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As a university student I'm very grateful that I discovered memory techniques while studying magic. They've been a massive help for me and I've explored the area further, building memory palaces and planning out mental journeys to remember phone numbers.

I've been lead to other study skills and one of them is 'speed reading'. I'm skeptical of the claims, however, that you can double or triple your reading speed and also improve comprehension, what you take in and are able to recall from the text. If it works it would be a big help as an English Literature student.

Is this a genuine skill? Has anyone gone on a speed reading course or purchased the books?

I've read a little on it. The better systems are reliant on you increasing the number of words you take in at one time and make modest claims; and eliminating bad habits, such as skipping back unnecessarily in a sentence. This is all sensible stuff. Even running a finger under the text as you read it can have a benefitial effect. You are more able to set a pace, and neurologically you focus more on things that are close to your hand(!).

Other schemes involve taking in whole lines of text in one go; prescanning whatever you're reading (which takes time they tend not to account for) and similar. I believe these are more dubious.

I'd recommend reading something by Tony Buzan on the subject, but treating the more extreme claims he makes for speed reading with a pinch of salt.

They are a little bit of a grey area, but i have studied them in quite some depth and am now about 50% faster than I was. No exageration. I didn't pay for mine, I learned it all from a free site. What works well is taking the best sections from each approach that fits you and creating your own way of doing it.

Heres the link to the techniques I use.

http://www.mrkent.com/speedread/index.asp

Read a lot, and read all different kinds of material. Reading speed and comprehension are skills that improve with practice. You'll find that "naturally" fast readers are the people who've been avid readers all their lives.

One important skill you can learn is to read in different styles, depending on what the text is and why you're reading it. Skimming down a page to find one specific bit of information is very different from studying a textbook chapter, and that's different again from reading a novel for pleasure.

For study purposes, it's always best to do a quick skim over the material before studying it in depth, so you get an idea of what's covered and how the text is structured. This costs a few extra minutes, but really helps comprehension, so it's a good trade-off. Most modern textbooks will help you in this by having summaries, lists of objectives, etc. at the beginning of each chapter or section. You can also look over any questions at the end of the chapter, to see what the main points are that you're supposed to learn.

Buzan has some books on it.

Three things that work well for me (I'm not talking about reading novels or newspapers)

- Sit down at a desk to read, preferably unclutered (the desk, not you) - that will help you focus on what you are doing.

- Use your finger or a pen to follow what you are reading, and try and move it at a regular speed. Then increase the speed. You will be surprised how much more quickly you go through a page without loosing content.

- Read a lot about various things. It helps with speed, and with making connections.


On a related note, one of my holidays read was ..."How to read a book" by Mortimer Adler. I wish I had known about it when I was still a student. Get it. It isn't about reading speed, but about comprehension of the overall topic, whatever the topic may be.

Hope this helps you.

LP

Speed reading is a genuine skill, but it can't really be taught. Don't go on a course, you'll only be wasting your money

As Robbie said, people who read a lot naturally learn to read quickly. And personally as someone with the attention span of a goldfish who wants information there, then, and now, I've learned a few tricks on how to skim a document and get the gist of it, picking up the important points.

Mostly I make use of chapter titles, section headings, and skimming over the shorter words - your brain can fill in the gaps. Short paragraphs help a lot with this (Craig Browning take note!). But you'll soon find your own tricks

chunking...no, not something you do on the lav, but breaking down what you're writing, or reading and learning into smaller easier to manage pieces...the brain can handle between 4-9 pieces of info at a time apparently...

so its more a case of zapping the mind with that info, digesting it, and moving on...its the recall thats more important than speed really...

and yeah - what kolm said...

Here's another free resource:

http://www.wavereading.com/

It's a more advanced version of using a pen as a pointer.

Barry

I appreciate all the replies everyone. Thanks very much.

I will check out those links and set about putting some ideas into practice. I will also have a look at the Mortimer Adler book, thanks Le Petit Bateleur. It seems like speed reading is a bit boggy but there are also parts which work. It'll be fun finding which is which.

