“In one of your previous posts, you mentioned speed reading. How do you speed read effectively? How much content do you give up per second gained (maybe not exact numbers, but a ballpark estimate)? And how well does speed reading transfer to the internet? Keep up the good work.”
The Harvard MBA says:
I’m definitely a speed reader, but I’ve never taken any classes or underwent formal training. The Chris Yeh speed reading course is essentially this:
- Starting at the age of 7 or 8, read as quickly as you can for 4-5 hours per day.
- Continue with the regimen until the age of 21.
- Occasionally measure your progress by participating in the March of Dimes reading competition (I think my record was 150 books in 30 days).
My speed varies depending on the reading material, but reaches a top speed of about 160 pages per hour for popular fiction.
My big tricks are:
- Mentally highlight the important words and concepts
- When it comes to fiction, focus on the dialogue–all that description just slows you down
- When reading on the Internet, try to get into a rhythm. When I’m blasting through feeds, I maintain a steady beat on the “Page Down” key
I don’t believe that I give up more than 5% in terms of comprehension; if I read slower, all that happens is that I have less time for other things.
The one drawback of speed-reading? I have to take a lot of books with me when I fly.
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5 Comments
Being able to speed-read would be amazingly beneficial for so much. I can’t imagine reading 4-5 hours a day for training though. When I get back from holiday I’ll have to start some sort of course to get good at speed-reading for university.
There are other methods to speed reading. I was trained to look at sets of 2 to 3 words, instead of individual words. It is very effective.
But one method is even simpler, can be done by anyone, and requires no special training or skills whatsoever. The method is, when reading, simply try to read faster. There was a study (sorry, I don’t have a link) that proved when a group of subjects was instructed to read something as fast as they could, they all did read faster than normal - and with the same comprehension. So in reading, as in so many other things, just put your mind to it and you can do it.
Interesting! I´m also a natural speedreader (around 100 pages in 30 minutes for fiction). It´s probably one of my biggest assets, since I´ve always been able to finish textbooks and tests faster than anybody else.
I´m not quite sure how I do it, either, but I think that I “chunk” phrases or lines. At my fastest, it takes me 1 or 2 glances to finish a single line, and I am essentially reading from top to bottom instead of left to right.
Of course, this is because I was a total geek for the first 18 years of my life (and still am to some degree). My biggest achievement was reading a translation of Musashi (Eiji Yoshikawa, 1500) pages in 6 hours. I´ve always had this perverse desire to read through as many holy texts as possible in a single weekend (imagine finishing both Bible and the Quran within the same 48 hours!) but somehow never got around to it.
I’m also a natural speed reader, and I hate when people tell me that I’m not ‘enjoying’ the book.
I read every word, and I don’t skim. I usually retain at the least 80% of what I read. I’m not sure how I do it, but I do.
I found out I read fast when I was at a sleepover, and I read three YA paperbacks in twenty minutes. My friends were shocked.
I don’t know how I do it- I just do. I look at a word and I know what it says as soon as I look at it.
I found this while searching on Google for other natural speed readers.
The bottom line is that life isn’t fair; it seems like some people are natural speed readers, and that some aren’t. However, most people CAN read faster than they currently do.