Bummer. I played with Spritz (a centered-text speed reading API) at a hackathon a while back, and was pretty impressed. It seemed that I could read with real comprehension at around 400WPH and "skim" at about 1000. A big part of your pitch was "moving from word to word takes most of the time while reading," and I thought they had research to support that.
It's still a fun thing to try if you haven't done it yet. The article points out what is pretty clearly the biggest problem with these speed readers - going back to re-read is a big UX challenge. My little hackathon app used a "back ten words" button (may have been what Spritz recommended?), but I also thought having the actual paragraphs scrolling above the Spritz text as you read would be a more useful way of solving this problem. If you get lost, skim the paragraphs around what you're reading, and press / click a word you want to start speedreading from again. In more dense material where you need to flip back a page or two, you might need some sort of zoom out functionality as well.
If nothing else, these technologies will hopefully find a use in wearables and other tiny-screen devices.
The review article here suggests that language processing steps are the bottleneck, not we movement. So the reasearch suggests that current approach to using tech (rapid serial display of words) introduces a speed-comprehension trade off.
Perhaps a better approach would be to develop deep learning systems that sort of translate cumbersome writing into linguistic structures that our brains can more easily/quickly digest?
I took on speed reading in college after realizing I needed to study and learn faster or I would fail miserably. The book I picked up seemed like a lot of common sense steps the first one being to inhibiting subvocalization, the internal voice we are used to hear while reading since we where taught to read out loud. The idea here being that our mind can process information much faster than the speed of speech.
The paper cites several studies that suggest inhibiting subvocalization reduces comprehension. However it takes the result of these studies as fact when they might be flawed. An example in their chapter about the role of phonology:
> First, consider a study in which skilled readers were asked to indicate (with a button press) whether briefly presented words were members of a certain category (e.g., foods; Van Orden, 1987). The people in this study incorrectly responded “yes” to a word that was not a member of the category (e.g., meet for the category food) about 19% of the time if that word was a homophone of a true member of the category: In this example, meet is pronounced the same as meat, which is a food. Incorrect “yes” responses to non-homophone words—for example, melt—occurred only 3% of the time.
I looked a the Van Order paper (http://link.springer.com/article/10.3758/BF03197716) since it shows the highest reading comprehension failure rate (19%). They came up with that number from an experiment studing just 5 male and 5 female undergraduate students (see Experiment 1, page 3)
I think citing this study altogether as a basis of one of their main conclusions (eliminating subvocalization lowers comprehension) is flawed: The study didn't compare regular undergraduates with speed readers (people skilled at comprehending without subvocalizing), it just concluded no subvocalization could lower comprehension by 19%.
Did you find a personal improvement when inhibiting subvocalization? I find it an interesting idea. I'd love to be able to process two streams of English at once but find the inner voice has only one channel it can work with. I can't listen and read but that would be awesome.
In my personal experience just inhibiting subvocalization resulted in increasing my reading speed to around 300 wpm. With other techniques (using peripheral vision to read multiple words per "shot") I got to around 440 wpm. All this based on the tests in the book I used.
The book[1] claimed you could reach up to 1200 wpm by doing all the exercises, I never got to finish all of them.
[1] "Superlectura veloz" (fast super-reading) - Carlos Quiroga
There seems to be some ambiguity in the term 'subvocalization'.
Should it refer strictly to (A) the internal monologue, (B) micro-movements of speaking muscles, or (C) both?
Correct me if I'm wrong, but my suspicion is that parsing and comprehension of text would be impossible without A. But also that A is slowed by B; thus reducing or eliminating B is beneficial.
It is almost certainly the internal monologue. I can read in two ways. One in which I have the words in my head as I read them and the other in which I just 'comprehend' entire sections of sentences at once. In the second there is never an internal monologue just comprehension. The second method lets me read most books in an evening, not sure what that works out in wpm but I was always significantly faster than anyone else at school at reading.
The book I used on speed reading claimed subvocalization (internal monologue) was a "bad habit" that can be eliminated with practice. As far as my personal experience, it does.
