Ask HN: Have you had success with improving your reading speed? I’d like to read books faster, but I’m skeptical that the methods available will do anything beyond teaching me to skim - and I’m just the sort of person who finds a lot of magic in minor word choice. The idea of reading only 5 words in 8 repulses me. |
Now the temptation is always there to speed up on a few paragraphs and it’s hard not to.
Paraphrasing what Woody Allen said:
I took the Evelyn Wood speed reading course and it really works! I read "War and Peace" in a hour, and I had perfect comprehension! It's about Russia.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evelyn_Woodhead_Speed_Reading_...
I was listening to a podcast episode where the guy being interviewed was selling a speed reading course. He said it was all about improving your peripheral vision. I have not seen much on this idea online. But I think there may be something to it.
But as a result, my appreciation for "slow" reading had increased dramatically, where before it was a frustration.
Both have their place.
A good place to train, or generally use to speed-read to the best of your capacity, at least for digital text, is spread0r: https://github.com/xypiie/spread0r
Go to Project Gutenberg. Find a 100+ year old book that you're not going to get preemptively sentimentally attached to. Practice accelerating your reading with that.
That is exactly how I broke myself of the extremely self-limiting habit of having to subvocalize every single word like I'm still in kindergarten.
But it really only works for non-fiction and easy fiction, so it worked really well for standardized testing.
Obviously reading fast is better than reading slow, but if you're going to read faster than you can think / process the content, I don't think that's useful.
I realised retention is what I actually care about and slowed down instead. I read slower now, take notes, review the notes when I’m done reading. I end up reading less but I retain more.
1. Read more
2. Use a finger or bookmark to help guide you.
Speedreading techniques or consuming too fast just seems redundant to me. While I’ve been able to comprehend a good amount at a fast speed, it just isn’t enjoyable.
So, depending on the text I read, I adjust the speed.
Then I got astigmatism and my reading speed took a nose div
Things I've used there: notetaking, underlining, pausing and/or putting the book down at the end of chapters, talking with people about the book I'm reading, and actively subvocalizing.
That last one requires a little explanation. For me as a kid, reading was a visual process. I did not hear words in my head. This let me go way faster, but I missed out on things. Puns, for example. It's also not good for appreciating poetry and the like; at 11 or so I remember reading the Lord of the Rings and being just irritated by the blocks of poems or song lyrics. I didn't really appreciate poetry until I started listening to poets recite their own works.
Eventually I realized that a lot of prose was better appreciated at a slower speed, either because of the rhythms of the writing or because if I was going too fast I wasn't thinking about the content enough.
There's plenty of stuff I'll still read very quickly, though, up to the edge of skimming and beyond. But it's sort of like driving past a neighborhood on a busy street versus taking my time walk through it. The faster I go, the more I miss, especially of the subtle stuff.
Yes, PLEASE!!! If you're reading a nonfiction book (that you own, obviously), the whole idea of "don't write in the book" is complete bullshit. Consider the book a somewhere-between-$20-and-$200 replacement for a college course. The college course is a consumable. The book, then, also, is a (very cheap, in comparison) consumable.
If you can improve your retention of something that can be reasonably compared to a college course by 20-100% by writing in a book I'd argue it's disrespectful to your time investment to NOT do that. Write in the goddamn book. If it makes you feel THAT bad, then buy a second copy, find a way to donate useful books to people who can't afford them (consider a subreddit for your local college/community college) and do that.
The buried lede here is that if you're reading nonfiction that can't be compared to a college course, it may not be worth your time in the first place :)
I'd argue that it's applicable to fiction books, too. :) I love pre-owned books with notes and comments, it feels like you share the experience of reading with someone you might not even know.
It took me no time at all to learn that if I just read it as fast as possible correctly, it would impress the evaluator.
OTOH I can see what they did it, I was a senior in HS and people still read like they just learned how, having to sound out every word and with awful flow/pacing. These weren't "dumb" kids either. Straight A students in fact.
So becoming a faster reader was just a function of reading for me, the more I read the faster I read. My starting point was 1-2 books a week if that, and it took a couple of years of reading until I could do it in a day.
I'd focus more on reading comprehension, doesn't really matter how fast you speed through Dostoevsky if you simply don't understand it and I fail to see the point of being faster if it's not predicated first on understanding the text.
Is this true? For instance I've spent thousands of hours driving but I wouldn't consider myself particularly adept at driving. To get to a basic level of proficiency, how good you are at the task is primarily a function of time spent doing the task. But after a point you just plateau and stop improving. Getting better in something requires deliberate focused practice, pushing yourself and failure
If you enjoy it and get a better and deeper comprehension, I would even say read slower. Re-read the same sentence a couple of times, Google the definitions of words you are unsure about, and pause to let your mind wander about what you just read. It is what reading is about.
I remember meeting someone at a party who told me they read like 357 books that year. I can’t helped to think they were either lying or didn’t get any understanding of what they are reading. I am sure they thought saying something like that will make look super smart but it didn’t.
