Speed Reading/ Photoreading

myfatherrsson

Greetings!

I am trying to master the basics of at least one of these skills. I am aware there is a fundamental difference between the two that being; speed reading is just that, reading really fast, whereas photoreading is more about incorporating your eyes peripheral and frontal vision to 'scan' paragraphs and/or pages of writing and have almost total recall of what you have read. Impossible yet apparently true......

I am just wondering if there is anyone who has either or both of these skills and how effective they actually find them, particularly photoreading.

Also, if anyone has used the Acceleread method by Wade E. Cutler I'd love to know how effective that was because I have a copy myself and am wondering if it's worth my time to commit myself fully.

Cheers!!

BenjAii

I've always been a fairly fast reader anyway, but someone I would recommend that has helped me with speed reading is the ever excellent Tony Buzan.

As with most of his stuff the techniques are nothing new, he is just very good at communicating them.

What I learnt (it was quite a few years ago) and what has worked since, boils down to;

Absorb as much of you can of the meta-structure of the book prior to actually reading it. This works much better for factual material than fiction. Get to understand the chapter breakdown (including all further breakdown), the index & the bibliography before reading. This way your mind has already absorbed the super-structure of the material to be covered.

Approach every chapter by skimming through to see all the sections and subsections that you have already absorbed at this higher level. From then on it relies on the fact that well written and well edited books will have basically once idea, however extrapolated on, per paragraph.

In an ideal situation you can "skim" paragraphs and absorbs their relevant points quicker than reading through them line by line. It would take too long to go into it here, but there are lots of techniques for "skimming" sentences quickly and absorbing most of their content far faster than we usualy read, albeit without being as efficient in fully extracting their meaning.,

All this can work a lot of the time, but there is loads of stuff not suitable for speed reading. It's very tiresome for fiction (the whole point is the pleasure of reading ?) and it doesn't work for detailed and dense non-fiction - so its not going to help you absorb nuclear physics of esoteric philosophy any quicker.

But especially if you have some familiarity with the topic you are reading on, it is very useful in absorbing just what you need from a book you don't fully want to devote the time to reading properly.

myfatherrsson

Its funny you should mention Tony Buzan because i went and bought his Study Skills book and there was an entire section on speed reading there! The information that was there was nothing new to me as I already knew the basics behind the skimming, previewing, overviewing and inviewing. I was hoping just to ask people how effective they found these methods themselves. I only intend to use the speed reading skills for study anyway because yes reading fiction IS for pleasure why would I want to rush it!! overall what ive gathered seems to point out that the speed reading techniques are best put to use for revising because Im afraid if I skim over a section i could miss something potentially important!
Thanks for replying!!

Honey-ec

Very interesting article on speed reading here: http://www.straightdope.com/classics/a920214.html

"Dear Cecil:

What's the straight dope on speed reading?

Evelyn Wood commercials in the late 70s showed people casually zipping through impressive-looking tomes, apparently having benefited from one of Evy's speed-reading courses.

The concept, as I recall it, was that one learned to read not word-by-word but line-by-line and eventually paragraph-by-paragraph. It was claimed that in spite of the breakneck speeds you would "achieve a higher level of comprehension." It all seemed a bit implausible at the time.

Anyway, speed reading seemed to disappear until recently, when it was reintroduced on those late night mail order "infomercials." What's the scoop? --John Ashborne, Chicago

Dear John:

It's not a complete scam, if that's what you're thinking. But the benefits have been exaggerated. Speed reading is what you might call the Ronald Reagan approach to reading--you get the text's general drift while remaining largely innocent of the details, sometimes embarrassingly so.

Several trained speed readers were once asked to read a doctored text in which the even-numbered lines came from one source and the odd-numbered lines from another.

The speed readers read the material three times (average speed: 1,700 words per minute) and claimed to understand it. But they never noticed it consisted of two separate passages mixed together.

Claims that speed readers comprehend just as well as ordinary readers are probably spurious. In one early comprehension test speed readers scored a seemingly respectable 68 percent. But it turned out the test was so easy that people who had never read the material at all scored 57 percent.

To find out the truth about speed reading we turn to researchers Marcel Just, Patricia Carpenter, and Michael Masson. All are spiritual graduates of the Cecil Adams Cut-the-Comedy School of Scientific Investigation.

Just and company tested three groups: speed readers, normal readers, and "skimmers"--that is, people who were told to read rapidly but had no special training.

The researchers found that the speed readers read a little faster than the skimmers (700 WPM versus 600 WPM) and much faster than the normal readers (240 WPM). But the speed readers' comprehension was invariably worse, often a lot worse, than that of the normal readers.

What's more, the speed readers out-comprehended the skimmers only when asked general questions about easy material. When asked about details, or when reading difficult material, the skimmers and speed readers tested equally poorly.

Conclusion: speed reading might help you read TV cue cards faster, but for technical stuff, the kind speed-reading buffs want us to read faster so we can outsmart the Japanese, it's pretty useless.

Reading seems to be like losing weight--there's just no fast and easy way to do it. For more, see The Psychology of Reading and Language Comprehension, 1987."