I don't get why anybody would want to speed read a novel. (Outside of a High School literature class where you're being forced to read Ethan Frome and you just want to get back to playing Minecraft, of course).
When I'm reading Hemingway, I'll go back and read individual paragraphs three times to squeeze the last drop of juice out of them. There are only so many Hemingway paragraphs in existence, so wasting one feels like cramming an entire bar of imported Spanish 70% Artisan Chocolate in your mouth and washing it down with soda. Why would you do that???
Take Sordo on the Hill from For Whom the Bell Tolls. It's just a few pages about these guys shooting at each other, but there's so much crammed in there. You learn an awful lot about that guy, his feelings about this war, why he's fighting it, how he ended up on this stupid hill, and why he's going to go ahead and die there rather than any of his other options. He's a real person with complicated motivations and after a few pages you come away knowing pretty much everything you need to know about him and why he was acting the way he was earlier in the book.
Of course you could skim that scene in a minute flat and get the Hollywood Blockbuster version with the crazy local militia yelling stereotypical catch phrases and dying in a blaze of glory.
But then can you really say you read that book? Wouldn't you still want to go back and read it for real some time?
I speed read pulp novels, and have for decades. From Doc Savage to Honor Harrington's recent outings, sometimes you just want the the combination of that literary equivalent of zoning out in front of the TV, combined with finding out what happens next.
You're right that speed reading very well done stuff is a waste of time, but for the written equivalent of fast food, it seems to work fine. And if something does turn out to be better than expected, I can always slow down or go back and reread at my normal speed.
What is the point of speed reading a novel? If you can't be bothered to read what the author wrote, word for word (or nearly so) then you might as well go online and read a summary of the novel - job done. When an author writes a book, they consider every word they put in. Every word has meaning and a reason for being there. I am sure you could take almost any novel ever written and reduce it down to a 10th of it's original size and not lose any of its plot, but it would not be a good book to read.
Of course, it is your time and you can read or not read a book any way that pleases you, I just do not see the point in skimming it.
When I was a kid, I used to speed read each Harry Potter book when it came out, just to find out the plot so nobody could spoil it for me, and then I'd read it again later for enjoyment
Every Neal Stephenson book I've read, I've gone through at break-neck pace wanting to know what happens, and later reread substantially more slowly to get make sure I follow as many of the ideas as possible.
> I don't get why anybody would want to speed read a novel.
The bit about 'War and Peace' was a joke. Woody Allen didn't really speed read it :)
But even if it wasn't, War and Peace is a great example of a classic most people would be happy to speed read. It's not a relaxing novel like Harry Potter but it's perhaps arguably an important novel to read.
In today's society classic novels like that are often more about absorbing the knowledge rather than enjoying the story, which is people want to speed read... Fast knowledge absorption.
You obviously like Hemingway, you must realise for most people that's odd. Just like you think it's odd a small part of the population might speed read certain novels. It's great that not everyone is the same.
I would never want to "speed read" a novel, or anything else I was reading for enjoyment or enrichment. There are times, however, when I found "speed reading" for rapid content absorption not only desirable, but necessary. When I was in graduate school I would often be assigned voluminous amounts of text on a weekly basis, in several classes. Much of this assigned reading was not particularly interesting or enlightening, yet it composed of hundreds of pages per week in each class. It certainly isn't something you want do to all the time, but speed reading does have its place.
I have found that the density of content certainly adds to or detracts from the ability to read at a rapid pace.
When I sit down with a Raymond Carver short story, the shorter sentences and clear descriptions allow me to absorb it more quickly and move on.
I tried to read at the same pace with authors like Thomas Pynchon or David Foster Wallace (and Hemingway) and found myself re-reading the same paragraph four times.
For me, it isn't nessecarilly that I want to speed read a novel, it is just that I have trained my brain in other ways to absorb the most crucial aspects of a text/problem quickly and jump ahead (at my own detriment). Thanks college!
I don't get it, either. I read at a speed that matches what I'm trying to get out of it. I skim work-related documents and zone in on relevant areas. In college, I would speed read humanities textbooks.
But novels? Like you, I read those slowly and savor them like a good bourbon or wine. I look up words I don't know and commit them to memory. I stop and think about the writing, or a turn of phrase in some dialogue, or the world or characters. I consume novels. This is very different to how many people I know read.
But then I only read very good books. Life is too short to read a bad book.