> onism - n. the frustration of being stuck in just one body, that inhabits only one place at a time, which is like standing in front of the departures screen at an airport, flickering over with strange place names like other people's passwords, each representing one more thing you'll never get to see before you die-and all because, as the arrow on the map helpfully points out, you are here. dictionaryofobscuresorrows.com
Well, it's more a silly management issue than a productivity issue.
They all abandoned it later when they finally accepted that the learning bottleneck wasn’t their ability to move their eyes across the page as fast as possible.
If you have too much material, pick the specific chapters and subjects you want to read most and start there. Don’t compromise everything just to see it all.
I've had success reading more: take a fiction book, read it once quickly — even irresponsibly fast — then read it again for comprehension. You get a lot more out of it, and it sounds like you appreciate getting a lot of out of books. But, this way, you will end up spending more time reading, not less.
The other trick I know is to stop reading. If you are trying to work your way word-by-word through a book, and it's not rewarding you, either skip to the good part, or put the book down and pick up another one. You don't owe the author anything, and the world is full of more good books than you can ever read anyway, so why waste time on bad ones? An English Lit professor told me to make a choice after the first 50 pages whether I wanted to continue or not, so that's my rule of thumb. At first you think "Oh no, I've failed, I'm a bad reader," but over time you see how much more you read and learn because reading becomes pleasurable, and not a chore, once you want to do it.
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speed_reading#Controversies_in...
Some years ago an FT columnist assessed that even the most voracious reader can possibly only ready 5000 books in their lifetime. You should be thoughtful on where you want to spend you focus on.
https://www.ft.com/content/79bfc92a-e3e7-11e7-97e2-916d4fbac...
As another poster said, you should plan to use different reading techniques for different books. Recreational reading is much easier to read super-fast. Textbooks and research papers just aren't. It's similar to how an encryption algorithm works: your brain is really good at finding patterns. You can read faster by letting your brain do the work it's designed to do. Fiction books are very repetitive in their writing style. Technical works aren't; their content is very dense, and there is hardly any repetition. You'll never find easy patterns and repeated words there. They're not very compressible, and they're not very speed-readable.
Speed reading is all about look-ahead, look-behind, and pattern recognition. You are having a hard time because you are trying to force your brain to do it all algorithmically lock-step. Ideally, you want your eyes to maintain a steady rate of scan. Try to avoid using a finger like another poster said; it slows you down in the long-run. Eventually, your brain will start assembling words you have just read with words you're about to read, and give you the sentence in total.
It feels really weird the first times you do it. You're trying to let your brain to do more of the repetitive processing on its own, without you explicitly telling it to do that.
It takes a lot of practice. It's achievable. Keep pushing yourself, but you need to relax while you're doing it. It's a very delicate and tricky balance to achieve, if you're starting out as a slogging reader.
I’ve tried for years, and ultimately it has come at the detriment of reading comprehension and my enjoyment.
I am actively in the process of reading books lovingly. I am trying not to care how long it takes me to get through a book, and to just enjoy what I’m reading. It’s tough, but has improved the experience for me.
I have a lot of learning challenges. I was taught how to read wrong. The list goes on. I sorta forced my brain to learn bounded-box read-ahead/behind scanning by turning on autoscroll and letting it rip. My brain parts figured out the trick. Eventually, I was able to strengthen my reading skills to the point that I can self-regulate my eye-scanning & page-perusing movements on my own.
From time to time, when I'm having a not-read-good day, I still use an autoscroll app to help me retain focus.
There are a lot of chunking applets and extensions for the web browser, too. Those helped immensely to teach my brain how to read better. Eventually, I figured out how to do multi-line chunking/processing that way.
It took me much longer to learn all the various skills that usually get lumped together under the term "speed reading" than I expected. It took years to fix my reading skills. I wanted it to take weeks. It also took so much more practice than I expected.
If anyone has advice, I am desperately in need.
Chunking has been the most helpful for me, but I assume it's different for everyone. It took some time to get used to it. There are several tactics to improve but the one that was most helpful for me was breaking up the line of text into 3 chunks and keeping my eyes stationary within those 3 chunks. In other words, try to read the first third of the line without moving my eyes, then move my eyes to the center of the line and read the middle third, etc.
This obviously wouldn't work for reading technical documentation, but if you watch some educational videos on programming on something you can also easily handle 2-3x when watching video lectures. Though getting used to high-speed video is harder.
Most importantly listening at high speed is super easy to learn. You just starting listen some podcasts or books at 1.1 and gradually increase the speed by 0.1x each time you certain that current speed is comfortable for you. In two weeks you'll certainly handle 2x with no problem at all.
PS: My personal record is listening whole The Expanse book at 4.5x, but it was only possible because I was just laying with my eyes closed and enjoyed the ride. Of course I only listen at 2-3x speed when doing something at home or walking outside.
https://github.com/PaulWoitaschek/Voice
For lectures on youtube there are Firefox extensions.
It's like reading music, you just look at it and understand it. I think slow reading speeds might be a function of how we're taught to read, because when you learn music etc it's entirely different.
I've just not been able to do it though. I think I've managed bursts of it when skimming something super quickly - which as OP mentions is not how I enjoy reading.
