talkmagic.co.uk

Ha, I used to use that film analogy too! If someone finished a book quickly I would say to them 'you don't watch a film in fastforward'. Good points though. I'll certainly be treading carefully in speed read land.

Another thought has come to mind. The other argument speed reading advocates might use to counter the film analogy is that (unless they have tried some psuedo maths or science) you wouldn't 'rush' a piece of literature only non-fiction.

The reason is, is the best writers have crafted what they are doing so perfectly that they anticipate when you will be thinking something. They anticipate what their general type of reader will be thinking like, and this allows them to throw in suitable red herrings and subtle nuances, subtle metaphorical or covert meaning and they direct your thinking, absorb it and soon it is under their control. The same applies to nonfiction believe it or not.

First of all- some of the greatest non-fiction ever written is fiction (As some of the greatest works of fiction are born from nonfiction). Plato- the republic. Kierkegaard- 'Either/ Or'... If you actually read Freud, weather or not you agree with him, he was a master of literature. He elicits questions and predicts just about when you are going to start asking them then he times it so that just as you think that he brings it up. It is quite uncanny. Furthermore, the rest of the decent non-fiction stuff is also quite thought provoking. You wouldn't be speed reading through Euclid or an acedemic journal.

Granted, there is a time and a place for skimming or flippant 'overviews' to extract the general theme of a piece of information. Like I said, I am impartial. If I read 'The history of Britain between the wars (1918-1939)' at the same speed as something more layered and subtle, then I would have been reading it for the past 7 years and based on rough calculations, would still have 900 years left of reading it to do. By my own admission, had I spent 907 years thinking and truly learning at my highest capacity, then I would be the greatest expert of that part of history imaginable.

But sometimes you have to settle for throwing mud at a wall and hoping that the more mud you throw, the more mud will stick. Speed reading tries to make the wall sticky which is just not happening. Mnemonics make the mud stickier and hard work give more mud; there is no such thing as effortless thought and effortless knowledge. If you think Einstein just was born a genius and didn't have to work hard and think hard then you are simply revealing how little you know about Einstein.

Gosh. All this talk about speed reading.