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JoonasTo
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posted November 07, 2014 08:02 AM |
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Edited by JoonasTo at 11:50, 07 Nov 2014.
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Reading Speed and Practices
Okay, I got linked to Speed Reader site and this got me wondering. We have a lot of people here who read a lot. Both for work/education and for own enjoyment/improvement.
How fast do you guys read? What kind of reading practices do you use?
Does software like the one linked above help you read faster?
Just to clarify, this is not just about speed reading but all kinds of styles.
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JoonasTo
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What if Elvin was female?
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posted November 07, 2014 08:15 AM |
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Edited by JoonasTo at 10:43, 07 Nov 2014.
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Using hunk size of 6, speed variability, start chunks at the beginning of sentences and skip stopwords I can keep reading up to 6000wpm. At 6500 I start forgetting sentences from between.
I wonder if by increasing the chunk size to 10 would enable me to get 10000wpm? Since the chunk size of six gave me 6000, almost worth a test. (If only someone would bother to write a program for that...)
This seems to correlate somewhat to real life font and page size. My reading of the famous five books is only limited by my ability to flip pages while the LotR limits my read speed through small font and too many sentences on one page, making it hard to read fast. As such my fastest reading of LotR is 3:45. Does still average to 2100ish wpm(about 4,5 pages per minute) but with pages like Harry Potters' it would be a lot higher. They sit pretty close to the sweet spot of fitting enough, easily readable text on one page that taking it all in goes smoothly but not too fast to be flipping pages all the time. This might be just an illusion though as Harry Potters' pages have a lot less words on them.
Just checked, yes it is. My reading speed of Harry Potter I is about 45 minutes, which averages to 7,5 pages per minute, which in turn is only about 1700 wpm. Huh. Wouldn't have though about that.
Anyways, my reading style has my eyes jumping in a somewhat random pattern in the text on a page just focusing on a few focal points on a page which gives me an image of the whole. I don't really read in the literal sence of the word, it's more like taking a picture of a small part of the page then jumping forward to take another untill all of the small pictures make one large coherent image. This allows for (in my mind) relatively fast reading speed.
Of course I don't always read as fast but I always read with the aforementioned style unless I'm looking for specific quote from the text or it's an english/german/swedish/korean text with lots of unfamiliar words. One I can handle, two is too many and I need to read the sentence around it word-by-word to learn it's meaning, sometimes the sentences next to it too. This breaks the immersion and "zone" and it requires some time to get back into it.
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artu
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posted November 07, 2014 08:28 AM |
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You know the Woody Allen joke? “I took a speed-reading course and read War and Peace in twenty minutes. It involves Russia.”
When you read a lot, you spontaneously read a little faster than the average person, anything beyond that is inessential and not necessarily a good thing. I can understand if someone needs to read faster if he has to go through hundreds of work-related technical documents or informative data but you don't speed-read Immanuel Kant or Pablo Neruda or Stephen King, so to speak...
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OhforfSake
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posted November 07, 2014 09:36 AM |
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Your reading times are absolutely "insane", I think the highest I ever got was around 350-400 wpm, or 1 page every 2 minute (and 1 min. taking notes add to that for a total of 3 min. pr. page or in average 15 hours pr. book, ~4 books pr. week). Your maximum time would be the equivalent of going through 5 years of university material in just a little over 24 hours.. if we include studies with larger books, it would still hardly take beyond a few weeks with only moderate amounts of time spend on reading pr. day (a couple of hours).
How much comprehension do you get? Is it only for story telling books? I think I should check out that link, thanks for sharing it. 
Edit:
In case my times seems unrealistic:
The reading time is about 1500% of my maximum which is already beyond average as far as I know (average being rather around ~200 wpm), so if one assumes average, we already have ~1 year when reading at the same rate to go through the same material. Follow up that uni is not only its material, lectures that takes up almost half a day (except for weekends a short days), exercises, test preparations, hand ins, communication, potentially work, duties such as shopping and leisure, social life, food, travel time to work / school, not to include all those moments when you've a task in front of you and you struggle to solve it, etc. and it all easily adds up to 5 years and a lot of stress.
Not to include the avg. of 200 wpm or 4 min. pr. page without including taking notes, or fine writing, etc. isn't necessarily very representative of the actual process. I remember many times being sleepy and stuck reading the same few sentences over and over again.. and other times some pages just takes nothing to get through..
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artu
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posted November 07, 2014 09:45 AM |
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Edited by artu at 09:46, 07 Nov 2014.
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OhforfSake said:
How much comprehension do you get?