I initially thought the same and found it was really hard to shake it off. It took me several weeks of frustratingly sticking up with the exercises until I was able to do it.
But I still tend to fall back into it when I'm reading something hard to understand, specially when reading english which is not my native language.
I never consciously inhibited subvocalization, it just must have happened at some point as I got faster and faster at reading. I think it just comes down to speed. I comprehend the word or phrase before I can even begin a subvocalisation and so I'm already onto the next section.
I've never quite seen the point of speed reading. When I read, it's either to look up some information I need, or for entertainment. In the former case, it's much more efficient to just look for the particular information and avoid reading most of the text at all. In the latter case, speed reading would make the entertainment run out faster.
Particularly in the context of academia, speed reading or skimming a large number of texts may be useful for keeping up-to-date in one's field, or for quickly surveying a number of approaches to a problem before investigating those which seem most useful or interesting.
I'm currently (finally!) reading 2001. I was half a page from the end of a chapter when my train was seconds from stopping where I wanted to get off. Thanks to speed reading, I could finish the chapter and put the book down in my bag before leaving the train!
If I'm looking to process a reading queue, I'll do a lot of skimming, most writing contains lots of fluff and very little substance. I look for the main idea and some supporting context, think about them briefly, make some conclusions, and move on.
Only if the text is exceptionally well-written will I slow it down and really dig into what the writer was trying to convey. It's like a conversation. Some are really worth paying attention to and experiencing, most unfortunately are not, just perform your social duty and then go find something more interesting to do.
Reading used to be supremely difficult. A piece used to be read aloud - after several personal practice sessions to gain familiarity with the text.
In the 4th century being able to read silently was notably strange.
We've refactored the process quite a bit since then:
Splitting individual words. Introducing capitals to highlight paragraph boundaries and proper names.
Punctuation to speed up parsing.
Inter-paragraph spacing and semantic and syntactic conventions to improve concept parsing.
Etc., etc.
If your intent is to memorize every factoid and point made in the text, then speed reading won't be effective.
However, if you naturally skim articles really quickly looking for information that will be of interest to you, then in a sense you are already speed reading.
i've been doing it for a while, and well to me it worked.
I didnt follow an official course just used tips around the internet. I was able to read a huge work related projected, and make the decision to go into it for our company or not. By speed reading i found the problems in the project a 500 page doc. And those where tackled by contract makers. later so it depends if you can do it or not, but dont put money in it
On its own, you're not going to magically be able to reduce your reading time by 95% and still maintain the level of retention you get by a slow word-for-word read from a few weeks with an app/course. As the article states, there's more to reading than just swallowing a word more quickly. But the techniques enable you to change the way you consume information by eliminating the bottleneck and associated procrastination of staring down a 1000+ page book and the weeks it will take to get through it.
I'm a huge advocate of speed reading, personally[1]. However, I think the points made in the article have a lot of merit.
Speed reading should be seen as a tool for consuming information, but you have to adjust the way you learn accordingly[2]. I can read, cover to cover, a 1000 page book in a few hours. My strategy for learning from a large book is to read it more than once (often three to four times) to treat the first read as a 30,000 ft view. I don't do included exercises, and I also limit my note-taking. My second read is with pen and paper in hand. I break for exercises and notes, but otherwise continue to read just as rapidly. If I struggled with the concepts, I'll repeat the process.
Years ago, that book would have taken several sessions to complete the first read and the second read would only be over particular sections. I'd be done after weeks, rather than a weekend, which also negatively affected my retention. Reading from day 1 is built upon and by day 19, it's foggy. When I can do that in an afternoon, it's fresh on my mind. And at worst, with several reads, I'm still getting through the material in half the time it would have previously taken me and with solid retention[3].
It's also not something you become good at over night. After I took the course, I could read twice as fast, but not twice as effectively. It requires a lot of practice. When I sit down to read something, I have a goal of learning whatever it is I'm trying to learn, but I have a second goal of consuming that material more effectively. The first few years, I focused on reducing my time spent on the first read. As the years have gone by, I've adjusted my note-taking and methods for retention. I read a 500+ page book (often equivalent text in PDF) nearly every weekend. I pick things I am using today and grab books that build on that.
