I taught myself the techniques of speed reading as a kid over 50 years ago. It didn’t really help. Fiction has too many characters and twists and turns; I can’t really read it much faster than 300 wpm or I miss something.
I’m a very fast reader of non-fiction (I have several thousand technical books). However, I don’t really read every book word for word. After reading a couple of books on algorithms for example, it’s possible to skim through the next one only looking for new subjects, better pictures, or new approaches. I also jump around and read the parts I’m interested in. The result is I have some recollection of what’s in most of my more recent books, and if I need to look something up I can often remember where I saw it in the book—like roughly how far into the text it is and where on the page it was.
I get stuck in the middle of a lot of non-fiction works. When I started buying more non-fiction because it was 'good for me', this got particularly bad.
In fiction, the conclusion is always at the end of the book. With non-fiction you sometimes know the conclusion by chapter 4. How would you keep going if you knew who the murderer was in chapter 4 of a mystery?
For some non-fiction, authors rely on a lot of repetition, but they don't always make it clear where the next new topic will begin. In a lecture once you get it you can check out. In a video you can skip to the next one. In a book? I don't possess the right coping mechanisms for books, and I wonder if they even exist.
I'm still learning to give myself permission to stop reading a non-fiction book halfway through when I 'get it'. I have a couple shelf-feet of books in my queue because of it. I think I expect there to be some profound observations they've saved until the end, like the little scenes after the credits in movies, and like movies, the random reinforcement keeps me coming back for more.
I've tried a bit of speed reading, skimming, and only reading the first sentence of every paragraph, but it all feels like I'm short-changing myself (and then truly short-changing myself in the process).
Maybe I should just read summaries and skip these books entirely.
I’ve found that the real value I get out of a nonfiction book is rarely the conclusion or any particular fact found within its pages. Instead, it’s a guide map for how to look at the sorts of things that the book is about and draw the sorts of conclusions that the author finds.
The act of reading a book permanently alters how you think a little bit, so the most important factor in deciding whether to abandon a book is whether or not you want to think more like the author does.
Like any other skill, the sort of thinking that any given book is training you to do benefits from repetition. The variation in the different scenarios also helps make this skill more robust so that you can apply it correctly to more diverse situations.
Fortunately, all this means you don’t need to make much of an effort to actually remember anything the book says— the book’s real value comes from subtlety altering the way you think which will happen so long as you’re attending to what you read. The later chapters should be easier and more relaxing to read because you’re familiar with the pattern of the author’s argument and they act more like a mental exercise than anything else.
I make a habit of finishing everything I read, to exercise my ability to maintain focus. But that only works by being extremely selective of the material I begin, particularly books.
If a book is skimmable, why bother? Presuming the author has something genuinely interesting and substantive to say, there are often better alternatives. For example, books written by scholars are often preceded by long-form journal articles which more concisely present the material. And if you were mistaken in your belief they had something interesting to say, then you've only wasted 20 pages of your time, not 400; yet you can still say you gave them the full measure of your attention and a fair chance to persuade you.
I don't think it's fair to compare 'Refactoring' and 'Design Patterns' based on their respective number of pages. They are both catalogs, but they are cataloguing different things. A design pattern IMO is harder to explain and understand than a refactoring, it needs to provide some context, and by definition you need to prove that it qualifies as a pattern by showing a few examples found "in the wild".
Also, the authors had to show how these patterns can be implemented in different programming languages (Smalltalk and C++). Fowler could get away with one simple example of a refactoring in Java each time.
Having said that, Fowler's prose is super clear, something that cannot be necessarily said about GoF, (IMO of course)...
Would you extend your reasoning to TAOCP as well? Not trying to put you in a spot: I would, and I agree. I wonder how much of the praise devoted to TAOCP is from people who have actually read the books.
The really good fiction doesn't always have the conclusion at the end -- you just think that that's the conclusion. Of course this presupposes that there's a sequel that the reader is not aware of just quite yet. (The sequel may not even exist yet, but if the author's narrative extends far enough into the future then you can get that feel.)