I think he already answered to that:
JoonasTo said:
I don't really read in the literal sense of the word, it's more like taking a picture of a small part of the page then jumping forward to take another until all of the small pictures make one large coherent image.
That would only work if you already have a fair amount of familiarity with the mindset of the writer, if your level of comprehension to his arguments is already sufficient.
And if we're talking about enjoying literature, that's not different than listening to a song on a tape that rolls faster than it should, the beauty of literature IS the words.
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OhforfSake
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posted November 07, 2014 09:51 AM |
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I'm not going to judge on what I find to be personal matters (by which I do not mean if one could, but if one should, like if one should speed read, the quality of joy or purpose of it). I'm more interested in the topic itself.
Anyway one can spend a lot more time on the initial pages and read the later pages much faster and still reach the same average, that doesn't matter that much. I'm more interested in how much comprehension Quote:
taking a picture of a small part of the page then jumping forward to take another until all of the small pictures make one large coherent image
translates into.
E.g. for a story, can the work be told chronologically with all the major points?
Can cause and effect be clearly demonstrated, e.g. why did a certain plan work or something similar.
Stuff like that..
Edit: Of course it's possible to spend so much time on the initial pages that the average becomes impossible to reach, but since we've already been presented with an average, I'll work out from that, but even a lower average, but still in the same digit range is still very very impressive.
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artu
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posted November 07, 2014 09:55 AM |
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I'm not judging, I'm concluding. And yes, you can realize what the story is about by fast-reading but literature is not what the story is about, it is the story itself.
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JoonasTo
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What if Elvin was female?
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posted November 07, 2014 10:42 AM |
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Edited by JoonasTo at 10:44, 07 Nov 2014.
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artu said:
I'm not judging, I'm concluding. And yes, you can realize what the story is about by fast-reading but literature is not what the story is about, it is the story itself.
This is not the point of this thread, make another one for it.
Longer post coming up in a while
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artu
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posted November 07, 2014 11:12 AM |
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So, on a thread about speed-reading, saying literature in the artistic sense isn't meant for speed-reading is off-topic? Whatever...
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JoonasTo
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posted November 07, 2014 11:33 AM |
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This is an example of what my reading might look like. I form my image of this page in the order the numbers represent. Sometimes the numbers 5 and 7 are reverted, the same goes for numbers 2 and 3.
The formation is a little different on this page because of the eye catching chapter break in the middle but it works well enough to give you a general idea. You can see that there are parts where they overlap, these overlapping parts work as kind of a security system to keep me on track, if they're off-sync I will get confused and be forced to re-read the page. Number one cause for this confusion is an outside distraction btw.
As artu brought up, there can't be 100% comprehension of all the small details with my style. But it gives a good, coherent image of the page when read like this. If I really want to blaze through something fast I will get 4 or even 3 pictures of a page. They're a little bigger pictures but still miss WAY more information. This is basically only possible for things I'm already very familiar with, for example, my fast read of the LotR. I already knew the story so it's easy to weave it together from smaller amount of raw information without missing too much.
I might know that Bilbo was wearing a red vest but not that it was wool not leather if it happened to sit just in the right spot in the area that was left out of my image. If the part left out was the vest instead my mind would make 1+1=2 and include the vest in it. Because I know Bilbo likes to wear vests and because it was summer, if it was Artu's mother wearing a red woollen thing and it was winter I would assume it was a sweater. I could be completely wrong about Artu's mother because I have no informaton regarding her. This way I'm highly reliant on my familiarity with the subject.
It works best for stories by far. The simpler the storytelling, the better. If it gets very complicated(or very boring for some reason) it gets harder and harder because I have to split it into smaller and smaller parts untill I have like 20 pictures of a page. The reading speed drops exponentially with the amount of looks I need to take to read a page. I think this is because the forming of the image gets more and more complicated when you have more parts. Kind of like a puzzle, 50 piece puzzle is pretty easy and really fast to solve, when it gets to 1000 you spend more time looking for the right parts than actually placing them down. Our minds work similarly, creating the image by adding to what is already known. You can't build the puzzle by simply placing the pieces in their right places, you need the pieces next to them to locate them correctly.
Quote:
I remember many times being sleepy and stuck reading the same few sentences over and over again..
Or you just realise you've read thirty pages and remember NOTHING about what you've just read. I know. At this point it's best to quit and go to sleep. Works much better if you read it in the morning after waking up.
Quote:
And if we're talking about enjoying literature, that's not different than listening to a song on a tape that rolls faster than it should, the beauty of literature IS the words.
No, this analogy is completely wrong.