I also read a lot of poetry, and internal monologue is a thing of beauty when reading that as I change intonation, or read out loud, and all.
Lately, even prose or novels that I read tend to be beautifully written, lyrical, or are more enjoyable with internal monologue.
There are browser plugins and mobile apps, and we’ll soon be integrated by a digital ebook platform.
> The idea of reading only 5 words in 8 repulses me.
One of the biggest concepts in the speed-reading section of the book is that a lot of people sub-vocalize the words in their heads. This limits your reading speed to around 150wpm. If you want to read 450+wpm, you have to be willing to "fill in the gaps" as you read.
Over the course of researching the specific algorithm we were using, I learned about eye saccades and speedreading theory. Even untrained users of the app could break 400 WPM comfortably using our test data, and regular users on our team were able to comfortably maintain over 700 WPM without previous training in speedreading.
The big takeaway for me, which actually improved my reading speed for physical texts, was the thing that slows you down the most when reading is eye movements. If you can will your eyes to move over lines faster, you can read faster. YMMV depending on the nature of the text (deeply technical stuff with unfamiliar words is gonna take more time to read thru, a big weakness of the automated speedreading app) but if you make a habit of trying to read faster, you'll find you improve over time.
There’s certain kinds of dense nonfiction this doesn’t work for (dense because it doesn’t have filler), or literary nonfiction (that you can slowly savor for the writing or narrative).
I used to relish a choice set of words to describe an idea in a way that just makes it click for me, but I’ve found that (a) this doesn’t lose that because a well written sentence that doesn’t communicate anything of substance is actually a bad sentence (style over substance), and that most sentences (in nonfiction) are pretty bad, and that’s ok. Moreover, I’ve found that simpler writing ends up being more effective, regardless of any personal preferences for Cormac McCarthy-like prose.
2. Read sections, lines, or blocks of text at a time instead of word by word.
3. Use your hand/fingers/ruler/index card/etc as a guide to help focus on each line at a time, until you can do the above without them.
4. Read more, practice the above
Evelyn Wood Reading Dynamics books discuss these in more depth.
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You can also find it here: https://www.locserendipity.com/Hyper.html
If you want a TTS system, this one is free: https://www.locserendipity.com/TTS.html
If you want to increase the rate of speech, download the HTML of the page and change to_speak.rate=1; to whatever rate you need.
Use both together for an even better effect. I once read Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment in an evening with these techniques combined.
If you want to try a method that flashes text with a pivot character, I have tried and implemented that, too: https://locserendipity.com/Speed.html
Their philosophy is basically to focus on quality rather than quantity. Find the books worth reading and read them at "normal" speed.
“Great speed in reading is a dubious achievement; it is of value only if what you have to read is not really worth reading. A better formula is this: Every book should be read no more slowly than it deserves, and no more quickly than you can read it with satisfaction and comprehension.”
― Mortimer J. Adler, How to Read a Book: The Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading
But opposite to what people are saying here, I find speed reading is great for technical documentation or for the first reading of a technical book. In pair programming sessions it's quite obvious because people will waste time reading SO answers that are obvious dead ends, for instance...
* Sprint reading: http://www.sprintreader.com/. You can install a Chrome extension here: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/sprint-reader-spee...
* "Bionic Reading": https://www.reddit.com/r/Damnthatsinteresting/comments/usdy2...
It seems that if you bold the first half of every word, it’s much easier to read quickly.
Similarly, not everything can be understood at the same speed - certain things demand slower reading. And this is where you have to ask yourself: "What am I reading this for? What do I hope to get out of this? How well do I need to understand this?". The answer to these questions will inform your reading speed.
My advice is to just cultivate a wide vocabulary as that will help you out the most (each time you have to think about a word’s meaning slows you down, IMO, more substantially than a minor difference in the speed at which you cruise over words.)
I mostly read scientific, mathematical and pop sci works.
It’s at least worth a shot. It has been huge for me and many others.
I really tried to read everything in college, but I just couldn’t, and neither did a lot of my peers. I still learned a ton by learning the main ideas, through internet summaries, through discussions with my friends, and discussions in the classroom.
Don’t be so hard on yourself and continue to learn :)
Good luck!
Speed reader usually sacrifices some details during reading, skipping conjunction is one of the example. So yes you need try to learn fast reading.
If I find that I’m already convinced of the point that a particular subchapter / section is trying to make, I’ll speed through it. As a result, I speed read through about 80% of most non-fiction books.
My experience with speed reading is that it’s more akin to speed “skimming”. I see all the words, I understand the point each paragraph is making, but I’m not resting and respecting every word, or really paying too much attention to sentence structure. You can miss details, but this is predicated on the assumption that those details don’t matter.
If I’m reading something where every detail does matter, or fiction that’s heavy on prose, I slow down significantly, since my objective is often to enjoy the book for the maximum amount of time possible, and not to learn as many things in as short a time as possible.
When I get to the parts I need, usually I skim it once and reread it slowly again after.
If I read a book, i will remember at the first reading nearly all the points, the structure, what it tries to talk about, what i like and why. I will not remember all the details of every single arguments or all the details of all the plot points. It is a different way to read and goal.