Sorry, but Speed-Reading Doesn’t Work If You Want to Learn
On average, adults read about two hundred fifty words per minute. With all the work-related reading you have to do—and all the non-work-related reading you like to do—being able to read faster than you do now is a worthwhile objective. The question is whether it’s possible to increase reading speed without sacrificing comprehension.
A long time ago, I took a speed-reading course. At the start of the course, we were given a Before test: reading a few pages quickly and answering questions about the content. At the end of the class, we took the After test: reading a book in minutes—yes, an entire book—and answering questions about the content again. We all did strikingly better after the course than before.
But did we really? The amount of text we supposedly read in the After test was so much greater than in the Before test that the speed-reading company could claim that we had increased our reading speed umpteen times. But we had absorbed almost none of the content.
The reality, I now know, is that it’s difficult to increase reading speed without losing comprehension. Look around and you’ll find numerous techniques that help increase reading speed, but also many objections to the legitimacy of these techniques.
For example, people routinely subvocalize as they read, speaking the text to themselves. One claim is that by learning how to stop subvocalizing, such as by holding a finger to your lips as you read so you can’t mouth the words, reading speed will increase. The counterclaim is that even the fastest readers subvocalize, and in fact our brains don’t seem to be able to separate reading from speaking.
The issue, then, is not just seeing the words, but also processing them. This idea of using color in the text to enhance readability seems ingenious, even if not entirely practical. But for most of the commonly recommended speed-reading techniques, there are videos and blog posts that argue convincingly that any increase in speed is accompanied by a loss in comprehension. And research seems to support this view. Therefore, if you decide to study any of these techniques, make sure you’re satisfied not just with how fast you read, but how much you absorb and retain.
In any case, speed-reading seems inappropriate for certain kinds of reading. If you attempt to speed-read technical material, you might miss critical information. A requirements document is not something to rush through, nor is a book on development methodologies.
Some of the recommended speed-reading techniques may be helpful to some people. But when the objective is comprehension and learning—or curling up after work with a much-loved novel—slowing down may actually be better than speeding up.