I think a decent example of this is the Three-Body Problem, although the first one does have a sort of abrupt ending. A weaker example would be Banks' Culture novels, but that was more about there being a whole world out there -- the actual narrative did usually just end at the end of the book.
> The really good fiction doesn't always have the conclusion at the end
I was going to say that for the opposite reason -- I don't think that something being a series or part of a larger whole makes it inherently better (sometimes it hurts; many a great book has been ruined by a sequel).
Some of the best books, however, have the conclusion right at the beginning and all the rest is "how we got there". C.F. much Vonnegut.
Question is also, why would people speed read fiction? To pretend that they are well read and can boast thousands of books finished? I read fiction for fun, when the book is good I don't want to finish it too fast.
For technical books, I agree it is possible to skim rather quickly through stuff that I already know with speed reading approach.
It is just a desire for time optimization. I would love to get the same satisfaction that I get from sitting and thinking deeply about every sentence of a complicated or nuanced text, in less time without loss of bandwidth. If I could read good fiction and get the same pleasure from it quicker, that would be great.
So your point seems to assume that books have a fixed volume of pleasure inside of them, which we extract by reading? In other words, the greater number of books read, the greater pleasure derived.
My own assumptions are quite different, namely I expect that like most other pleasurable activities, you get the pleasure from the time spent doing it, but that doing more of it.
For example, if two people both spend 5 hours hiking, and one person hikes 10 miles and the other 15 miles, I wouldn't then assume the latter had gotten more enjoyment from his or her hiking. Nor would I assume someone that had eaten a meal with 1000 calories got more enjoyment than someone who had merely eaten 500 calories.
> Question is also, why would people speed read fiction?
This is a question I always ask all speed readers and the answers are always so muddled. I can never understand what they are getting at.
Perhaps I relish a good novel more than most, but to me the idea of speed reading a good novel sounds about as appealing as speed drinking a fine wine.
You may be underestimating how many people do this as well :P
Personally, I would love anything that got me thru books faster. I've been reading A Scanner Darkly for months. Admittedly it's more of a problem of concentration than reading speed, but I do understand the appeal of reading quickly. You'll simply get thru more books.
That being said - I don't understand people who listen to sped up podcasts, as I hate burning thru my favourites before a new episode is out. So I think it's just down to personal preference.
Right, I understand the bit about getting through more books, but why? There are an unreadable number of mind-blowingly brilliant novels out there and basically no reason to read any them except to enjoy oneself.
If I am enjoying a book, I can’t imagine having the urge to finish it faster. Or slower. What could possibly be gained?
Edit: also, just some unsolicited thoughts on your struggle to complete a Scanner Darkly. IIRC, A Scanner Darkly is a fairly average length novel, meaning you might expect to finish it in ~10 hours of reading. My personal experience is that it's best to enjoy a novel within a relatively limited time frame (say a couple of weeks) so that the various characters and plot lines stay fresh in your head.
If I were in your situation, I would probably question whether:
A) If I actually like the book. If you are even a quarter of the way through a book and don't like it, nothing wrong with picking up something else. As I mention above, books are for enjoyment. If you don't enjoy it, what's the point?
B) If I perhaps don't have time to read a novel now. Sure, nothing wrong with starting a movie, pausing for dinner and then finishing it afterwards. But there are limits. You wouldn't want to split a 2 hour film into a dozen ten-minute segments. And I would argue, wouldn't you want to split a 10 hour novel into a 60 ten-minute segments either. Just not a good reading experience. Nothing wrong with putting the book on hold and coming back in a few weeks once your schedule has calmed a little.
Most of the time I vary the speed of the book as I read it. I think thats quite common (?) The last book I read had over a thousand pages, and some chapters which were not really interesting could just be skimmed without a huge loss of plot/story/detail.
Also, I can see how if you have multiple hobbies/kids/etc you'd want to speed up your reading because you have limited time.