I know someone who spends all their time devoted to this new age pseudo-psychological bunk. They can read a book in several seconds. But they don't remember or understand any of it. As a matter of fact, they spend all their time learning these things and not just getting on and reading.

Best advice, simply- read often, use common sense, don't 'regress' or 'backskip'. Personally, I find the notion of a 'pacer' distracting, and I can read chunks of words quicker without anything.

People often read at such low speeds not realising that there is no skill needed just to speed it up anyway considerable amounts without having to do any drills. It's like walking. You can get stuck walking at a certain pace thinking that it is fine. But it takes no athletic training to up the pace reasonably. That's just speeding up your reading. Hardcore speed readers treat reading like sprinting. It can be done, but the scenery becomes a blur.

I'm sure many people love speed reading. Personally, I abhor the dogmatic neglect for slightly more reasonable speeds- which when you realise that a million words per second speed reading actually isn't as effective as normal reading- is going to discourage you from reading at reasonable speeds.

There is one technique that can instantly and massively increase your reading speed. It does so by making things as computationally easy for your brain as possible.

Instead of moving your eyeballs across a page, you focus on a point on a computer screen and software delivers each word to you. It's vastly more efficient.

I saw a demonstration of it on The Learning Channel when I lived in the US, and I could easily read and comprehend the text at the top speed they used - an astonishing 1,500 words per minute.

i sped-read War & Peace one, it was something about some Russians...

IAIN wrote:i sped-read War & Peace one, it was something about some Russians...

Gotta love Woody Allen

SamGurney wrote:I know someone who spends all their time devoted to this new age pseudo-psychological bunk. They can read a book in several seconds. But they don't remember or understand any of it. As a matter of fact, they spend all their time learning these things and not just getting on and reading.

That sounds more like photoreading to me. And I would agree with you, it is utter nonsense.

Speed reading, however, sounds slightly more realistic. And I think it is possible to read at the speeds that speed readers claim. I have given books to friends, most of which are avid readers, and they will tell me 'just finished it' two hours later, and I'll chat to them about the content at length all the while thinking how they read it that quickly (these are fairly chunky, non fiction books) So, I'm interested if the techniques which they may be doing without realising can be recognised and put into practice for everyone.

SamGurney wrote:Hardcore speed readers treat reading like sprinting. It can be done, but the scenery becomes a blur.

This is something I'd agree with too. I wouldn't read for pleasure at high speeds, I'd take it at a leisurely pace. But it would be handy for breezing through the reading at university, especially if I already know what to looks out for.

Fair point. The difficulty is that I believe you can definatley speed your reading up, but it is impossible to name a limit on 'reasonable' reading speed. Nonetheless, there are certain unignorable correlates; the more you read, the quicker you can read; I am sure you will find that proffesors read much quicker on average than most people. And, beyond one's own reasonable reading speed (Reasonable not neccesserily meaning the speed at which one usually reads), the faster you read, the less you understand.

My 'bluriness' analogy was more designed to make the point that you wouldn't watch a film on fastforward x10 if you were a film student, would you? It stops being just about being able to appreciate the artistic merits of the film, you actually miss key events! You have to look at a piece of art and think about it- you cannot rush those thoughts and it is the speed of your thought which determines how long you should take. Thus, The less thought, the quicker.

Following on from this, you might then expect that people who prefer to think and question and analyse information read slower than those interested in simply 'learning' information. Beyond individual variation sometimes the enviroment will determine speed. The equation 'E=mc2' takes less than half a second to read in only one 'fixation' and is quite easy to remember. Find me someone who can look at that and understand the implications of that equation in less than half a second and I will punch myself in the face.

It all comes down to thought and to being used to reading.

So what can I conclude? Well, I am neither crediting or discrediting speed reading, I am merely making the case for looking beyond 'magic' methods and systems and just using common sense.

It's a bit like nlp. The fundamental premise of 'modelling'- observing what causes desired effects and replicating the causes to create the effect- is an intuitive piece of information that even babies understand. Does this mean that the whole of NLP is 'right' or realistic? No, it doesn't. It means you have to assess the individual parts and claims of NLP on their own, not as an entire system where some truths make all of it correct.