[1] I took a multi-week course that focused on the typical "eye movement" techniques along with skim/scan techniques. That course started, for me personally, a rapid change in my ability to consume information from text and I still believe it was one of the most important classes I've ever taken. I greatly prefer book reading over courses these days because I can completely control my pace from very rapid to word-for-word.
[2] I'm speaking purely of technical reading. I do not speed read fiction and my personal experience is that speed-reading fiction is awful. I stick with audio books for that.
[3] I do not have data to back this up. I've been reading large, technical programming books for 18 years, and some of that added speed is that I have a relative understanding of the work before I begin. I know how to read a programming book to maximize my retention and I read programming text to become better at what I do, which is something I've learned how to do from years of practice.
[Edit: Added a note clarifying fiction vs technical]
So this 1000 page book you can read in a few hours are technical or fiction books? What about the 500 page book over a weekend?
Both sound extremely impressive. What type of technical books are these? Any technical/programming book I read usually has a lot of exercises to do, or is just non-trivial and requires more time from me. For example I can't imagine it being possible to speed-read something like 'Introduction to Algorithms', or anything technical really.
Actually, it's only technical books (programming specifically) that I'm referring to. I do not read fiction that way (I actually prefer audiobooks for fiction mainly because speed reading fiction is less enjoyable).
To be fair (and to handle "bullshit" being called by another person's comments), the books usually cover a topic I am already at least partly (and sometimes very) familiar with. And many programming books contain pages of "just code" that are sparse in text. Books on topics that I am less familiar with I read more slowly, but rarely take more than a few hours (3-4) to get through the first read. I've explained in more detail in other comments, but the first read is a skim/scan without notes and without doing any exercises. It's to get a 30,000 ft view of the book to help identify areas I need to study more deeply.
Subsequent reads I focus on exercises, but hone in on areas I am less familiar with. The second read is much slower than the first. The most recent example I can think was Bjarn Stroustrup's "The C++ Programming Language". I've done little with C++ in about 10 years so this was almost all "new material". I started on Saturday morning and completed the first read in about 3 hours. I spent the day Sunday doing the second read, taking notes, but still without exercises. I spent the remainder of the week on subsequent reading doing exercises in 2-3 hour sessions every night.
This book would have taken me a month to read, the first time, before (I recall a Novell Netware book of 800 pages taking me almost a month to complete). And I would have gotten much less out of it as a result of the gaps of time between topics. I am not presently a "C++ genius" having read the book, but I've written a few programs and am comfortable with the material. And I know I'll read it again and refer to it.
You can't become a proficient speed reader over night or with just "some training" or "a course" without a lot of practice. I love reading programming books of any kind and approach it partly as an exercise to become better at consuming information, so every book I hope to get a little more efficient (though the law of diminishing returns applies).
I call bullshit. What he describes would be a major accomplishment worthy of publication in the most prestigious scientific journals but of course it's simply not true.
He may delude himself into believing he's actually getting anything out of the books he's speed reading but I bet if put to the test, his performance in terms of comprehension would be abysmal.
I'm not sure what else I can write to convince you -- I've detailed how I "read" so quickly in a few comments on this topic. It's true but I don't think it's all that unusual (your comment is making me think it may be which I'll try to keep from going to my head).
I used to work in Infrastructure in the early 2000s and a coworker and I had a running contest on how many certifications we could amass (my company had a library of reading materials). It was my coworker who pushed me to take a speed reading course. We'd each read 600+ page books covering the material around 3 times (maybe 4, but later reads are not complete reads) over a week while testing each other at work. Both of our pass rates were perfect[1] (Novell CNE, CNA, MCNE, A+, Security+ -- do those still exist? -- and a myriad of other certifications of dubious worth) -- failing meant we had to pay out of pocket, so we passed.
The "first read" is a skim/scan, very superficial read, and it's easy to get through a large book this way, especially if it's material I'm already comfortable with. The 1000 page books are technical books (points I made elsewhere) that aren't all wall to wall content, lots of diagrams, code, etc. I read a book more than once if I want to learn the content (the first read is partly to weed out a book that has no value to me).