So, for me, I read quickly and I read through books aggressively and without, as you say, savoring the experience: if it is a book with a strong character or event-based drive, I want to get at what happens to change them, or the events that drive the story, as fast as I can! But here's the thing--as you say, I do go back and read it. I'll read the same book three times, sometimes, and get more out of it each time. Once I know what the shape of the story is, I can more easily drill into it to appreciate the nuance. It's still faster than trying to read slowly to soak it all in the first time, and I think (can't prove, obviously) I get more out of it through the repetition than if I were to try to slow down and spend longer to do it only once.
If you like the recount of the spanish war in "For whom the bell tolls", read "Homage to catalonia" by George Orwell. It's one of the best books I ever read.
It's really quite simple: some novels have writing you want to savor, and you read them slowly, and some novels you just want to extract the plot out of, from fairly mediocre writing.
For example, I really wasn't a huge fan of GRR Martin's writing or story, but I wanted to be on top of the plot of SoIaF, so I blazed through the thing. I got a few details wrong, such as someone being a cousin instead of an uncle maybe, but I was ready to discussed tons of specific aspects of the writing as well (like how he calls Brienne ugly ~every. single. time.~ she comes up).
I tried speed reading on a book I've read multiple tea that I enjoy. It doesn't last long - the world falls away and I read at the pace that felt natural as I enjoyed the book once again.
I agree that it's a bit daft speed reading good works but, if you enjoy reading fiction, you'll find it difficult - you just want to enjoy it.
It only makes sense to speed read texts that don't have a lot of meaning in them. Which, of you consider avreage quality of technical books, articles and work stuff like email and memos, is the majority of texts you encounter.
Because people think more is better. I shortsighted and materialistic view of the world, that which has lead to much of our sufferings in this day and age.
> Except if we're talking about Grisham/Crichton/Dan Brown etc "novels".
Whilst these authors may not be literary greats (though not sure why you lump Crichton in with Brown), isn't it important that people are reading something, even if it is The Davinci Code or The Firm? Even if these are throwaway novels, readers are improving their comprehension, spelling and vocabulary skills (especially if these books are in english and english is not your first language). That's surely better than lazing in front the the telly watching reality TV shows.
> Doubling the speed, in our experience, leaves individual words perfectly identifiable — but makes it just about impossible to follow the meaning.
Wow, sorry but this is very misinformed. A lot of people me included can listen to audio at 2x. I constantly listen to podcasts (so not a slow narration to begin with) at 2x in English which is not even my native language and I understand everything and enjoy it very much.
Blind users listen at 4x without loss of understanding.
Seconded. After I saw and heard how blind people use screen readers (with experience), I started accelerating audio. You can train your brain to become better at understanding — I started at 1.25x and slowly worked my way up. I am now at 1.75x - 2x (plus Overcast's silence removal) and I have no problems, even though English isn't my native language.
Two requirements: headphones (you need much more processing power to deal with crappy speakers and poor audio in general) and lack of significant distractions (you can't afford to think about something else). Also, some apps have crappy audio acceleration algorithms. Overcast does it so well that I use it also for listening to audiobooks.
I also think the article is misinformed. You can speed read by regularly training your brain. Just don't expect miracles and don't believe the "experts" who try to sell you miracles.
It depends on the density of the information doesn't it? I would certainly agree that many, if not, most podcasts could be listened to at double speed or higher and still be understood. However if the podcast is about a detailed analysis of how string theory explains quantum gravity effects, then I highly doubt one could listen to it at double speed and retain much understanding.
The inverse holds that the density is sometimes not high enough. I had trouble following videos on the mill cpu at normal speed, but at 1.25/1.5 my mind was forced to pay more attention
I'm a physics student who has listened to tons of physics course videos at 2x or sometimes 2.5x. I pause when an equation is drawn on the board, but the speech is fine.
This part made me question the entire article. Just about any audiobook or podcast under 2x is too slow for me and most videos (including tv shows and movies) I watch at 1.5x comfortably. I'm also much faster at reading today than I was a few years ago. There is definitely a way to get much faster (while still being realistic).
Yeah. For a long time I thought I hated nearly all video-based entertainment. Then Youtube got that speedup feature. Now that I can watch things at 1.7x, it's much more interesting.
One of the biggest limits is the processing I think. Good algorithms try not to omit anything, but those also begin to blur vowels in to consonants. Fine-tuning of the window size helps (not sure if this was on the FFT or resynthesis part).
Close to the speed limit for understanding two things are difficult:
- personal names (especially of companies) and aberrations.
- a change of the speaker to someone who has a slightly higher speed or worse audio quality
Unavoidable and super annoying:
how back in the "real world" everything appears to be in slow-motion. It takes ages for someone to just finish a single word...