A closer one would be listening to a song that only plays the different parts, the best parts or parts randomly and/or simultaneously untill it has played enough of the song to create a well formed idea of the song and it's charasteristics. Depending on the song, this might take no time at all, say, a repetetive pop song, or almost as long as the song itself in case of more intricate work.
One thing to note about my style is that I don't read the text in my mind, I have no inner voice when I use it. And I don't "decipher" the textt in real time. I create a kind of a backlog where the text I take in from a book is always at least a page or two ahead of the creation process in my head. I think it's because I'm too slow for my eyes but it also allows for easier forming of the image where concepts and terms appearing again reinforce the already existing connections. This helps to ensure I'm on the right path.
If you're familiar with receiving morse code in CW, that's kind of similar in how the backlog works as you hear the sound but your hand writing it down can be minutes behind.
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artu
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posted November 07, 2014 12:18 PM |
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Edited by artu at 13:00, 07 Nov 2014.
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JoonasTo said:
artu said:
And if we're talking about enjoying literature, that's not different than listening to a song on a tape that rolls faster than it should, the beauty of literature IS the words.
No, this analogy is completely wrong.
A closer one would be listening to a song that only plays the different parts, the best parts or parts randomly and/or simultaneously until it has played enough of the song to create a well formed idea of the song and it's charasteristics. Depending on the song, this might take no time at all, say, a repetetive pop song, or almost as long as the song itself in case of more intricate work.
Your example is literally the same thing as speed-reading regarding the procedure, my analogy was rather inspired by my experiments as a little kid, listening to dad's 33's (Long Play) in 45 (single) speed.
There is not much difference in those examples regarding the end result. You are not listening to the composition/performance itself as it was meant to be heard, the whole point of music is to enjoy the process of listening to it, not to get to know about it, and that is exactly what you are doing. If we stick with LotR and Tolkien, who is a good novelist, what separates good novelists from bad ones is how they fill the story with significant and intriguing details, the way they express inner thoughts of the characters, how little clues and tips of the iceberg makes us realize about the depths of the story or the characters. You are only getting an idea about the narrative and the plot, you might as well just watch the movie, what's the difference, to be able to say "yes, I've read the book?"
I'm not even mentioning poetry or poetic prose, where expression comes before the narrative and sometimes is the only thing that matters. Speed-reading can be practical for work-related or educational (if you're a student who just wants to pass an exam) purposes but to read something that is meant for giving you pleasure while reading it by skipping the... reading part is absurd, in my opinion.
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markkur
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posted November 07, 2014 12:21 PM |
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I'm a line by line guy and furthered slowed by reading aloud all the time. Mine style is a long practiced art, I suppose because since my wife and I have read aloud LotR and many other books we put heavy emphasis on acting the words as we read...so it's a read ahead fast and backtrack and emote. Scan and repeat. I did a lot of carpentry over the years, I guess I read sort of like sawing a board.
I used to read a lot faster till I started reading archaic lit or guys like Burns.<L>
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artu
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posted November 07, 2014 12:25 PM |
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Well, Markkur, at the other end of the spectrum, we have Joyce who says his readers should spend equal amount of time on his books that he spends writing them, if they truly want to understand. He writes a single novel in around fifteen years.
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Doomhammer
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posted November 07, 2014 12:47 PM |
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Anyone can read fast but not everyone truly understands what they read.
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OhforfSake
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posted November 07, 2014 01:18 PM |
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Very interesting.
Doomhammer said:
Anyone can read fast but not everyone truly understands what they read.
JoonasTo said:
As artu brought up, there can't be 100% comprehension of all the small details with my style.
Comprehension is never 100% anyway, the way I see it, everything is information and it's just about dealing with said information as fast as possible... to gain more life so to say.
Hence I agree with Doomhammer, if you understood it, many small details won't matter. Which is incidentally why I don't agree that speed-reading is only good for passing an exam, not everyone understands information from books at the same rate, but it surely can be improved through training, hence speed reading. In a work of fiction however, obscure details can matter in the long run, but I believe I've read texts very throughout and while I read about some obscure thing mentioned once long time ago, when the next books came several years later I'd forgotten all about them anyway.. Btw. I really like the puzzle analogy. When I read study material I don't go from the start to the finish, e.g. the first thing I read is the summary which is usually the end of the chapter. This way I already have an idea of what I'm dealing with, at least more than what the headline and introduction usually provides. Otherwise I try to understand figures before reading them, because otherwise reading references to figures requires a whole lot of eye shifting. It fits the puzzle game analogy, because in a puzzle you'd normally start with placing the 4 corners, as they've 2 very uniquely defined sides, and then move your way inwards along the edges and use the edge pieces as the new walls, etc.
In any case, while it's not something I really intend to discuss, the information from books are usually not time dependent. The quality does not change, because it speeds up.. that's not how it is with music, why I don't agree with the example. For it to work, you'd have to speed up your mental processing as well somehow, so it fits with the intended frequency.
Edit:
To give an example. I remember when I was younger I'd read every word on every page and I could sometimes even say what page certain figures, references or even sentences were on.. and I'd very little understanding of the actual content despite using days and days to memorize everything.. and that was the problem, I memorized, I didn't understand.
Later on I could sit in class without having prepared my homework, be selected to explain the home work for the class by random selection, quickly look through the page while the teacher prepared the board (gave me about 1.5-2 min.) and go through the material without problems. Why? Because the material was always a continuity of what we'd already had.., i.e. it was based on previous stuff in a very nice way.. I didn't need to remember the text, I needed to get the idea the text was trying to present and be able to convey this information for the class.
And just to be clear, I've never been proud of not doing my homework or be able to get away with it, I felt it more like wasted potential, because I knew I could take all the exams I wanted, and I knew at that point I had the time and the skill to read up on most of them, effectively giving me 1.5 years off from school before uni.. and I couldn't muster the willpower to go through with it.
On the other hand, I was rather talented for e.g. chess, but I didn't find it interesting, and so I don't find it to be wasted potential that I never developed my talent to the fullest.
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artu
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posted November 07, 2014 01:41 PM |
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Edited by artu at 13:44, 07 Nov 2014.
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Literature is not information forfy, it's art. You don't read about Bilbo Baggins, to actually learn about the life of a Hobbit. Reducing literature to a pile of data and disregarding its compositional values can only be explained by being alien to it. In a speeded-up record, you still hear the same line of musical notes (which is the informative part) but the music doesn't feel the same, does it?
And regarding non-fictional stuff, real works of philosophy usually can't be fast-paced either, since the philosopher slowly builds up his unique terminology but you can have basic opinions about them for sure. Still, as I already said, you have to be already familiar with the paradigm to be able to fill in the blanks as suggested or the book should be quite shallow. (In that case it might as well be completely ignored.)
Not everything in life can be speeded up and that's not necessarily a bad thing. Taking your time and focusing on a higher level is part of the experience when it comes to some things.
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OhforfSake
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posted November 07, 2014 01:53 PM |
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This is going to be opinionated again then. To me everything is information. To go with your example, because you've the musical notes does not mean you've every permutation of how those notes can be translated to what I call music.. obviously, because speed apparently matters!
Quote:
Not everything in life can be speeded up and that's not necessarily a bad thing.
Well I wouldn't know, but if I try to go fast enough, everything can for be slowed down for an outside observer.. (joke).
Edit: Since I think it's off-topic I won't continue down this path of discussion, but it could be interesting to have a thread about reasons for why we e.g. like listening to Mozart or similar (I like the emotions, despite how much I dislike emotions).
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artu
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posted November 07, 2014 02:01 PM |
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Edited by artu at 14:20, 07 Nov 2014.
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Everything is information on a broader sense (as in received data) but we don't read Shakespeare to get informed, the way we read a statistic about the economy of Poland. The data we receive, in this case, is meant to be esthetic. There are 50 pages long versions of 1000 pages-long novels, the main plot is still there, yet the literature isn't.
If I remember correctly, JoonasTo enjoys fishing. Now, probably, he enjoys things such as watching the horizon from the boat, throwing his fish hook and waiting in peace, looking at the calm water etc... The whole "zen" part of the experience. Somebody can come up and say, look, throw in a few dynamites in the water and ta ta, here's all the fish you need. That would make sense, if he was fishing only to get food but the experience of fishing is not aimed at that alone, is it? The act of fishing itself is the pleasure. Same with reading a quality piece of work in literature.
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Tsar-Ivor
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posted November 07, 2014 02:26 PM |
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A good point, but as a student I have to get through a **** ton of reading material, most are read because they might be useful or relevant, so reading quickly is useful to dilute the material and get an idea of its usefulness, or to find anything useful that you can extract from it.
For my book review though, I read like 40 pages in 6 hours at times, re read a lot sentences or even pages, and made plenty of notes. Plus I genuinely wanted to fully absorb everything. The thing with academic authors, is that every word they use is there for a reason, to fine tune their points to perfection, if you risk yourself skipping over these, you stand to miss the point entirely.
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fred79
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posted November 07, 2014 03:30 PM |
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artu said:
but you don't speed-read Stephen King
sk books tend to have a lot of unnecessary filler, so i couldn't agree there.
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