At the end of the day, it's the equivalent time it takes to learn the material that matters. After a 2 hour "read" (skim/scan/speed-read) of a 1,000 page book, I'm nowhere near where I'd be if I had read the entire thing, slowly, word-for-word while taking notes and doing exercises. If I feel the book is worth it, I'll read it again, then read parts of it carefully, to the point where I've likely read the book 3-4 times with notes and exercises included. I'm at "equivalent to reading it slowly" by the end of the second read. But that's a low bar for a book of that size. Considering that same exercise would have taken me a month to complete the first read. How much of Chapter 4-6 will I remember on day 30 of multi-evening broken-up reading sessions reading it "slowly"? How likely am I to be burned out by then? By doing it this way, much more of it is fresh in my mind and (most important to me), I'm more likely to devote the time to learning the material knowing it will take a week, not a month+, to get what I want out of the book. After finishing a C++ book recently, I was writing in the language. I'm nowhere near proficient, having only two books and a 10-year gap in my C++ code experience, but "the old way" I would have been more likely to let it sit on the shelf half-read, never completing it. If I did, I wouldn't have been able to write more than a "Hello, World" program without having it pulled up along-side my IDE, constantly referring to bits I hadn't read in over a week.
[1] Pass rates, not scores. There were some tests I squeaked by one question over passing. I scored perfectly on more than a few, though, too.
I've seen a few speed reading lessons selling on that angle. It's a good way to sift through stuff that doesn't come with a summary. Just slow down once you find the good stuff.
Straw man? I've never heard it claimed that speed reading can give the same level of understanding as normal reading. Just that it's a way to quickly get a sense or gist of a work.
I've definitely seen promos for seminars that claim to "double your speed" and at the same time "increase your comprehension," so I'd say that speed reading being on par with normal reading is at least a real claim made sometimes and a perception that probably exists among many.
The course I took promised both, so the problems the article has with speed reading courses are completely fair IMO. They're ridiculous and on par with claiming a pill will make you lose hundreds of pounds without any effort or work.
I've way more than doubled my reading speed from when I took a course 18 years ago. My retention is dramatically higher, as well. The main reason for the increased retention, however, had less to do with the course than a change in the way I consume information from books. If the technical book is worth reading, I read it at least twice. "Read" includes skimming/scanning techniques that I've gotten very good at over 18 years. Thinking "well, I can read 90% faster with these techniques" will result in retention that is very low if you change nothing else. The first read is rapid and haphazard (sometimes just to figure out if it's worth using the book as a source of information). The second read will be honed for specific information (and third and fourth).
That serves two points in favor of retention. By being able to get through a massive text in a weekend with multiple reads (versus a single read over a few weeks), that information hasn't become foggy from multiple long breaks/distractions--it's fresh. My second read is cover-to-cover, but focused with note-taking and doing exercises. Subsequent reads are surgically focused on areas where I am weak and are done more slowly.
Before, my learning was single-pass (with some section/chapter review). Because of the reduced time/effort it takes me read, I can do so in a multi-pass manner with careful focus on learning the material rather than on the act of reading.
Increased comprehension was definitely one of the selling points when we were offered a speed reading course at my slightly odd school in the 1980s. Its proponents may have backed off on those claims since.
"Our testing shows that the retention levels when spritzing are at least as good as with traditional reading and that, with just a little bit of experience, you will retain even more than you did before."
So at least some companies are making claims of this nature.
It's still a fun thing to try if you haven't done it yet. The article points out what is pretty clearly the biggest problem with these speed readers - going back to re-read is a big UX challenge. My little hackathon app used a "back ten words" button (may have been what Spritz recommended?), but I also thought having the actual paragraphs scrolling above the Spritz text as you read would be a more useful way of solving this problem. If you get lost, skim the paragraphs around what you're reading, and press / click a word you want to start speedreading from again. In more dense material where you need to flip back a page or two, you might need some sort of zoom out functionality as well.
If nothing else, these technologies will hopefully find a use in wearables and other tiny-screen devices.