I second this. English is my second language and if I listen to an audiobook or watch an informational video in normal speed, I might as well not do it at all... because my brain starts thinking of something else if it is too slow (i.e. normal speed) and I lose track of it.
Related: There's a plugin for chrome that lets you speed up all html5 videos. I usually watch youtube at at least 1.5x. The plugin is better than the youtube settings because it lets you set the speed on small increments.
Perhaps this depends on the speed of your brain? You know, different people score differently on IQ tests. For example, some score 140 while others score 70. I read (in the book IQ and the Wealth of Nations by Richard Lynn and Tatu Vanhanen, I think) that what an IQ test basically does, is measuring the speed of your brain.
So I guess intelligent people will be able to understand everything on 2x while dumb ones may not.
I was on a debate team in college, and understanding people talking at 200 to 300 wpm is a critical skill. Wired ran an interesting article on this phenomenon a few years back: http://www.wired.com/2012/01/ff_debateteam/
I don't have research about 2x audio to cite but I think there are datapoints that the authors didn't consider when they wrote "Doubling the speed [...] makes it just about impossible to follow the meaning."
Consider that most of us can read text at a normal unhurried speed of 200wpm to 300wpm. We also hear this "inner voice" as we read the written words. This subvocalization is therefore "sounding out" the words at ~300wpm in our head.
However, many people speak out loud at only ~100wpm. For many of us, accelerating speech from 1x to 3x is simply making the speaker sound out the words at 300wpm. Since that's the same as our subvocalization wpm, the meaning is not impossible to follow. Most humans can't move their mouths fast enough to talk at 300wpm -- but with digital technology -- they don't have to.
Spoken recordings at 100wpm is mind-numbingly slow and it would just make my mind wander.
I think the authors should have surveyed a hundred youtube users that always take advantage of the 2x speed option. They would have been surprised to learn that people can follow the meaning of the words at 200wpm very easily.
Completely agree, you just have to work your way up. Made a custom chrome extension and often watch videos at 4x speed (depending on the speech rate of the actual narrator).
The linked article abstract from Psychological Science says:
> The way to maintain high comprehension and get through text faster is to practice reading and to become a more skilled language user (e.g., through increased vocabulary). This is because language skill is at the heart of reading speed.
So, in short, moving your eyes over the page faster only helps if your speed of language interpretation can keep up (the nytimes article has a slightly paraphrased version).
I wasn't really impressed by the article. It seemed to add very little to the abstract, just a couple of concrete examples of speed reading techniques (and one accompanying study).
Defining speed reading as 'eye movement speedups' and explicitly excluding 'language comprehension speedups' is fine, but it makes me want an article about what happens when you combine both, which I know for a fact can result in reading speedups by a whole number multiple.
I agree. I feel that for me reading in my native language or English goes as fast as I can see sentence. So I assume my language interpretation for those languages is high and maybe I could speed up by doing fancy things with eye movement.
But I am learning Dutch right now and I have to spend a lot more time to get correct meaning of sentence. So no eye movement technique would help me.
this article seems to confuse speed reading with skimming.
i took a full semester class back in high school where all we did was train speed reading. i was able to get to 800 wpm with 90% comprehension on tests. that was from a baseline start of ~150 wpm with 80% comprehension. (the tests afterwards weren't easy "what was the name of bob's dog?" questions)
i've, of course, lost it all in the past 25 years of no practice, but i remember the keys being swallowing entire lines instead of words, achieving "flow", and dropping the subvocalization of what you're reading. (when you pronounce words in your head)
Also, the part about not listening to stuff at double speed. As if all recordings (and thus people speaking) were using the same speed. Sure, there are people who talk too fast anyway, but I've had an online course where I had to move to 1.5x speed to even be able to follow along and not drift off constantly...
>I had to move to 1.5x speed to even be able to follow along and not drift off constantly...
I'm an avid audio-book listener, and I use both 1.5-2.0x and 0.8-0.9x, depending on my mood. The slower speeds definitely allow you to "think" more about the content, rather than concentrating solely on the narrative.
Ditto. I also got a pair of head phones that have a mic/play/pause button on the Y of the cable. This is GREAT for quick pauses without having to reach for my phone.
(I use MEElectronics M6 PRO IEMs because of replaceable cable.)
The reason people want to read quickly is because writers often digress. Maybe the focus should be on writing text that can be absorbed easily and quickly and finding and promoting such text.
Yes! I often scan low-density writing, and love finding technical blogs and tutorials that convey information with clarity and concision. We value writing with strong personality and style, and that's not always aligned with high density.
