Scientists suggest unless you already know a lot about a topic, you’re unlikely to remember much of what you read at high speed. The main obstacle to speed reading turns out to be nothing to do with our speed of seeing words, but rather our ability to put words together into meaningful phrases. I took a speed-reading course and read War and Peace in twenty minutes. Sure, you can read faster, potentially much faster, but you may not understand much of what you read. It turns out when you read faster, you are simply trading off between speed and accuracy. Research published late last year investigated decades of research into how we read and then applied that understanding to speed reading techniques. Sounds like a big time-waster, doesn’t it? But prevent readers from being able to go back and re-read and once again, their comprehension of the text drops. But we’ve known for decades this approach limits our understanding of the text.Ī further hindrance to reading speed is our habit of often going back and re-reading something we haven’t completely understood the first time – it’s called regression. This technique is known as Rapid Serial Visual Presentation (RSVP). There are a number of apps that purport to solve this problem by presenting only one word at a time in rapid sequence on a screen. Other speed reading proponents argue one of the main reasons most of us read more slowly than we could, is the time it takes for our eyes to track each individual word on a page. Another technique involves trying to read groups of words, or potentially even whole pages in one mental snapshot (also called chunking), rather than labouring over words one-at-a-time. But when scientists got people to ‘turn off’ this little inner voice by humming while reading, their understanding of the text plummeted. The argument goes this practice is simply a hangover from the way we learned to read – aloud. You can also learn not to spend time saying each word in your head (called sub-vocalisation). Firstly, you can simply skim read and focus only on important words – no surprises it’s faster to read if you skip over many of the words. How could such feats be possible? Speed reading techniques centre around a few key approaches. His reading was clocked at more than 25,000 words a minute. The 1990 Guinness World Record book recognised Howard Berg as the fastest reader in the world. It would take an average reader 11 uninterrupted hours to read Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. In 2007, Ann Jones read all 199,797 words of the final Harry Potter instalment in 47 minutes. You don’t have to look far to find claims of even faster reading. Her argument was simple: the way we read is inefficient. The story goes Wood could read at a speed of 2,700 words per minute. Surely the simple answer to our toppling reading piles is simply to learn to read faster? It’s not a new idea: back in 1959, teacher Evelyn Wood published Reading Skills and later launched her Reading Dynamics training program. Most educated adults read at a speed of 200–400 words per minute. Current estimates are we now read around 54,000 words per day. Sound familiar? Given email, work reports, blog posts, books and text messages, we’re surrounded by words. I suffer from a pretty serious case of tsundoku: I have a massive, and ever-growing pile of books beside my bed that I don’t have time to read. How fast could you read and understand a book like this? Image credit Sam Greenhalgh via Flickr Death by Tsundoku
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |