Speed Reading

[send_the_msg]

[ QUOTE ]
Thats like reading at Johnny 5 speed.

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damn i'm glad someone referenced that movie. haha

[SmileyEH]

I did that demo thing and it said 592 WPM, but the text was pretty easy and I had some pauses strating and stopping cause i was playing a tourney at the time. This is good I guess?

-SmileyEH

[morello]

[ QUOTE ]
speed reading software

If you are interested in reading faster I have to recommend this site. I actually never used the software but merely did the demo on the website. It trains your eyes to read peripherally instead of left to right word by word. Try the demo on the site you might be surprised.

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I just tried this site. Initially it said I was reading at 484 wpm, and after doing their demo, I got up to 521 wpm. Not sure how reliable it is though.

[wacki]

I was at the library a few days ago. I spent 7 hours on 4 pages.

That is all.

[Jman28]

When reading denser books (poker, math, etc.), does speed reading help? I mean, you have to take the time to think and absorb the information anyway, right?

[TStoneMBD]

i actually have a copy of eyeq and used it for a couple of weeks. it appeared that i was actually increasing the speed of my reading, but its hard to tell. am i comprehending the passage as the same level as i was a week ago but am reading faster? maybe i am reading faster but understand less.

i think i got up to like 800 words a minute, i really dont remember (its been a while), but i cant comprehend the text as i can by reading at a normal pace.

for whatever reason i got bored with the program and stopped using it, which seems pretty silly.

i believe that eyeq advertises that many people read 1500 wpm after they use eyeq for a while. if the world champions dont even read that fast then imo this discredits their software.

[edtost]

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i believe that eyeq advertises that many people read 1500 wpm after they use eyeq for a while. if the world champions dont even read that fast then imo this discredits their software.

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i did the demo and went from 920 -> 980, and have no speed reading training. if the world champions aren't 1.5x as fast as me, that's pretty sad.

[edtost]

[ QUOTE ]
When reading denser books (poker, math, etc.), does speed reading help?

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not to any appreciable degree.

[dawade]

I can read fast, but when I do I don't absorb the information as much, and even when I read at normal speeds I sometimes forget important details in a section only a paragraph or a page before.

(Not MAJOR details but just certain stuff)

[Dan Kimberg]

One relevant study I'm aware of was done years ago by Pat Carpenter, Marcel Just, and colleagues at Carnegie Mellon University. (I'm only aware of it because I was later in the same department.) The upshot of their study was that speed readers pay for their speed with poorer comprehension than normal readers. They also argued that speed reading is likely to work well for simple material, and less well for complex material, and that people not specially practiced at speed reading could skim and read almost as quickly as speed readers with comparable comprehension. So to some extent, the science backs up common sense more than it supports miraculous reading techniques. If you just need the gist, skim or speed read. If you care about the details (e.g., you're reading a good book on poker strategy), take your time.

There have been more recent studies, but I believe the evidence still weighs strongly against any huge special benefit to learning special techniques for speed reading. Experimental tests (from the scientific literature) of the claim that people can speed read with perfect comprehension have I think uniformly failed to support this claim. If you don't read a lot, you can certainly improve with practice. But anything much beyond about 250 words per minute and you're probably sacrificing comprehension. The wikipedia article on speed reading has a few useful starting points if you're interested, although it could use some editing (Allyn and Bacon is the publisher of the Just/Carpenter book on reading, not an author).

Of course, the kind of detailed comprehension you get from regular, slow reading isn't always desirable, especially if a superficial understanding is all you need. There's lots of empty text out there, and not everything calls for detailed reading. I try to avoid reading things that are best understood superficially, so as much as I'd like to quadruple my reading speed, I don't want to sacrifice comprehension. Sometimes this means I'm spending a lot of time soaking up unimportant detail or redundant material, which is a waste of my limited reading time. But I blame careless authors/editors and not my slow reading speed for the wasted time.

dan