I once took a speed reading course and my conclusion was, just as the article, that it is glorified skimming.
But some text are written to be skimmed (large parts of many college textbooks for example - the author is paid by the word, so there's often a lot of filler. Most people only need to get squinted with most journal article they meet)
Is it just skimming? When I saw the headline of the article I decided that, rather than skimming it, I'd try just reading all the words really fast. I haven't taken a class or anything, so maybe my technique could use work, but I understood it just fine at a little over 1300 words per minute. The writing wasn't very dense, and even then I didn't have time to think critically about what it was saying until after reading it, but I wasn't just skimming.
What slows things down for me (and for most people) is subvocalization.[1]
It should be possible to get in the zone and not subvocalize, but I can only do it for very brief periods. And it's something that I can only do for "light reading" rather than when trying to understand highly technical information.
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When I'm reading Hemingway, I'll go back and read individual paragraphs three times to squeeze the last drop of juice out of them. There are only so many Hemingway paragraphs in existence, so wasting one feels like cramming an entire bar of imported Spanish 70% Artisan Chocolate in your mouth and washing it down with soda. Why would you do that???
Take Sordo on the Hill from For Whom the Bell Tolls. It's just a few pages about these guys shooting at each other, but there's so much crammed in there. You learn an awful lot about that guy, his feelings about this war, why he's fighting it, how he ended up on this stupid hill, and why he's going to go ahead and die there rather than any of his other options. He's a real person with complicated motivations and after a few pages you come away knowing pretty much everything you need to know about him and why he was acting the way he was earlier in the book.
Of course you could skim that scene in a minute flat and get the Hollywood Blockbuster version with the crazy local militia yelling stereotypical catch phrases and dying in a blaze of glory.
But then can you really say you read that book? Wouldn't you still want to go back and read it for real some time?
You're right that speed reading very well done stuff is a waste of time, but for the written equivalent of fast food, it seems to work fine. And if something does turn out to be better than expected, I can always slow down or go back and reread at my normal speed.
Of course, it is your time and you can read or not read a book any way that pleases you, I just do not see the point in skimming it.
Every Neal Stephenson book I've read, I've gone through at break-neck pace wanting to know what happens, and later reread substantially more slowly to get make sure I follow as many of the ideas as possible.
The bit about 'War and Peace' was a joke. Woody Allen didn't really speed read it :)
But even if it wasn't, War and Peace is a great example of a classic most people would be happy to speed read. It's not a relaxing novel like Harry Potter but it's perhaps arguably an important novel to read.
In today's society classic novels like that are often more about absorbing the knowledge rather than enjoying the story, which is people want to speed read... Fast knowledge absorption.
You obviously like Hemingway, you must realise for most people that's odd. Just like you think it's odd a small part of the population might speed read certain novels. It's great that not everyone is the same.
When I sit down with a Raymond Carver short story, the shorter sentences and clear descriptions allow me to absorb it more quickly and move on.
I tried to read at the same pace with authors like Thomas Pynchon or David Foster Wallace (and Hemingway) and found myself re-reading the same paragraph four times.
For me, it isn't nessecarilly that I want to speed read a novel, it is just that I have trained my brain in other ways to absorb the most crucial aspects of a text/problem quickly and jump ahead (at my own detriment). Thanks college!
But novels? Like you, I read those slowly and savor them like a good bourbon or wine. I look up words I don't know and commit them to memory. I stop and think about the writing, or a turn of phrase in some dialogue, or the world or characters. I consume novels. This is very different to how many people I know read.
But then I only read very good books. Life is too short to read a bad book.
YMMV, of course.
Deleted Comment
For example, I really wasn't a huge fan of GRR Martin's writing or story, but I wanted to be on top of the plot of SoIaF, so I blazed through the thing. I got a few details wrong, such as someone being a cousin instead of an uncle maybe, but I was ready to discussed tons of specific aspects of the writing as well (like how he calls Brienne ugly ~every. single. time.~ she comes up).
I agree that it's a bit daft speed reading good works but, if you enjoy reading fiction, you'll find it difficult - you just want to enjoy it.
Personally, I'd rather wait for the good things.
One counterexample is general news -- I always just want the tl;dr.
In a realistic world, each person has a relatively small discrete amount of free hours each week.
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Because most people don't understand that novels are for ideas, language and descriptions, as opposed to plot.
Except if we're talking about Grisham/Crichton/Dan Brown etc "novels".
