What is Digg?47 Comments
- diggerd, on 10/12/2007, -0/+18from the article's source:
4. Use your finger. For most beginning speed-readers
this is a shock. They remember reading in grade school with their
finger and assume it slows one down. Actually the finger is your pace
car.
5. Break the Back-skip habit. Most of us read along a
line of type like this one to get the interpretation of the meaning,
but as we read our eyes jump back to dwell on a word we just passed. We
do this without knowing it.
8. Eliminate “Bus Stops” (Eye rests). As your eyes
read down this line they stop periodically and “rest” on a word.
... Most reader never get over this habit, but like a bus stopping
at every corner, it slows down your progress.
and
1. Underline, circle, make margin notes.
Yup - that's pretty much what I do. I'd disagree with the dog-earing of pages though.
Good idea on the post-its for loaned books - I usually make note cards (5x8).
I've found that using index and pinkie fingers to delineate the line and keeping it moving down the page allows me to reduce "back-skip" and "bus stop" habits - but it's very hard to eliminate. Also, I hate highlighters - they tend to bleed through to the other side. I underline / annotate the margins instead.
Love them books!
DUGG - chris9902, on 10/12/2007, -0/+6that took way too long to read...
- ejfisher, on 10/12/2007, -0/+5Direct link to Keith Drury's actual Article:
http://www.drurywriting.com/keith/SPEED.htm
And other writings:
http://www.drurywriting.com/keith - VeganG, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4Yeah, I agree. Compared to everyone else that I know, I leisure-read at a slow pace. I'm not retarded or anything, I'm just "acting out" the book in my head. It's more enjoyable that way.
- LucasVB, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4Then you use the mouse cursor. That's what I do.
- skaughtm, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4finger technique does help unless you're reading online.
- rolosworld, on 10/12/2007, -1/+5good tips, but... at the end of the day to improve reading speed what you need to do is read a lot (digg helps a lot with this). Its not just learn this tips, most of this tips I had already learned them by experience.
- TinMan, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4I use the mouse to highlight while I read.
- nikkesen, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3Speed reading is only good in certain situations.
If you're reading fiction, you'll want to enjoy it. If speed-reading is natural to one and you can still enjoy a book that way, then all the power to you. Otherwise, why force others who enjoy reading but don't have a strength in speed-reading to try it?
It takes the joy out of reading.
I'm a sped-reading, but, it comes from years of reading as a young child because I didn't want to pay or watch TV. - GarethMB, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3An interesting a valuable read. I'm going to try and incorporate some of these ideas when I'm doing the reading for my university course. Particularly the stuff about periphery and back skipping.
- leapingfrog, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3Direct link:
http://pianoer.wordpress.com/2006/02/05/speed-reading-techniques/ - LucasVB, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2There's a difference. This article just describes techniques to improve your reading speed, but there are several books and other junk being sold out there that claim you'll be able to read over 5 pages a minute. Those are the things that have been debunked.
Of course you can read faster, but there are limits. - matrixneo, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2Techniques mentioned under "Retention Techniques" could be very well applied for blogging as well.
- bennybertow, on 10/12/2007, -1/+3I speed-read it, thus it didn't take too long...
- tidu, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2This'll help me wtih my summer reading...
This and spark notes. - ejfisher, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2I was one of Drury's students. It works! Now...read that fast!
- neoncricket, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2One suggestion that I've heard for stopping subvocalizing is repeating something to yourself over and over while reading, like counting to ten, or humming the tune of a song. This way the part of your brain that subvocalizes is busy, and after awhile you learn to do it without having to count or hum. I haven't gotten very good at this, however, but it's supposed to work if you keep at it for awhile.
- Haplo, on 10/12/2007, -1/+3See my other comment: people who read a lot already are able to read fast. If you increase this speed, then you will lose more and more information but (!) if you read a lot, you can for yourself find the right balance.
Most people who want to learn how to read fast, I guess, are just people who rarely read, and suddenly have to go through a bunch of books.
Reading is recognizing patterns, and this goes easier when you have been training a lot. - yahoofrom, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2But can I speed-read an abstract algebra textbook?
- CAPSLOCK2000, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2I second this opinion, allthough I can't tell you how to do it. I've read a lot, and can do so very fast, I'd probably qualify as a speed writer.
I know that most of the times I do not sub-vocalize. Most of the time I'm not really aware of myself when reading. However I can consciously switch back to sub-vocalizing, this usually happens when I have problems with the text.
