I.e., reading is no longer an open-ended exercise I choose how long it will take. It allows me to decide how much time I think it’s worth spending on a book, article or report, and to get as much information as I can within that self-imposed time constraint. Learning to speed-read (via a self-paced course) has made large, important bodies of literature significantly more accessible. People earlier in their careers, researchers, and people with expertise in many domains should consider learning to speed-read. Kennedy took a speed-reading course with his brother, promoted its use among his cabinet ministers President Jimmy Carter and his staffers learned the skill while in the White House President Theodore Roosevelt was a known speed-reader. Very famous policymakers who sped-read: President John F. Even as an entry and mid-level diplomat, I found that speed-reading tactics made my portfolios more manageable. I’ve seen speed-reading be a critical asset within policy circles, particularly at the higher levels, since you have so many sources of intelligence and analysis to review daily. The views in this article belong solely to the author and do not represent those of the U.S. You’ll have gotten the gist of each paragraph and chapter through efficient skimming of the parts of the book that summarize the chapter’s directions (first/last paragraphs, table of contents, etc.) I use the 752-page NSCAI report as an example of speed-reading. Specific sub-skills are: learning to not say the words aloud in your head, reading one or two lines at a time, and even using fewer eye-swipes to get the general sentiment of each sentence/paragraph. People often take weeks-long courses to develop all the related-subskills (I used a 36 chapter-a-day book). Main benefits of speed-reading: reading non-fiction books and articles faster and choosing how long to take on a report/book, rather than an open-ended amount of time. In fact, since the 1960s, experiments have repeatedly confirmed that when people "speed read," they simply do not comprehend the parts of the text that their eyes skip over.Summary: More EAs should learn to speed-read. This means that we can take in only a word or so at each glance, as well as a little bit about the words on either side.
Our eyes are seriously limited in their precision outside of that. There is only a small area in the retina (called the fovea) for which our visual acuity is very high. Reading half-paragraphs led to better performance on a test of memory for the passage's meaning than did reading only the first or second half of the text, and it worked as well as skimming under time pressure.īut speed reading? Techniques that aim to guide eye movements so that we can take in more information from each glance seem doomed to fail. Participants in a 2009 experiment read essays that had half the words covered up - either the beginning of the essay, the end of the essay, or the beginning or end of each individual paragraph. This is probably a good skimming strategy. Some speed-reading systems, for example, instruct people to focus only on the beginnings of paragraphs and chapters. We can definitely skim, and it may be that speed-reading systems help people skim better. In a recent article in Psychological Science in the Public Interest, one of us (Treiman) and colleagues reviewed the empirical literature on reading and concluded that it's extremely unlikely you can greatly improve your reading speed without missing out on a lot of meaning.Ĭertainly, readers are capable of rapidly scanning a text to find a specific word or piece of information, or to pick up a general idea of what the text is about.
Unfortunately, the scientific consensus suggests that such enterprises should be viewed with suspicion.
Today, apps like SpeedRead With Spritz aim to minimize eye movement even further by having a digital device present you with a stream of single words one after the other at a rapid rate. The course focused on teaching people to make fewer back-and-forth eye movements across the page, taking in more information with each glance. The first popular speed-reading course, introduced in 1959 by Evelyn Wood, was predicated on the idea that reading was slow because it was inefficient. And as the production rate for new reading matter has increased, and people read on a growing array of devices, the lure of speed reading has only grown stronger. Nonetheless, it has long been an aspiration for many readers, as well as the entrepreneurs seeking to serve them. The promise of speed reading - to absorb text several times faster than normal, without any significant loss of comprehension - can indeed seem too good to be true. "I read War and Peace in 20 minutes," he says. Our favorite Woody Allen joke is the one about taking a speed-reading course.
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