> 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?"
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.