Has anyone Successfully learned how to read faster i.e. speedread?

ebtek

ebtek

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Oct 21, 2008
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there are various books and discussions on this. can anyone recommend a good book on acquiring this skill?

there arent enough hours in the day to read everything i want to read. starting with learning how to read faster would make each subsequent learning venture much faster and efficient (yes i am a wizard)
 


I've known someone who can do it and he said comprehension suffers pretty badly to the point where he will speed read something twice just to fully get it. But it's still faster than one slow time through.

I speed read fiction. Some stuff you just can't speed read though, like philosophical and technical writings.
 
I went through a 1-day course that a place I was working for offered on this, and what they taught actually worked pretty well. The whole skimming a page in like 2 seconds is likely horse shit though imo, but we were table to increase our reading speed by 3-4x and maintain the same level of comprehension with what I learned at that course because they tested us on it and all this shit. The majority of it had to do with retraining your eyes to hit certain points in the text. Hold on, I'll mspaint a diagram.

abK8G.png


Your eyes don't smoothly slide from left to right as you read. Instead, they hop from point to point, and you take in a chunk of what you're reading at the time. The red dots in the diagram are like the "before," and the blue dots are the "after." One of the first things we learned is not to move our eyes completely to the left side of the page when we start a new line, and this by itself increases reading speed a considerable amount. After that, we worked on spacing out our "dots" more.
 
I bought this back in 1985.

Speed Reading Made Easy

by Arlyne F.Rial

[ame="http://www.amazon.com/Speed-Reading-Made-Easy-Arlyne/dp/0385198353"]Amazon.com: Speed Reading Made Easy (9780385198356): Arlyne F. Rial: Books[/ame]

Back in 1985 I was in Direct Response Marketing and had to read through a TON stuff. So I saw this book, bought it, and started reading it. ( I still have it sitting here in front of me.)

I went from about 350 words a minute to around 650. But like was said above, at the 650 speed my retention was only good for about a week. If I wanted to remember something long term I had to go back to my old way of reading. Heck I still remember 80% of my High School stuff from 30 years ago with my slower reading method.

They say you should actually have BETTER retention with Speed Reading but the few people "I" know who've studied it and used it had the same experience as me.

Now, I did NOT go through the entire book as I should have and maybe that's why my retention is lacking with the Speed Reading. They have chapters on memory improvement in the book but the gains I attained without putting the time in for the memory stuff were good enough for me to Plow Through Sales Copy and put weekly mailing campaigns together.

I'd say give it a shot. Maybe try one of the NEWER Speed Reading Computer Programs like EyeQ, Reading Genius, or SpeedreaderX.
 
I grabbed a torrent of eyeQ after seeing the infomercial on TV one night a few years ago and it seemed to help my reading speed at the time.

[ame=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FF_9knFS7VA]eyeQ Infomercial - 9 min - YouTube[/ame]
 
ebtek said:
there arent enough hours in the day to read everything i want to read.
Click to expand...
Your problem isn't reading speed, it's being able to discriminate between different kinds of information.

Until you develop that discipline, speed reading will only be able to help you so much.

I read naturally fast, but my biggest gains come from developing instincts about what needs to be read, when.
 
I learned a "diagonal" speed-ish reading trick a while back. It works well for something you don't need each and every detail on. I couldn't possibly begin to explain how to do it, though. It's just one of those things I unconsciously do now.
 
I'm pretty sure EyeQ improved my eyesight or at least my peripheral vision. Playing video games got a lot easier. The hardest part about reading faster is keeping a good level of comprehension for what you are reading and making sure you understand all of it.

As far as actual eye strengthening techniques and reading faster I enjoyed EyeQ when I used it few years ago, but I haven't tried out any of the other products out there. The biggest technique would probably be to stop subvocalizing when you are reading. Basically, you stop talking to yourself or hearing yourself reading while you are reading.
 
I usually assume the quick methods and tricks are B.S. Pretty sure speed reading just takes practice, you try to read a little faster than you normally would, and keep practicing until your comprehension has adapted. Then you repeat the process a little faster.

Think of it like weight training. You're not going to immediately bench press 300lbs, and no particular method is going to get you there faster (aside from smoking PCP). You improve in small increments, but they add up.
 
I did EyeQ a decade ago and I got up to 5x faster at the time... It takes practice to keep those kinds of gains and a few years later when I went through a long patch of no practice I lost most of it.

Today I read about twice as fast as I did before I bought EyeQ. I'm too lazy to do it again though, and like Guerilla says, it's more important to put the right stuff in front of your eyes than it is to move your eyes faster.
 
I bought one of the best selling speed reading books of Amazon and learned some great tips, but the biggest issue was the time commitment. You have to constantly do drills and practice if you want to read faster and comprehend what you read. Got boring really quick.
 
roclafamilia said:
How do you learn to stop subvocalizing...that's what I always have trouble with.
Click to expand...

You may have just the comprehension glitch with the speed reading.


I know that it's a scientific fact that if you take in information both Visually and and Audibly you will understand the information better and remember it for a longer period of time.


So hearing your "inner" voice while you read may be what hleps to retain the information longer and eliminating this part of reading may be why I and other have found shorter retension times with speed reading since the inner voice is suppose to be silenced.


I've watched and read the proclimations of Speed Reading saying that comprehension went up, but I've never seen even one of talk about HOW LONG the information is retained or the percentage of the retension.


They talk of testing people for comprehension after speed reading, but I'm asuming that it's within about an hour of when the reading was finished.


I highly doubt that they tested them 6 months to a year after the material had been read.


As stated in my above post, at my SLOW 350 WPM using my inner voice I remember around 80% of what I read for YEARS after I read it. But when I speed read, I'd say that I remember maybe 40% of what I've read after only a week has gone by.



P.S. If you want to see what it's like to read WITHOUT subvocalization just SKIM over the words as fast as your eyes can move while still keeping the words IN FOCUS. You'll find/feel that your eyes will slow down when you try to automatically subvocalize.



You wind up looking at words the way you view PICTURES. When you look an IMAGE with no letters you don't subvocalize. This is another reason that some Speed Reading techniques use image viewing to help train you to read faster.



Some also teach pattern recognition. Kinda like this:


"Aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn't mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoetnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer be at the rghit pclae. The rset can be a toatl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe"

MRC CBU, Cambridge » Matt Davis
 
potentialeight said:
I went through a 1-day course that a place I was working for offered on this, and what they taught actually worked pretty well. The whole skimming a page in like 2 seconds is likely horse shit though imo, but we were table to increase our reading speed by 3-4x and maintain the same level of comprehension with what I learned at that course because they tested us on it and all this shit. The majority of it had to do with retraining your eyes to hit certain points in the text. Hold on, I'll mspaint a diagram.

abK8G.png


Your eyes don't smoothly slide from left to right as you read. Instead, they hop from point to point, and you take in a chunk of what you're reading at the time. The red dots in the diagram are like the "before," and the blue dots are the "after." One of the first things we learned is not to move our eyes completely to the left side of the page when we start a new line, and this by itself increases reading speed a considerable amount. After that, we worked on spacing out our "dots" more.
Click to expand...

It worked.

Learning to speed read in 20 seconds visiting a random thread. Only on WF.
 
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