Whilst these authors may not be literary greats (though not sure why you lump Crichton in with Brown), isn't it important that people are reading something, even if it is The Davinci Code or The Firm? Even if these are throwaway novels, readers are improving their comprehension, spelling and vocabulary skills (especially if these books are in english and english is not your first language). That's surely better than lazing in front the the telly watching reality TV shows.
> Doubling the speed, in our experience, leaves individual words perfectly identifiable — but makes it just about impossible to follow the meaning.
Wow, sorry but this is very misinformed. A lot of people me included can listen to audio at 2x. I constantly listen to podcasts (so not a slow narration to begin with) at 2x in English which is not even my native language and I understand everything and enjoy it very much.
Blind users listen at 4x without loss of understanding.
You just need to train it.
Two requirements: headphones (you need much more processing power to deal with crappy speakers and poor audio in general) and lack of significant distractions (you can't afford to think about something else). Also, some apps have crappy audio acceleration algorithms. Overcast does it so well that I use it also for listening to audiobooks.
I also think the article is misinformed. You can speed read by regularly training your brain. Just don't expect miracles and don't believe the "experts" who try to sell you miracles.
https://github.com/waywardgeek/sonic
I think speed rate should be a standard control on every multimedia player, just like volume.
Unfortunately Overcast is iOS only. Could anyone recommend an Android app similar to Overcast?
Close to the speed limit for understanding two things are difficult:
- personal names (especially of companies) and aberrations.
- a change of the speaker to someone who has a slightly higher speed or worse audio quality
Unavoidable and super annoying:
how back in the "real world" everything appears to be in slow-motion. It takes ages for someone to just finish a single word...
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/video-speed-contro...
javascript:void%20function(){document.querySelector(%22video%22).playbackRate=parseFloat(prompt(%22Set%20the%20playback%20rate%22))}();
Works on all HTML5 video that's not inside an iframe or otherwise inaccessible to the page-level DOM.
Only tested on FF for Windows and Linux, but it's just vanilla JS.
So I guess intelligent people will be able to understand everything on 2x while dumb ones may not.
Consider that most of us can read text at a normal unhurried speed of 200wpm to 300wpm. We also hear this "inner voice" as we read the written words. This subvocalization is therefore "sounding out" the words at ~300wpm in our head.
However, many people speak out loud at only ~100wpm. For many of us, accelerating speech from 1x to 3x is simply making the speaker sound out the words at 300wpm. Since that's the same as our subvocalization wpm, the meaning is not impossible to follow. Most humans can't move their mouths fast enough to talk at 300wpm -- but with digital technology -- they don't have to.
Spoken recordings at 100wpm is mind-numbingly slow and it would just make my mind wander.
I think the authors should have surveyed a hundred youtube users that always take advantage of the 2x speed option. They would have been surprised to learn that people can follow the meaning of the words at 200wpm very easily.
> The way to maintain high comprehension and get through text faster is to practice reading and to become a more skilled language user (e.g., through increased vocabulary). This is because language skill is at the heart of reading speed.
So, in short, moving your eyes over the page faster only helps if your speed of language interpretation can keep up (the nytimes article has a slightly paraphrased version).
I wasn't really impressed by the article. It seemed to add very little to the abstract, just a couple of concrete examples of speed reading techniques (and one accompanying study).
Defining speed reading as 'eye movement speedups' and explicitly excluding 'language comprehension speedups' is fine, but it makes me want an article about what happens when you combine both, which I know for a fact can result in reading speedups by a whole number multiple.
But I am learning Dutch right now and I have to spend a lot more time to get correct meaning of sentence. So no eye movement technique would help me.
i took a full semester class back in high school where all we did was train speed reading. i was able to get to 800 wpm with 90% comprehension on tests. that was from a baseline start of ~150 wpm with 80% comprehension. (the tests afterwards weren't easy "what was the name of bob's dog?" questions)
i've, of course, lost it all in the past 25 years of no practice, but i remember the keys being swallowing entire lines instead of words, achieving "flow", and dropping the subvocalization of what you're reading. (when you pronounce words in your head)
I'm an avid audio-book listener, and I use both 1.5-2.0x and 0.8-0.9x, depending on my mood. The slower speeds definitely allow you to "think" more about the content, rather than concentrating solely on the narrative.
(I use MEElectronics M6 PRO IEMs because of replaceable cable.)
But some text are written to be skimmed (large parts of many college textbooks for example - the author is paid by the word, so there's often a lot of filler. Most people only need to get squinted with most journal article they meet)
(n = 1)
It should be possible to get in the zone and not subvocalize, but I can only do it for very brief periods. And it's something that I can only do for "light reading" rather than when trying to understand highly technical information.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subvocalization