I did this with the Wheel of Time series. I skipped the 5 middle books and had zero problems picking up the last couple and figuring out what was going on and enjoying it instead of burning out midway through the series because there were far too many side quests.
When a new WoT book would come out, I would reread the earlier ones to remind myself of where I was. After book 6, I skipped books 4 and 5 completely when doing so.
If it's anything like me (a very slow reader), I imagine speed require reduces the room for distractions to occur if you do if effectively? Like, your mental energy is very committed to the one task.
“As the biggest library if it is in disorder is not as useful as a small but well-arranged one, so you may accumulate a vast amount of knowledge but it will be of far less value to you than a much smaller amount if you have not thought it over for yourself; because only through ordering what you know by comparing every truth with every other truth can you take complete possession of your knowledge and get it into your power.”
- Arthur Schopenhauer (1851)
But I wanted to make an additional point myself, which is: the key part of reading for information is not consumption, but rather memory. It doesn't matter how many books you read if you only remember a small percentage of each one. Like any educated person, I've read thousands of books in my lifetime. And yet I could probably only name the details of a few dozen. This strikes me as horribly inefficient.
As such, I've been trying to incorporate Spaced Repetition (with Anki) into the reading process itself. My initial idea is to do two things:
- add specific lines and information into Anki. E.g. quotes, statistics, and so on.
- write a brief one-paragraph summary of each chapter or, in shorter books, each page. Then add this summary to Anki.
So far, I've been able to recall far more information about the books I've read, even if it takes 5-10x times longer to read them. Overall, I'd consider that an effective sacrifice.
Just because you can only remember specific parts of a few books, doesn't mean the information from those books hasn't been incorporated into your mental model of the world.
If it really takes 5-10x as long, it might be more efficient to reread books you decide are worth remembering. Reading the whole book 5 times (with months in between, of course) seems like it would be more effective at helping you remember the book itself, rather than your summaries and statistics from a single reading. You might not remember all of your takeaways from your first reading with this method, but you should be able to make new observations and connections each time you reread it, which you have a 0% chance of remembering with your current method.
I think a thousands of books are only read by a very slim percentage of educated people over their lifetimes. It would mean about a book a week on average for several decades.
"Hundreds" sounds more realistic, unless you have a very strict definition for "educated person".
There is a neat book I picked up in Highschool called The Manual: The Ultimate Study Method.
It was cool. It advocated multiple forms of meditation for concentration training so you could speed read a book. Using your increased concentration, which was mentioned as super important, you'd do pass 1 of 3 speed reading through using the Visual Method mentioned. Meditation and clearing your head were mentioned specifically to reduce regressing, but it was okay to regress. Pass 2 would involve creating an outline of all the topics and information. Pass 3 would be creating a visual mind map of the information.
Point for me was that speed reading helps only to filter or get a first pass on something, but I doubt anything really complicated can be understood by simply speed reading it. Or even simply reading it once.
Interesting you mention concentration and meditation. It seems, for a lot of people at least, that the highest leverage thing is alleviating distraction; self-interruption and fatigue.
There's a major extra aspect to the approach mentioned here; via multiple passes you aren't limited to the progressive/incremental mental image that a single pass, no matter how well-focused, would provide.
I do the visual reading thing that is mentioned in the article. I get a sort of "movie in my head" when I'm reading, and often become unaware of the words on the page. Sometimes I have to pause to let the action catch up to where I am on the page, and sometimes I'll be focused on one character in a story and miss incidental things that happen in the book to another character.
I can read just under a couple of pages of a standard paperback in about a minute.
It's a pleasant way to spend a few hours.
I don't read non-fiction like that, though. It just doesn't happen, and I don't know how to make it happen.
>I get a sort of "movie in my head" when I'm reading
I think this means you're doing it right! In Polanyian terms, your subsidiary awareness is on the particulars of the typography and the words allowing your focal awareness to be on the fun bit, i.e. on the meaning.
This ability, I think, depends just as much on how interesting and enjoyable the content is as it depends on your reading skill.
