Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit login

Oh God, speed reading ...

I like it when people mention how it's awesome and how it "totally works"..

I can read fast through light content, but some parts of a text need comprehension, not just to be read. They need a mental effort that you don't exert reading an article about a movie star.

Like many of you, I spend a lot of time reading technical doc. It's not necessarily "complicated", but it certainly is complex. Speed readers don't seem to get the subtlety of this, and when anyone says it works, I'd love to hand them the IEEE articles and the bunch of journals I eat all day long and dare them to just summarize the state of the art part.

As I said, there are parts you can read fast because the content concentration isn't that high, and, thanks to plagiarism in the scientific community, a lot of articles are worded in an uncomfortably "similar" -cough verbatim- way. There are parts though you need to stop. Read, re-read.

You can't speed read parts where a comma matters. Where there are a lot of interconnections between several works, etc..

The reason, I think, some people think speed reading works is that they don't read much and don't read much stuff that matters to be able to tell it doesn't work.

Most people have a short attention span. Heck most wouldn't even be able to read a "paragraph", so I wonder where they had all that "experience" speed reading. That's like claiming to have test driven a Ferrari in a 20 feet track. I'll simply say "Good for you".

Try to post that link to your friends who claim to speed read, most of them won't even read it entirely. Ask them how they liked X part (that doesn't exist). They would probably answer you assuming it's really there. There you go, you proved my point.




Consider applying for YC's Fall 2025 batch! Applications are open till Aug 4

Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: