Speed reading

I took a speed reading course and read 'War and Peace' in twenty minutes. It involves Russia. -- Woody Allen

Unfortunately it seems that speed reading is just so much snake oil. In practical terms, speed reading is just skimming.

There are two limitations to how fast you can read: first, the physical limitation of how fast you can move your eyes and how much text you can recognise with each time you fixate your gaze. Second, the cognitive limitation of how fast you can understand ideas.

Your normal reading rate should be somewhere between 200 and 300 words per minute (wpm). Mine is about 230 wpm. At this speed comprehension and recall should be near 100%, although apparently most people fall short and do only get about 75%.

Speed reading proponents claim you can improve that rate up to 1000 wpm and more without significant loss of comprehension. What techniques do they propose to improve speed?

First, improve the physical limit by training to fixate on larger groups of words, and avoid jumping back to words already looked at. This will cut down the time your eyes need to move and focus, which is time spent not actually recognising and parsing words. Holding the text at a moderate distance helps to see more than holding it close up. Good light and concentration helps. You also can use a reading aid to help you guide your eyes - a thin pen seems to work better than a finger. I believe these techniques are reasonable, and may allow you to speed up to somewhat above 300 wpm. Even without training you can achieve this rate if you just work concentrated.

Second, you can use typical browsing techniques like first reading the table of contents, quickly leafing through or glancing over the pages to get a general idea about the structure and content, or skimming the text to pick out important ideas. This also works quite well and allows you to see the larger patterns of organisation which you might miss when mired in the details of reading word for word. But you pay for it by missing a lot of these details and possibly some of the important ideas.

I'm not sure how far this actually speeds you up if you want to parse everything. But in cases like a newspaper or scientific journal, where you do not want to read every article, this can significantly cut down the time you need, by allowing you to just read those parts which are of interest. Again, these techniques do not really require training.

Finally, there are techniques that speed reading vendors promise will enable you to read thousands of words a minute without loss of comprehension: You train reading at speeds faster than your comprehension to train your ability of absorbing ideas, just as running repeatedly would train your endurance or pushing weights would train your strength. You use a pointer to swipe over pages reading text in both directions and several lines at a time, until you're gobbling up whole paragraphs at a glance. You're supposed to train like this for several minutes every day. I read the eponymous "Speed Reading" book by Tony Buzan, which is all pseudo-scientific gibberish, anecdotal hearsay evidence and promotional hyperbole both for speed reading and his various other endeavours. Disgusting.