Speed Reading
- Thread starter conjamuk
- Start date
Basically there's a tradeoff between how much of something you want to remember and how fast you want to read.
What he said. Which do you prefer? Getting the basic jist of things, or getting all the details?
Source: Ten Minutes to Speed Reading With No Bull | potentialeightEveryone has seen commercials or advertisements for speed reading courses, and most people reading this will probably have the feeling that speed reading is a crock. I once took a quick one-afternoon course about reading mechanics and reading faster, and I’ve been in a position to share a lot of what I learned with other people from time to time. Every single time that I have shared these ideas with someone, they have proven to be very effective, so I have decided to share them here. This will make my life easier since I’ll be able to just copy and paste this URL whenever the topic of speed reading comes up.
The concept at work here is that we want to be able to make small adjustments to how we read to increase our efficiency. This is the Pareto principle at work in a major way. If you would like to measure your current reading speed by reading from a book for two or three minutes and estimating how many words you are reading per minute, then now is the time. With that out of the way, we have the idea that I’m going to share today:
Our eyes do not read in a continuous stream. Instead, our eyes jump across a line of words at certain intervals.
For this demonstration, I have copy and pasted some information from Wikipedia into a Notepad++ window. The blue lines mark where your eyes might “hit” the lines of words as they skip across while you read. The fastest way to increase your reading without hurting your comprehension is to decrease the number of places where your eyes pause on what you are reading.
When looking at the example text above, the main thing that we want to notice here is that the first blue line is very close to the left-hand edge of the text. If we were to move this line a bit to the right, we would still pick up all of the words without a problem. However, our reading speed would instantly increase. Check out what I mean here:
Since we’re stopping fewer times on each line, we will read faster if we do not start reading a line at the far left. This is a simple technique that improves the efficiency of our reading, and it becomes more natural after consciously practicing for about ten minutes.
Some people might not think that this small change makes much of a difference. However, if you time your reading with and without this technique, you’ll typically see speed increases in the 15 percent range without changing anything else about your reading.
Stop sub-vocalizing words as you read them and your speed, comprehension, and retention will increase.
Do it and find out.
For some it does, for others it does not. However based on what appears your current disposition towards the subject, you may find yourself in the later. There is a learning curve that the ego will attempt to disrupt because the reading techniques disrupt an already acquired and presumably dominated skill. Additionally, speed reading does not mean missing the details. Different techniques provide different results.
For some it does, for others it does not. However based on what appears your current disposition towards the subject, you may find yourself in the later. There is a learning curve that the ego will attempt to disrupt because the reading techniques disrupt an already acquired and presumably dominated skill. Additionally, speed reading does not mean missing the details. Different techniques provide different results.
My opinion and approach to this is to accept that a lot of material in nonfiction books (I don't read fiction) is fluff/filler. I read in iBooks, and what I do is:
1) Scan each page quickly, with my speed increasing if I feel like I'm going through filler. I use the highlight tool to highlight any nuggets of wisdom, important pieces, things to remember, etc. This saves the highlighted passages and their location in the reading list, so once you've made a pass through the book you can revisit just the parts you highlighted.
2) Generally I will make a second pass through the book, but on the 2nd pass I only scan the parts that aren't yet highlighted. This is just a "cleanup" pass to ensure I captured everything that piqued my interest.
3) Finally I go through and summarize the highlighted parts into my own set of notes which are distilled down to the bare minimum I need to completely understand the message or wisdom being conveyed.
I can blow through a 500 page book in iBooks in under two hours with this method and it has served me well. I think I got all there was to get from "Jab, Jab, Jab, Right Hook" in about 20 minutes.
1) Scan each page quickly, with my speed increasing if I feel like I'm going through filler. I use the highlight tool to highlight any nuggets of wisdom, important pieces, things to remember, etc. This saves the highlighted passages and their location in the reading list, so once you've made a pass through the book you can revisit just the parts you highlighted.
2) Generally I will make a second pass through the book, but on the 2nd pass I only scan the parts that aren't yet highlighted. This is just a "cleanup" pass to ensure I captured everything that piqued my interest.
3) Finally I go through and summarize the highlighted parts into my own set of notes which are distilled down to the bare minimum I need to completely understand the message or wisdom being conveyed.
I can blow through a 500 page book in iBooks in under two hours with this method and it has served me well. I think I got all there was to get from "Jab, Jab, Jab, Right Hook" in about 20 minutes.
I was a senior in HS and went to he library. I was sitting next to some people who were in their 40s maybe, nerd types. I was a redneck with blue jeans and workboots but I sat down and began to flip pages like I was speed reading, pausing to sit back and say like AHHH, or put my finger on my chin, jot down some notes. I spent like 15 minutes bullshitting my way through this 300 page book. Lulz, I finished, put the book in my book bag and stood up and walked out. Apparently they were watching me for who knows how long. I really was only waiting for 330 for a ride.