For more Michael Polanyi I recommend this superb (audio, non-fictional) lecture:
>I don't read non-fiction like that, though. It just doesn't happen, and I don't know how to make it happen.
This may be because the books are boring. For instance, textbooks. Here the reading is mainly about searching for the relevant material, so the focal awareness is on the text itself. However, Feynman's Hairy Green Ball Method seems applicable:
I had a scheme, which I still use today when somebody is explaining something that I’m trying to understand: I keep making up examples. For instance, the mathematicians would come in with a terrific theorem, and they’re all excited. As they’re telling me the conditions of the theorem, I construct something which fits all the conditions. You know, you have a set (one ball)—disjoint (two halls). Then the balls turn colors, grow hairs, or whatever, in my head as they put more conditions on. Finally they state the theorem, which is some dumb thing about the ball which isn’t true for my hairy green ball thing, so I say, “False!”
It depends on the book, really. There are some very deep books which one should totally take the time to read slowly, comprehend the ideas and retain them to some extent. But lately I've been noticing that the majority of recent non-fiction books are basically filler added around an idea which could have better been an essay. I would definitely speed-read those. My latest example would be https://www.amazon.com/Conspiracy-Peter-Gawker-Anatomy-Intri....
Not to mention the numerous pop-sci books which are a detailed history of science in disguise. I'm actually abandoning those. I'm tired of reading about the personality quirks or life stories of Bohr, Einstein, Heisenberg, Schrödinger whenever I pick up a book about quantum mechanics.
Life's too short to invest your time (slow read) in filler material.
If you're trying to determine what to read, or want to rapidly get an overview of a book, or are "visually grepping" for specific content, then the tricks of speed-reading, especially of chunking, skimming paragraph ledes, and not vocalising or subvocalising, help.
If you're reading for deep understanding, you'll want to fully absorb the material (and work through the exercises!), though this can also involve several passes -- for textbooks or nonfiction, I'll scan the ToC, and then the chapter (especially for section/subsection titles), then read through in full.
Treating such reading as an inquiry rather than simply as data transfer helps tremendously.
And of course, if you're reading quality literature or poetry, you'll want to savour the language, words, rhythm, meter, and rhyme. Go slow. You'll appreciate it all the more.
Reading plays or dialogue-rich content is a particular skill -- try reading with different intonation or to sort out what possible alternate meanings might exist. Shakespeare is of course excellent for this, though many other plays (or film screenplays) are as well. Realise just how much latitude the actor or director has in translating from words on the page to those uttered on the stage or screen.
"Speed reading" comes from a functional view of activities: You eat in order to power your body, you read in order to acquire that all-important "information", you go to school to acquire "job skills".
Which is true but so what? They are elements of life; sometimes you grab a quick bite on the go and sometimes you sit down to a multi-hour meal, yet both are "eating". Likewise with reading.
Every time something like this comes up, I'm reminded of something Alan Kay mentioned, which I can't find but I'll try and remember: "I realized at an early age that to prevent needing to read a book more than once, I should read in a way so I remember what I've read".
I'm very curious what method he came up with to do this. Being a genius probably helps.
Understanding the structure of the book (or realising that it lacks one) helps tremendously.
See Mortimer Adler's How to Read a Book for an excellent guide. Most of the techniques it describes are ones I've long used -- it's been an excercise largely in validation, though with a few additional tricks and bits.
Today I had yet another user complain that our program didn't do the right thing, when in fact it was doing exactly what the user had told it to.
The issue seems to be that while this dialog is crystal clear when you read it slowly and understand all the words, most users appear to read what they think it says, and select the dialog option according to that.
It's not a wall of text or anything, it's a medium length sentence on the form "Select Yes to [...], press No if you want [...]". I ran it past the support guys and they thought it was clear as well. But apparently it's very easy to get wrong.
In all cases the users go "oooohhh, that's what it's saying" when they get told to read it carefully, and after that they select the correct option and make the program do what they want.
I spent a fair amount of time figuring out the most clear and correct way to present the choices, but apparently I failed hard... oh well, that dialog is getting rewritten tomorrow!
