This is a topic that comes up from time to time:
Speed reading.
Should I take a course? Try it out? Use a speedreading program? Do you speed read?
I can definitely answer the final question as “Sort of, sometimes.” I don’t read the same material at the same speeds because I have different goals when I read one type of writing vs. another. I’ll return to that in a moment. Before you consider speed reading as a solution, you should consider what problem you want to solve.
On the surface, speed reading seems like a solution to a common complaint among modern people and authors in particular: I know I need to be reading, but I have so little time! I think the heart of the issue is the nature of this question and this impulse, which is to read more. The desired outcome is not to spend more time reading but to read more words.
The answer to the question of speed reading, therefore, is dependent on why you read and just what sort of experience reading is to you. Is it an aesthetic experience, or are you merely searching for information and looking to increase the speed of the interface—to load more into your mind in less time?
I had a high school English teacher who did a small course on speedreading for our class. It was not particularly successful according to his goal of getting us to read above 1,000 words per minute (roughly two printed pages), but I do think it improved my reading speed overall, and, importantly, it taught me what the goal of speed reading was and its methods for achieving it. The point was to glean information, not to enjoy the words. You were encouraged to actively drop many articles or skip them mentally since the verbs and nouns were what was important, and all of this came at a necessary loss of comprehension. You might forget sentences or not understand them due to unique words or atypical grammar.
For a high school student, that approach was very interesting and appealing because the vast majority of reading, especially in English class, was not pleasurable or interesting. Reading faster helped me get the “gist” of books I wasn’t interested in, so I could fill out worksheets or write simple essays. If your literary experience is primarily academic, speed reading can help by minimizing the annoyance of reading books you aren’t interested in.
However, as an adult, such an approach does not suit my purposes.
First, books are an aesthetic experience for me and are not an informational input device that I happen to need functional eyes to utilize. I enjoy hearing the sentences in my head or even speaking them aloud. I enjoy pausing and thinking about what I am reading, about what it means, or how it is similar to something else I have read. I enjoy the way the book looks, the way the font flows, the black and white. I love the texture of the paper with the ink floating on it. I like to pause and admire illustrations. I enjoy the way a real book feels in my hands, too.
These days, I prefer physical books over ebooks, and I only read ebooks on my phone when I am flying or otherwise want to read a book but don’t have one handy. A real book works much better for how I read. I sometimes repeat sentences. I flip back and re-read earlier sections. My eyes move around on the page. I pause and look out windows. Speed reading is an intentional avoidance of that deep experience in favor of a shallow one, and if a book is good, why would I want the experience to be as quick as possible?
I can sprint through an art gallery. I can wolf down a steak and dart away from the table. I can turn up the speed on the Art of the Fugue. But why would anyone want to do these things?
What is the best solution to “I need to read more?”
Well, it would be to set aside more time for reading, but on a deeper level, I think it is to find more books that are worth reading, books that are really truly enjoyable experiences. Sometimes, you might feel inclined, even as an adult, to read something that you are not interested in for some purpose, and for that, speed reading can be very valuable, but it really depends on what you need out of the source.
Circling back around to the loss of comprehension, my teacher viewed comprehension as a direct and measurable metric. There were sentences with information. Did you understand them? Can you recall what the book said? I have other thoughts.
Consider something like the Suma Theologica by Saint Thomas Aquinas. You can read it in a modern English translation rather than medieval Latin (which is a very precise language), but even so, you would be best served to go slow and consider what is being said. Each sentence carries great weight and is laden with technical meaning. Even if you could recall everything Aquinas said when speed reading, do you really understand it? He spent years contemplating what he wrote before committing it to paper. Should you not spend a few moments pondering its meaning?
While I think there are good use cases for speed reading, consider first what problem you need it to solve as well as what investment you are willing to make to solve said problem. It takes time to practice new skills.
I’ll also add this, as it is relevant: life is too short to read bad books. If you don’t enjoy a novel, give yourself permission to put it down and find something else you do want to read. As authors, there is some pressure in the sphere to be “in” to your own genre or category – to be a “well-read” fan. I think fans and artists are different categories. If I want to write fantasy and spend my time reading Roman history, I will. I’m not going to read modern trash fantasy just because it is modern and popular, and I need nerds on the net to think I am well-read. Yes, there is some market research to be had (I read and analyzed Twilight, after all), but I have my limits. I could use speed reading… or I could just read something better.
In terms of technology, you can try using something like SwiftRead (available as a browser plug-in), which, rather than training you to read a line at a time (the method I was taught for physical books), it throws a single word at a time in rapid-fire fashion so that your eyes don’t have to move. It seems to work well for me for things that I want to digest quickly—news articles, Wikipedia, some short stories, update blog posts—but you do lose your normal control. It feels very “strapped in,” but it might suit your needs without you having to practice other styles of speed reading for months.
Make use of the technology and the techniques of speed reading according to your goals. For me, I prefer reading to be a more deliberate and deeper experience.
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The part about Latin is interesting. Reading in another language you don't know natively is a good way to be sure you absorb EVERY word
I'm just not a fast reader. That's the way I am. I solve the problem by reading books that interest me instead of books I'm "supposed" to read. It works out better that way.