Either I do not understand the meaning, or I don't understand the structure of the sentence, or I'm just tired/distracted.
When that happens my reading speed drops at least 2 times, maybe as much as ten times. I find myself backtracking all the time and are bound to lose my position in the text.
I do not use a finger to point at the text, but I think I use a mental pointer to the text.
I'll try to describe the process, but beware, this explanation is artificial, and probably not how I really read.
My "mental finger" pushes through the text at a constant speed, without pausing. I do not read individual words, but word groups. Not all words are of the same importance. A lot of text is non-essential, and easy to parse. Within a word-group I only need to decode the important words. The rest just colors the important words.
Meaning is extracted from these groups based on the context and the essential words. This information is then appended to my conscious representation of the text. As long as information fits well within the rest, I can continue reading without fully realizing the individual words.
School has showed me beyond doubt that I'm not "losing" information this way. At least not more then others. As a matter of fact I've always scored very high on comprehensive reading like activities.
I can cranck up the speed even further, by just reading a few words per paragraph, but that way I will miss a lot of information that way, allthough it's usually possible to get a reasonable idea of the text. - Kilroy2004, on 10/12/2007, -1/+3Yes - the author is wrong when she says that retention is better with speed reading.
On the contrary, retension has absolutely nothing to do with the speed you read - rather, it has to do with the comprehension of what you read. If you can understand the key words in a paragraph by glancing at them, you probably gain as much insight into them that a slow reader does by taking time reading the paragraph. It's how you retain that insight that matters - not how fast you gain it. - kingkilr, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1I remember a while back some celebrity went to a famous speed reading school and after reading this very famous book(Crime and Punishment maybe?) all he could come up with when asked what the book was about was vague generalized statements.
- inactive, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1I use this on the pocketpc, cause it reads PDFs:
http://www.pocketgear.com/software_detail.asp?id=10942
I in the middle of Piers Anthony books... (yeah im a kid at heart) and have to say I continue to like this fast reader even though the guy put it out in 2003. - Tabris, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1I do the highlight stuff too, I just realized I do it and ahve been for a little under a year now. No idea why..
Do you highlight a little block of text at a time? Then maybe a few more lines down you'll be reading without highlighting then just spontaneously highlight some more text? - missflibbles, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1I'm with you. I'm not really convinced that speed reading doesn't decrease your retention just because a couple people say so, especially if the advice to stop it is "take notes."
- charlietuna, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1That's exactly my beef with this topic. It takes what is a complex subject (learning), and turns it into a "good-better-best" type two dimensional blurb. There's little point in refusing to re-read words if the word one is trying to understand lacks supporting context. One simply must slowly churn through certain abstract topics.
The point is well taken that there are certain bad habits which hinder optimal reading speed. Obviously if you lose those bad habits, you do better. - Haplo, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Yeah, the finger thing is bollocks IMO. Speed reading is scanning a page very fast. Depending on how much info you want to collect and how accurate. A finger only slows down. Other tricks are hopping through sections, or even trying to absorb several paragraphs by one look. Of course the accuracy drops greatly, it's like very fast scanning for certain patterns, but it's great if you want to find a small piece of info, or just grasp some parts.
If you read a lot, IMO, you already are able to read extremely fast, and you can use the mental finger as described above or use other ways to find anchors in the text. - inactive, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1One other tip worth mentioning is how many words you read at once. Nobody reads letters one curve at a time. Nobody reads words one letter at time. There's no reason to read sentences one word at a time. Work on using your peripheral vision to read phrases at a time. Experts will say "make your way up to a whole sentence at a time" but I simply don't believe that.
- diggerd, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1-maybe 'cuz you were reading too fast - it's in there.
- VeganG, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Ah, sub-vocalize, so that's the term. That is what slows me down, but I actually prefer it.
- missflibbles, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1I never, ever sub-vocalize when I'm reading English, but I tend to do it when I try to read Spanish. I do it because I'm nowhere near proficient with the second language, and I like how it sounds.
Contrary to the article, playing music with lyrics in the background might help you stop sub-vocalizing.
Regardless of background noise, as you read more you won't need to say the words in your head, because you'll just recognize them. That's the key to speed reading, right there. You don't actually read the words, you just recognize them. That comes with practice. - Haplo, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1"Experts will say "make your way up to a whole sentence at a time" but I simply don't believe that."