This is one of the parts of Apple's Human Interface Guidelines that I appreciate the most when I use other operating systems, in particular Windows.
> Give alert buttons succinct, logical titles. The best button titles consist of one or two words that describe the result of clicking the button. [...] To the extent possible, use verbs and verb phrases that relate directly to the alert title and message—for example, View All, Reply, or Ignore. Use OK for simple acceptance. Avoid using Yes and No.
Suppose opening a document gives me an alert that says, "This document contains macros. Macros may contain viruses that could be harmful to your computer. Do you want to disable macros before opening the file?"
With simple Yes/No buttons, I might hastily jump ahead after reading the first sentence and think that affirming the dialog means, "Yes, I know it contains macros."
Or I might hastily jump ahead after reading the second sentence and click, "No, I'm scared, don't let this malware infect me."
Or I might mistake it for another pop up that happens all the time and also has Yes/No buttons, and not realize until it's too late that I've accidentally enabled macros.
Yes, users should read dialogs, but good UI design can help.
That web page only loads the first paragraph for me but there is a huge advantage to being able to read very fast with comprehension for certain material - the gauntlet of standardized tests American kids go through is much easier for both verbal and math skills tests (essentially most of them - because they have to use some words for most problems) and a lot of tests going through university level because one has time to go through an entire test once, answer all the questions, and go back and double and triple check your answers and evaluate multiple choice answers several times. At least when I took those tests a generation ago, the time allotment is overly generous if you can read fast. I read slow when reading for pleasure or learning something.
For non fiction, I do best with a quick read to get the overall picture of a book and its organization and argument, then think about whether there are any interesting questions to ask of the book, and zoom into those portions to read more carefully.
I vary my reading speed based on the material I'm reading: it's important to understand that not everything you read is worth 100% of your attention, and it's not a big deal if you can't recall every detail of the last article that ended up on Hacker News. As such, I "skim" most of the things I read–what's important to me is 1. knowing when to slow down (the thing I'm reading is interesting/complex/the details matter) and 2. keeping enough "metadata" to be able to find the actual content later if I need it.
I have always felt read slow helps you make connections intentionally and helps in better retention. Slow reading is an intentional choice. But it is a choice between when to do or not. With so much information around today through various mediums, speed reading/skimming helps to go through information quickly to get an understanding if you have to proceed further or not. I guess we switch between both of these modes time to time based on how important the information we are taking in.
It would be better to teach non-fiction writers about concise writing so we don't have to read 300 pages when they could deliver the same info in 100 pages or less.
If I want to truly understand something and retain information, I slow down my reading to a crawl and start taking notes on index cards.
I then later transfer those index cards into notes on my computer into equivalent "cards", which let me edit or
rework the information on the fly.
Sometime, I transfer some of the information into Anki SRS, requiring yet another rework into flash cards, and permanently anchoring the information into my brain.
I speed read ‘naturally’ particularly I’ve been told that I ‘chunk’ & ‘visual read’. I have to take the reading experts word for it as to me it’s just reading.
All told I’d say it’s neither positive or negative. I’ve had to teach myself techniques to slow down especially on technical material but I can get through business style reading extremely fast. Different texts and contexts require different techniques.
i went to school with many kids in what were called "k-level" courses (high school courses in early grades before courses with dual credit were offered)
I often noticed how they could read MUCH faster than i could, and appeared to be actually retaining the information.
Me personally, if i read too fast im literally just "seeing" the words on the paper pass my eyes. I could read a sentence very fast, out loud, and not understand it.
I've always been a slow reader. My sister took speed reading "lessons"(?) when we were younger, apparently she had a problem with reading so my parents felt the need to enroll her in some type of weekend (speed?) reading program that was held at a hotel conference center in a trendy area of our city... it was probably snake oil because i only recall her going once or twice then never returning (perhaps the program was only a day or two long? even worse? how do you really learn anything?)
And I had her share the speed reading techniques with me in an attempt to learn to read faster myself but never could do so.
