Reading
From HowTo.Lifehack
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[edit] Speed Reading
Speed reading is a discipline devoted to improving both reading speed and reading comprehension. As a speed reader, I have used various speed-reading techniques to almost double my reading rate from 450 words per minute, up to an average of 900 words per minute. Despite these personal improvements, speed reading is still largely misunderstood as being either an panacea for the slow reader or an outright hoax.
[edit] What is Speed Reading?
Speed reading has three components:
- Using proper technique for maximum comprehension and speed.
- Reading flexibility
- Practice reading to improve speed
[edit] Proper Technique
After learning how to read in elementary school, most people stop making major improvements there. This is like being a toddler, and not progressing past crawling when learning to run. Some of the elements of proper technique for speed reading include:
Use of a pointer - Using your index finger to guide your reading facilitates practice reading and reduces time spent tracking your reading position on the page. Once you get comfortable with a pointer, this alone can boost reading by 50%.
Reading with margins - Making use of the approximately 1" diameter area of clear vision you have, leaving a ½ inch margin for each side of a line of text will improve your speed.
Other techniques - Advanced techniques can let you read several lines at once, read on the backstroke of your pointer finger or allow you to turn pages more rapidly.
[edit] Reading Flexibility
The real benefit of speed reading isn’t reading faster, it’s reading smarter. Normal reading is a bit like driving a car with only one gear. You can only go a particular speed. The benefit of speed reading is that it allows you to change your pace when reading. Easy to understand sections can get skimmed at several times your normal reading rate and dense sections with confusing explanations can be slowed down to a crawl for maximum comprehension.
Your goal shouldn’t be to just read faster, but to read more intelligently. I can read some sections of books at 1500 words per minute. For these sections comprehension won’t be as high, but I can still feel confident I’m getting the value out of the sections. Other areas I read slowly at 200-300 words per minute, absorbing every word and detail to fully understand.
[edit] Practice Reading
Using a pointer and becoming more flexible in your reading, won’t improve your speed that much. In order to improve your maximum reading rate you need to do a process called practice reading. This is usually misunderstood to mean just reading frequently to get practice. Practice reading is a completely separate process from your normal reading.
In order to practice read, get a book you haven’t read before and represents the type of information you would like to begin reading faster. From there, mark your start position and begin reading faster than you can comprehend. Using a pointer is crucial here, because your goal is to move your finger slightly faster than you can actually read the words on the page.
By reading faster than you can actually read, you are forcing your brain to comprehend with less time and less visual information. This means that you are teaching yourself how to read with less visual information by compressing small sentence fragments and words into smaller visual units.
People already use these reading compression techniques to a certain extent. Most people will determine words based on the first and last letters and word length. Small words like ‘and’, ‘or’ and ‘on’ are often compressed into single visual units. This is why readers often miscount the number of F’s in this section:
FINISHED FILES ARE THE RESULT OF YEARS OF SCIENTIFIC STUDY COMBINED WITH THE EXPERIENCE OF YEARS.
Most people will count 3 F’s, but there are actually 6. This is because the word OF is converted into a single visual unit because it is a common word. Speed reading improves this compression process by forcing you to make sense of only a few glimpses.
[edit] Myths About Speed Reading
Speed reading is commonly misunderstood. Here are a couple myths about speed reading:
1) You can immediately improve your reading rate without sacrificing comprehension.
Most of the scientific studies I’ve read that debunk speed reading make the false assumption that if you use speed reading techniques, you can immediately boost speed without losing comprehension. Similarly I’ve seen people try to immediately double their reading rate and expect to have the same comprehension rate. This is misleading.
Speed reading is a function of proper technique and practice. Using a pointer and other techniques can boost your reading rate just through familiarity with them, but the real benefit of speed reading takes more time and investments in practice reading.
2) Practice reading is reading more frequently to get practice.
Hopefully I clarified this error in my section on practice reading. It still amazes me that some people equate practice reading with just reading more. Of course reading more will improve your rate, but it is a completely separate process from practice reading. It is called practice reading because anything you “read” while practice reading will be at a speed you can’t fully comprehend, so it is mostly wasted information.
It doesn’t take a huge investment of time in practice reading to significantly improve your speed without huge comprehension sacrifices, but it does mean you need to get a book you haven’t read and practice read it, knowing fully that you won’t understand most of the book and may need to read it again later.
3) Speed reading is just skimming the material, you won’t understand it better.
This is dangerous because it is a half-truth. Speed reading is a process for reading everything, whereas skimming is a portion of reading at the upper limits of your reading rate. The techniques of speed reading are an attempt to slowly push your reading rate upwards so you can understand at a rate you used to be only able to skim.
The other benefit of speed reading is that you learn what to skim and what to slow down to a crawl. You can’t make a hairpin turn at two hundred miles per hour, but cruising an empty highway at fifty isn’t going to cut down on travel time. Similarly speed reading involves becoming comfortable moving up to your high rate, low comprehension zones of skimming and shifting down to your low rate, high comprehension zones.
