![]() One study of 16 high-performing people, including self-proclaimed “speed-readers” found that none could read faster than 600 words per minute while understanding at least three-quarters of the information. In the World Championship Speed Reading Competition, top contestants read about 1,000 to 2,000 words per minute, but they only understand about half of what they take in. "I say, which would you rather do: eat a dish of rice kernel by kernel or take a spoonful to get a good taste?"īut most research points to the opposite conclusion: As speed increases, comprehension deteriorates. "My reading technique is actually comprehension by accumulation," Wood once told the New York Times. "Which would you rather do: eat a dish of rice kernel by kernel or take a spoonful to get a good taste?" Wood, the speed-reading entrepreneur, ardently believed that fast readers were good readers. But they did remember the story’s most important ideas better than those who tried to read normally but didn’t finish the piece. A 2009 study found that skimmers did not remember very many details, nor could they make inferences from the text. If you’re pressed for time, it might be preferable to skim the entire text rather than to read linearly through just part of it. And skimming might be useful, in some cases. Some forms of what we call “speed reading” are actually skimming - the reader saves time by not reading every word on the page. “Did you read that?!” the hipster bookworms on Portlandia shout at one another before shoving pages of a magazine in their mouths, thereby admitting that to stay well-read these days you’d have to physically consume articles, not unlike a human flatbed scanner. Meanwhile, media companies have cruelly conspired to make “longform” cool again, so now everything you actually want to read is twice as long as it needs to be. We now read an average of 54,000 words a day by some estimates, roughly the length of a novel. Perhaps because its students found the method to be harder than it sounded, or perhaps because those early Clinton years were simply a chiller time. A generation of lawyers and bibliophiles flocked to speed-reading classes that sprang up in community colleges and on mail-order services.īy the 90s, though, the speed-reading craze slumped again. ![]() The comedian Steve Allen hawked the program in TV commercials, and over the years multiple iterations of White House staffers signed up. These techniques helped Wood reach 2,700 read words per minute, she claimed, and it was these principles she espoused in Evelyn Wood Reading Dynamics, her speed-reading business. In the 1950s, a schoolteacher named Evelyn Nielsen Wood discovered that she could read at a much faster pace than the normal 250-300 words per minute by sweeping a finger along the page as she read, reading entire groups of words at a time, and by avoiding sub-vocalization, or saying each word mentally. This is actually the second coming of speed reading. Think how many more Facebook exclamations you could post if you weren’t wasting all your time moving your eyes between words like a chump. “OMG I need this!” gushed a typical response. The idea is to cut down on the saccades and get straight to the good stuff-the ORP-which Spritz highlights in red as each word appears.įacebook feeds were unanimous: Spritz could be life-changing. That movement is called the "saccade," and each one takes about a tenth of a second. “Reading is inherently time-consuming because your eyes have to move from word to word and line to line,” the creators write. "There are only a handful of times when one can remember when a piece of tech totally changed the world and those in it." Users can set the pace at which the words zoom by-currently, the app can go up to 600 words per minute, about double the normal reading speed. It will center each word around its Optimal Recognition Point (ORP), the point at which most readers recognize its meaning. Spritz, its creators say, will speed up reading time by flashing just one word of an article or book at a time inside a text box. or download our magazine app! (Seriously though, do it, if you want to be a thought leader.)īut one app promises to be part of the solution. “Save this to read later,” they offer, as though “later” you won’t have better things to read. Most smartphone apps contribute to this deluge of facts. We are all bailing water out of a leaky info-boat. It allows us to read anything, but it gives us entirely too much to read. The internet is wonderful and terrible in its volume.
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