are a lot like imagery.
Emotions. We are bio-chemical systems and there's a time scale over which emotions happen. They won't take place any faster. If you are like me and you care about emotions when reading, you will slow down (All I get from speed-reading is a fast-beating heart and stress quite like the stress in one of those visual labs).
Consider this. Emotions are very important for long-term memory (which is probably the most important part of reading some kind of technical text). By reading very fast you are cutting your emotions short if they happen at all. You effectively average out your emotions. It might not feel like it because you are still experiencing the peaks and valleys but they are smaller and you'll never know it. Memories are formed better when the emotions are stronger.
Speed-reading is just another phenomenon in a series of maximizations along one dimension by disregarding full the effects it has the other dimensions. Other phenomenons are known as texting, facebooking, etc. Okay, these kinds of things have their place but the more we do them, the easier it is to let them take over our lives. Our brains are not designed that way. I just find it hard to justify calling it "I read x wps" when it's more so "I lossy-scan the page and get the jist of it while stressing over my speed".
Like most of us, by which i mean intellectual types who define our selves and worth in part by the relative level of our perceived knowledge, speed reading seems like a holy grail. There's so much out there to read, and not enough time in my life to do it. But it is to us as fad diets/exercise regimes to people who care primarily about their looks/weight.
I say this because its apparent I'm a relatively fast reader, i have to read a lot for work, and i have professional colleagues to compare myself to. In all these speed-reading fads in professional environments, I've never actually met a single person, NOT ONE, who can actually read these materials faster than an intelligent, well read person. (barring perhaps abnormalities like Kim Peek, but newsflash, you know if you're Kim Peek and if you are/aren't, there's not much you can do about it). Get someone into an actual environment where they have to read lots of stuff, have to comprehend it, and its professionally demonstrable, and suddenly all the "speed readers" vanish.
Do you know why I'm a relatively fast reader? I'd say probably: a) genetics b) reading a lot.
b) is about the only thing I've seen that has a big effect and is demonstrable, and is in our control. The fastest readers read a lot. The slowest readers don't. Those who didn't read a lot, and then started reading, got faster.
And barring genetic abnormalities and usual statistical variance, no one I've met, EVER, has been able to read more than 3/4/5/6 hundred words per minute with accurate comprehension.
Which brings us of course, to the comprehension debate. Lets avoid the ridiculousness of the comprehension stats that are usually poorly designed and created by people trying to sell you things, they are worth about as much as fad diet testimonials and figures. And this is where a lot of speed reading salesmen try to get you. "I can read this at 1000 wpm with just slightly less comprehension!". "I can skim and pull out the important parts really fast!".
To which my feelings can be summed up: Anyone can purport to increase their reading speed by including words they didn't read or comprehend in their wpm. Frankly, if you are not reading something with %100 comprehension, you are not reading it. Taking a sample and taking a census are two different things. That you can take a 10% sample in 10% of the time does not make you a "speed-census-taker". Ditto skimming, summarizing, or any other weasel-word used to gloss over the fact that someone is trying to speed up their "reading" by reading or comprehending less.
I'm not saying skimming doesn't exist. I am saying its not the same as reading/comprehending, and that "speed-readers" show heavy drops in comprehension.