![]() Participants in a 2009 experiment read essays that had half the words covered up - either the beginning of the essay, the end of the essay, or the beginning or end of each individual paragraph. This is probably a good skimming strategy. Some speed-reading systems, for example, instruct people to focus only on the beginnings of paragraphs and chapters. We can definitely skim, and it may be that speed-reading systems help people skim better. In a recent article in Psychological Science in the Public Interest, one of us (Treiman) and colleagues reviewed the empirical literature on reading and concluded that it's extremely unlikely you can greatly improve your reading speed without missing out on a lot of meaning.Ĭertainly, readers are capable of rapidly scanning a text to find a specific word or piece of information, or to pick up a general idea of what the text is about. Unfortunately, the scientific consensus suggests that such enterprises should be viewed with suspicion. Today, apps like SpeedRead With Spritz aim to minimize eye movement even further by having a digital device present you with a stream of single words one after the other at a rapid rate. The course focused on teaching people to make fewer back-and-forth eye movements across the page, taking in more information with each glance. The first popular speed-reading course, introduced in 1959 by Evelyn Wood, was predicated on the idea that reading was slow because it was inefficient. And as the production rate for new reading matter has increased, and people read on a growing array of devices, the lure of speed reading has only grown stronger. Nonetheless, it has long been an aspiration for many readers, as well as the entrepreneurs seeking to serve them. The promise of speed reading - to absorb text several times faster than normal, without any significant loss of comprehension - can indeed seem too good to be true. "I read War and Peace in 20 minutes," he says. ![]() But those tests are still only as good as the questions-and the incorrect answers provided as foils for the right one.Our favorite Woody Allen joke is the one about taking a speed-reading course. "For example, people read in a different way if they anticipate a question is going to ask them about a particular word," says Schotter.Īssigning a comprehension score to open-ended summaries of text tends to be subjective, so researchers like Schotter usually measure comprehension with multiple-choice questions presented after a sentence or paragraph. ![]() "What does understanding a sentence or a paragraph or a text really mean? How detailed does your knowledge of the actual words versus the gist versus everything in between have to be?" Studies even suggest reading behavior changes based on the types of comprehension questions you ask. "It's kind of an open question," admits Schotter. While it's easy to track eye movement and measure reading speed, measuring comprehension is trickier. It's about Russia." That quote gets at one of main criticisms levied against speed reading, but also one of the core scientific problems in completely discrediting it. Woody Allen sums it up best: "I took a course in speed-reading.and was able to read War and Peace in twenty minutes. But you won't understand what you've read nearly as well. Can you learn to read faster? Absolutely. Unfortunately, decades worth of psychological research and more recent insights into the visual processing system seem to confirm only one thing: Doing things quicker means doing them less accurately. Still others eliminate the need to move your eyes at all. ![]() Others teach you to "chunk," or take in multiple lines of text in a single glance. Some involve suppressing your inner speech while reading. That's more or less the promise that Evelyn Wood's Reading Dynamics, Tim Ferriss' PX Project, software called Spritz, and countless other speed-reading techniques make to overwhelmed readers. Who wouldn't want to breeze through their reading list at 2,500+ words per minute and devour Johnny Five levels of input? It's no wonder then that speed reading-reading at an increased speed with no loss of comprehension-is an increasingly popular recourse for both the GTD crowd and anyone who worships at the altar of productivity. Like a lot of people, I'm drowning in words. I also have 12 un-downloaded novels waiting for me on Amazon's servers, 142 unopened emails, and suffer from what the Japanese call tsundoku (an unwieldy pile of books and magazines annexed my nightstand and desk long ago). According to the badge icon on my phone, I have 667 unread articles in my Instapaper account. ![]()
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