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Speed Reading?

Z

Zaradrak

New Member
Hey, I'm currently working on this skill and am curious if anyone here has perfected it or at least attempted so they can share their thoughts and experiences with speed reading.
 
I toyed with it a bit some years back, thinking I could stuff more pleasure into my ever shrinking amount of reading time. In the end I decided that since for me reading is a hobby and used as a way to disconnect from an already hectic pace of life that I would opt out of speed reading and take up the art of reading in half time.

I cannot help but notice that Meadow's Bacon quote is quite apropos.
 
LOL yes it is quite apropos isn't it. I find that I zip through 'light reading' or books that are swallowed. I reread a lot of books so a book that has me engrossed to the point I'm devouring will get a second and third reading anyway. Actually I find the more engrossed I am the deeper my level of concentration and the faster I read.

I can't however read the same speed on my e-reader as I can in a book. The format, the delay in turning pages, the spacing all slow me down somewhat. I have not tested my speed in years but I can feel it isn't as fast.
 
which method of speedreading are you learning?
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I'm trying to learn to read by sight; essentially I want to stop subvocalizing while I read. I've been trying an online program 7 Speed Reader with mixed feelings.
 
The way I learnt to speed was that they taught you to stop focusing on each and every word. Basically both your eye and brain are capable of absorbing 3 - 4 or more words at a time. The way to do this is to focus slightly above the line of words kind of in the blank space between the lines. They started by marking a line of dots above every second word, then every 3rd then every 4th. When you focus on the dot, not on the word you take in the words either side of it. It actually also forces you to stop vocalising because you are no longer reading every word as word - if you know what I mean. You just 'know' the words.

I just did this online test - Speed Reading Test Online and came out at 1215 wpm. They claim onscreen is 25% slower than paper. So that makes my paper reading speed around 1500 wpm which means I am right in saying I have slowed down some.
 
I would love to read quickly, as I have so much to get through. I think my reading speed is simply average. Approx 1.5 hours for every 100 pages. The speed reading that I had tried to learn up on was Buzan's Speed Reading method, but then I realize that a lot of the speed reading techniques are pretty similar: improve and expand vocab, stop subvocalizing, 3-4 words at a glance, etc. The thing is to keep at it, and work on the one thing that's supremely difficult to adhere to (for me): don't go backwards! :)
 
I took speed reading in college and can never really seem to slow it down. I devour books. My partner says I should buy books by the pound. There are times a particular turn of phrase or scene capture me enough to slow down my rush towards the end- where I often arrive feeling let down that there is no more of the book to read. Finishing a really good book is like saying goodbye to a very good friend. You know you will see each other again (I am a chronic re-reader) but it is sad all the same. I generally close the book and think about the author and the writing process for the book I have just finished. I enjoy it when the author removes himself/herself from the book and are evident only when the writing is truly exceptional. Books with those rare gems are wonderful to find - like Truman Capote's work. Back to topic - yes, I speed read...
 
As I've gotten older I have come to slow my reading pace down quite a bit. Maybe I'm just not in as much of a hurry as I used to be when I was younger. Also, Woody Allen's take on it really does seem to apply, at least in my case ... "I took the Evelyn Woods Reading Dynamics course to be able to read faster. I read War And Peace in 20 minutes ... it was about Russia."
 
Lol!

I do my 'speed-reading' in the car, where I listen to audiobooks at 3x speed. Surprisingly, while that seems like a complete waste of a good audiobook, in reality it is actually very enjoyable, losing almost none of the experience (the exception being when you're listening to a sf/fantasy audiobook, where pronunciation of alien words make comprehension a challenge, which is why I almost never listen to genre audiobooks).

I've finished lots and lots of classics this way. I just finished Mansfield Park today (was ok, but entirely too long. None of the conciseness and therefore punch of say, Pride and Prejudice).
 
Agreed Pride and Prejudice is definitely Austin's best book.

And no comment on speeding up audio books lol
 
No, no, I still have another 3 of her books to go! I don't want to know I've read her best book on the first try! :(
 
I don't have any formal methods of speed-reading... but I try to speed read my textbooks (or other non-fiction) just to get rid of the filler content and find the important details.

I don't like speed reading novels or poetry, especially if it's in first person or dialogue. I like the little person in my head that vocalizes all the words (he has a beautiful voice, btw), stumbles on new ones and has to look them up in a dictionary. That also gives me the time to visualize settings and characters.
 
I have to admit that speed reading is not something that has ever interested me personally before and I have absolutely no idea what speed I read at... although I have a sneaky suspicion it is nowhere near as fast as the rest of you.

For me reading is a pleasure, something to help me escape from reality for a while and help me relax after a long hard day at work and speed reading seems like cheating somehow. Like I said it's not something that I've ever really thought about before, so I don't really know how it works or what the process is, but from reading what's been said above I don't think I would take in what I was reading if I used the methods mentioned. Even reading at the pace I read at now, which probably isn't that fast, I sometimes end up having to read a paragraph, or even a page for that matter, more than once because I didn't take it all in the first time around. I really don't think my brain could cope with speed reading.
 
Speed reading is just learning to take advantage of the fact that your eyes and brain can take in information a lot faster than most people read because schools stop teaching any reading skills in the second or third grade and most people never take the time (or even know that they can) develop much beyond that level.

Reading more efficiently does not mean any loss of comprehension because that would entirely defeat the purpose. Any good reading test will test both speed and comprehension and will adjust the speed for comprehension because speed without comprehension is useless.
 
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DATo said:
As I've gotten older I have come to slow my reading pace down quite a bit. Maybe I'm just not in as much of a hurry as I used to be when I was younger. Also, Woody Allen's take on it really does seem to apply, at least in my case ... "I took the Evelyn Woods Reading Dynamics course to be able to read faster. I read War And Peace in 20 minutes ... it was about Russia."
Click to expand...

Ha ha ha. Great quote.
 
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