Yet it's true, the more you read similar text, the faster you can read whole sentences in one go, or better: drop whole sentences because they match a certain pattern. The thing is, as soon as you're going to check what you're doing, your speed drops a lot. It's like: don't think about a white polar bear. I said... - Daniel591992, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Try your speed reading:
Lorem Ipsum is simply dummy text of the printing and typesetting industry. Lorem Ipsum has been the industry's standard dummy text ever since the 1500s, when an unknown printer took a galley of type and scrambled it to make a type specimen book. It has survived not only five centuries, but also the leap into electronic typesetting, remaining essentially unchanged. It was popularised in the 1960s with the release of Letraset sheets containing Lorem Ipsum passages, and more recently with desktop publishing software like Aldus PageMaker including versions of Lorem Ipsum. - snowboardertim, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1I go to IWU as well and have heard about these seminars, but never attended... I might just have to now.
- Haplo, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2"Teach yourself speed-reading techniques" - by reading more. Most people who read a lot already know most if not all tricks to read fast. People who want to learn how to speed read I guess are often faced with a lot of books they suddenly have to read, while they rarely read. You can't learn to speed read in a short time though.
- Haplo, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1If you read a lot, you stop subvocalizing soon enough. Learning speed reading is just reading a lot, every day. I do subvocalize when I read in a non-native language only in the beginning when I start to read, shortly after, the real world goes, and I am in the book :-)
- Crankt, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0How would one learn to not vocalize? I just noticed that I say every word in my head, and when I read faster the voice just speaks faster. I'm trying but I can't turn the voice off.
- framitz, on 10/12/2007, -1/+1The one thing that I didn't see mentioned in the article or the comments is that the KEY to speed reading is to learn NOT to sub vocalize, that is not to pronounce the words as you read.
I had an experimental class in speed reading in 1966 or '67 and took a reading test over 25 years later as part of a management course. I scored off the charts in grade level and had 96% comprehension at around 650 words per minute. I actually held back to make sure I understood the material. 650 WPM isn't all that fast, but it is 2 to 3 times faster than the speed of speech which is the limiting factor for most people.
I don't use speed reading when I read for pleasure, but it is a useful time saver when I have to read work related material. - josegutz, on 10/12/2007, -2/+2This would help me read all the terms of agreement fine print whenever I sign up for a website...
- neoncricket, on 10/12/2007, -1/+1Easily the most difficult aspect of speed reading for me is #3: Quit Subvocalizing. I've tried this a lot, and maybe I need to simply practice more, but I have a hard time not hearing myself speak when I read. And from what I hear, this is a pretty important piece of the speed reading puzzle. I wish he gave some good pointers on how to stop doing this.
- sparc, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0Oddly enough, it took longer to bring up the speed reading web page than it took to bring up any of the other articles I have read this morning.....
- eddieo, on 10/12/2007, -2/+2Yo taxi!!
- dredgemortle, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0Here's a quick test:
http://www.readingsoft.com/ - yogaiscool, on 04/29/2009, -0/+0This is a good article, but you need to practice instead of just learning about the techniques. I used http://www.free-speed-reading.com/ to take a test that showed I could read at 300 WPM. Then I practiced. I took another test, and I went up to 380 WPM. It's a good tool.
- charlietuna, on 10/12/2007, -1/+0Has anyone done a statistically validated controlled academic study of this stuff? I would think that for technical reading there would be little benefit in doubling the rate at which one could read if retention were halved. Could anyone seriously try this with "Paradise Lost" by Milton, or a biophysics paper?
- SickBoy, on 10/12/2007, -3/+1Yeah, I thought speed reading was debunked years ago.
- missflibbles, on 10/12/2007, -3/+1There needs to be a quantifiable definition for speed reading besides "decoding language really fast". Is it considered speed reading when you read 500 wpm, or what? I really don't care how many pages you get through in a minute. Page length is much more variable than word length. You might as well measure buildings with people's feet. It might be more accurate.
I would also like to point out that most of the techniques presented as ways to make you read faster are just ways to improve your retention. Obviously, retention is important for reading, but don't package an article designed to improve my study habits as one that will increase my reading speed.
Other commenters are right about this. You get faster at reading with practice. I read over 300 wpm, and some of these tips belong in the "no duh" category. Really, don't reread words? That will really make me read faster?
Come on. This stuff is bunk.
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