Speed reading.. how?

If you want to speed read your school homework or slurp down a programming manual in an evening, it's not going to work as well as you think it will. Speed reading is for digesting large amounts of general info (like a magazine artical or a newspaper, or even a novel). For things that require deeper thought like poetry, programming manuals, Shakespeare, the Bible, love letters, etc, speed reading is of no use, even counterproductive. Speed reading is for getting the gist of it, not analyzing details.

In a nutshell, spead reading is accomplished by digesting groups of words at a glance, mentally picking out key words, and ignoring the "filler" words. The trick is really just in training your eyes to move quickly using your fingertips. This is why you see speed-reading portrayed in the media by people quickly moving their hands across the page. The fingertips are an eye-guide.

My suggestion is to take a small non-credit class at the local community college if available. This way you can interact and talk with others trying to learn over the same material.

Hey Drew. From what I gather to be a good speed reader you have to glance over the passage and kind of teach yourself only to pick out the key words of a given sentence. Then you kinda add 1 and 1 together in your head as you move along. That's how I've heard of it being done before. I'm sure you can find some exercises to help you learn how to do it, although some people might not be able to. Everybody has a different way of learning and taking in information.

1. Memorize the book first
2. Pretend to read it really really fast
3. Make something up as to how you do it, and publish a book about it
4. ???
5. PROFIT!!

I'd check wikipedia for references on this subject but it seems to be down right now :(

Quote:

Original post by DrewGreen Anyone got any good (and preferably free) sources or info I could look into about this? It's no more than a curiosity for me at the moment but if it works as well as I hope it does, I can see the benefits. Cheers

leiavoia touched on a lot of the important points here. Speed reading does not train you to think faster; it trains you to read faster. It works best on long items focused on a set of ideas -- a magazine essay, a fictional novel, an extended essay. It works the worst on things that aren't arranged in sentences, or which require nontrivial analysis to understand -- poetry, source code, a passage from a mathematical text.

Quote:

Original post by kSquared Quote: Original post by DrewGreen Anyone got any good (and preferably free) sources or info I could look into about this? It's no more than a curiosity for me at the moment but if it works as well as I hope it does, I can see the benefits. Cheers leiavoia touched on a lot of the important points here. Speed reading does not train you to think faster; it trains you to read faster. It works best on long items focused on a set of ideas -- a magazine essay, a fictional novel, an extended essay. It works the worst on things that aren't arranged in sentences, or which require nontrivial analysis to understand -- poetry, source code, a passage from a mathematical text.

Indeed. You'll find that you completely miss the fact that words are mispelled, etc. when reading at high speed, but if you do happen to notice it tends to throw you right off track.

Basically you're pulling out the ideas rather than the actual words, so anything that breaks the flow of text will throw you off - diagrams, formulas, cross references, etc are all good examples.

Minimise pointless eye movements. For example, most people when reading over a page do so like this (arrows indicate eye movement):
>>>>>>>>>>>>>
Line of text.
<<<<<<<<<<<<<
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
Additional line of text.
<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
Third line of text.

As you can see, reading each line of text from the left involves moving your eyes all the way back to the left again without them doing anything. If you try it out, you'll find that as long as the lines aren't overly long you can still comprehend the information while reading like so:
>>>>>>>>>>>>>
Line of text.
<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<
Additional line of text.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
Third line of text.

As you can hopefully see, in the second example you're actually reading every second line with your eyes tracking right to left. This will save you more time than you might think, and allows you to get a better flow happening. Move your fingers along the lines of text as you read to train yourself to read like this if you want to try it, with only a short time practicing most people will get a small improvement in thier reading speed.

The next thing is training yourself to pick out key words and ignore the rest, essentially 'skimming' over the text in question whilst still maintaining a high level of comprehension. Unfortunately I don't have any advice on actually training this; everyone I know of who can do it either already did it instinctively, or just picked it up after improving thier reading flow.

I met someone that can photoread. She said its way better than speed reading. Basically you use a similar method to speed reading, but instead of actually moving your eyes, you actually just capture the entire page in one shot. In nerd speak: You capture the page into your brain's video memory and have your brain directly access the Video RAM.

I can't really explain photoreading since I can't do that yet.

http://www.photoreading.com

She says its faster and more accurate than speed reading too. She reads way faster than me so I kind of have to believe her. ;)

I have my own method of speed reading which I use for reading boring english notes and the like. Essentially you try and look at an entire line/sentence at once and let your brain process it and then look at the next line/sentence. When done correctly you can almost read down a page instead of side to side. Of course I have no idea if it's easy for other people to do but I find it increadibly useful.

Thanks everyone, it's not for technical use (or cheating), although I suspect it could be put to use with an initial brief read of a spec followed by a more thorough one. That photoreading thing sounds more like what I'm looking for.

If anyone's ever seen Derren Brown's Trick of the Mind (tv magic show here in uk, although largely based on psychology) you'll probably have seen the trick where he gets a librarian to pick an obscure book out at random & proceeds to memorize the entire thing before quoting words and sentences back to him on a "page x, line y, word z" basis. Assuming it's not rigged (& having a couple of Derren's "magic trade" books I believe it isn't), it's certainly very impressive.

Speed reading, from what I read in Tony Buzan's "Use Your Head", is not just to get the jist of what you're reading. From what he says it actually improves your understanding because you read multiple words at the same time, giving them more connectivity. It also means you will get bored less easily, plus less energy is used when speed reading, rather than going from one word to another, you go from a few words to another few words and presumably, after time, the amount of words you can handle at the same time increases.