Is there any truth to speed reading

[Trakar]

...PS. I hate pod casts, spoken word is approximately 100 words per minute, and most people can easily read 300 words per minute. Podcasts seem like a waste of time to me.

of course, with modern tech, the spoken voice can be greatly speeded up, to at least 4x the normal rate and still understood. I discovered about forty years ago that I could listen to greatly speeded up lecture recordings (back when recordings of such were either reel-to-reel or vinyl) while going over notes and have extremely high retention rates for not just facts, but nuance.
admittedly it takes a few minutes to adjust to listening at faster rates but the brain seems quite capable of processing data at much higher rates than most traditional input applications. I've always had an extremely fast read rate in traditional sentence by sentence reading, just a combination of high eye track rate, good short-term memory and large functional vocabulary. Most "speed reading," however, is not really "reading," it is scanning blocks of text for important noun/verb data and then reconstructing the pairs into a general understanding of the information in the scanned material. At least this is how it works for me. Scanning and reading are two different things and useful for different purposes, it seems the faster you can read the faster you can scan, there does seem to be some correlation between the two, but I wouldn't using scanning for things I need to read.

 

[Matthew Best]

Is there any truth to speed reading?

About a quarter to three.

 

[Miss_Kitt]

In my experience, there are already a lot of people who don't read carefully; who grab out a few words or phrases and then "fill in the gaps" with what they expect the rest to be. This leads to long, convoluted online arguments, among other things. It sounds as though the "speed reading" techniques encourage this approach. So it will only improve comprehension of certain kinds of writing, like textbooks.

A lot of the value of writing lies in the small sidebars, the nuances and unexpected discoveries that lie outside the main thrust of the text. (IMHO) And certainly for fiction reading the whole idea of skimming out the 'major points' misses the central focus of the writer.

 

[marplots]

I'm a fairly fast reader, but by no means a speed reader. That's only because I not only taste the text, but digest it as well. A very large part of reading for me is connecting what I've read to what's already in my head. There's a creative element in play.

 

[DaveGalt]

A 'line' of text is NOT a thought-unit.

But it never felt like a natural way to read, required considerable effort, and was quite tiring. When the novelty wore off, and I stopped the exercises, my reading speed gradually slowed to a more comfortable level. I do still retain some of the line-at-a-time comprehension, which is handy for skimming text, but my normal reading speed is now far more leisurely than it once was.

dlorde, Exactly my point. These old tachistoscopes only showed "lines of text", but only MEANINGFUL groups of words can be really comprehended at a glance. This is the big difference between reading 'thought-units' and just trying to read sets of every 3 or 4 words (which is what all those old machines, and even the other 'speed reading' websites and programs today do).

The following explanation from "Reading Thought-Units" (on Amazon) shows a good example of this:

Understanding groups of words depends a lot on which words are grouped together, because some groups definitely make more sense than others. For example, look at the following sentence from 'Animal Farm', and some of the ways it can be divided into word groups:

Mr. Jones of the Manor Farm had locked the hen houses for the night.

If we simply divide this sentence after every 4th word, we get this:

Mr. Jones of the —— Manor Farm had locked —— the hen houses for —— the night.

Dividing after every 5th word would result in:

Mr. Jones of the Manor —— Farm had locked the hen —— houses for the night.

You can see that it isn't easy to quickly understand arbitrary word groups such as: "the hen houses for", or "Farm had locked the hen".

Now look how much easier it is to read, when divided into thought-units:

Mr. Jones —— of the Manor Farm —— had locked the hen houses —— for the night.​

So, obviously it would have tiring and unnatural for you to read words that were just broken up into some randomly chosen length, because they DIDN'T MAKE SENSE on their own. Reading whole thoughts is really much easier than reading either random word groups, or word-by-word, because you are seeing whole IDEAS at a time.