I dont think that speed reading is all that its cracked up to be.
For whatever reason, I do auditory reading at a much faster pace than is usually listed in articles like this (over 500WPM for typical paperback fiction; technical content is limited by my thinking, not how fast I can read the words. The same is true for more poetic narratives). Anyone know of any studies on that?
Speed reading, or not subvocalizing, is analogous to touch typing, or not looking at the keyboard. Both are needed for peak WPM metrics, but particular WPM isn't that relevant. Relevant metric is "faster". Even for things that 'need time', it'll take less time with those skills.
Google scholar search term. Find highly cited paper with title that resonates. Read abstract. If interesting, load, look at pictures and captions. Discussion. Scroll between intro and conclusion. Lit review & results. At somepoint, check cites or citations. Ad infinitum.
Read the first sentence of a paragraph, and the last. You'd be surprised how much crap goes in the middle. Not so great for important stuff, but if you need to zip through something quick it's a good trick.
Using less-legible fonts leads to slower reading, but better recall. [1]. There's clearly a case for slow reading if comprehension and/or recall are primary goals.
Generally speaking, there's a continuum of activities from glancing to skimming to reading to 'close reading' (a term of art in education). It's not surprising that for most people, there is a tradeoff between speed and comprehension/recall.
EDIT: are the downvotes for the first paragraph or the second? Comments would be more helpful!
I'm pretty sure her conclusions are baloney. She admits the main speedreading takeaway: visual understanding is much faster than subvocalized reading.
As for the other statements; of course you can't read complex or deep text by glancing at it and taking it in in one line or paragraph. Imagine trying to learn topology or something that way; you will fail. You have to slow down to the point you're working problems on the side in a notebook. Same thing for learning a new language; looking at the grammar table won't help: I have to internalize it by repetition. Deeply aesthetic poetry; you have to vocalize it, or it doesn't even begin to make sense. Similarly, complex fiction you have to slow down to figure out what is going on, sometimes rereading passages or whole chapters. Sometimes this also needs to be vocalized (Modernist types like Joyce & Pound).
But for stuffing clearly written briefing type texts, speed reading is the absolute shizznizzlenuts. That's why Kennedy found it useful; that's pretty much what the man read all day at work. Low end college coursework also fit into this category of reading material. Lots of business stuff also does. Her neuroscience balognia about saccades may be true to some extent, but you can skip over or infer most simple sentences in the exact same way that Gmail and Outlook completes your sentences via semi-markov models.
Again: it works for simple texts. It also probably works better if you're smarter and a better reader in general, and so taking a bunch of average people and drawing conclusions from their results is pretty useless.
I imagine it would also be helpful to quickly determine if something is worth taking more time to read carefully. Or maybe to get a quick overview of the contents of something before you really dig into it.
I'm a slow reader myself. Reading fiction I'm slow. Reading non-fiction I'm very very very slow. I can type faster than I can read. I can read blog posts and news articles fairly quickly. I found in college that against other students using fashionable speed reading techniques I completely beat them academically. The speed reading didn't pick up on subtle ideas and wasn't able to capture complex ones.
I have a relative who is a natural speed reader and who has perfect recall. I realize this is a controversial claim as perfect recall (sometimes called photographic memory) is a myth. It's not a myth more likely extremely rare. I could give her a book around 300 pages she had never seen before. She would read it in about 15 minutes. I then could ask questions about the book and she would answer by exactly quoting sections and citing the page number. So... was this helpful? Well she never went to college or did anything with her life. It was just a weird thing she could do naturally which she didn't exploit except to read and remember precisely absolutely vast numbers of books.
I’m a very fast reader of non-fiction (I have several thousand technical books). However, I don’t really read every book word for word. After reading a couple of books on algorithms for example, it’s possible to skim through the next one only looking for new subjects, better pictures, or new approaches. I also jump around and read the parts I’m interested in. The result is I have some recollection of what’s in most of my more recent books, and if I need to look something up I can often remember where I saw it in the book—like roughly how far into the text it is and where on the page it was.