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Comment by atemerev | Hacker News Reader

Sorry, NYT, I can.

Of course, speed reading gets some meaning lost. But the very skill of speed-reading amounts to developing a sense of look-ahead: first, intuitively establishing fast anchors in text to actually read a few moments later; second, to expand on this anchors, absorb the information and introduce feedback corrections in look-ahead patterns.

All my reading is "speed reading"; I even can't follow the linear text word by word anymore, this is way too boring. But I can regulate the time distance between look-ahead and absorbing passes, and thus the ratio between speed and meaning extracted. This is invaluable to find something in technical documentation, or prepare for exams.

And I can't listen to audiobooks or lectures; they are sooooo slow...

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Ok, so you notice you lose "some" meaning. The question is, how much? One way to find out is to read something the fast way and then the slow way and pay attention to how much is new the second time. Have you tried this, or perhaps some other way to see how much meaning gets lost?

As for comparing reading speed to talking speed (audio books and lectures): of course talking is slower than reading, even if you don't speed read.

I don't know about the parent, but I have tried this - repeatedly, in fact, including taking a number of reading comprehension exams each way, just to see the effects. Something that frequently happens is that I'll mix up side characters. I can only juggle a few characters at a time when speed-reading. I really made a mess of The Hobbit, back in the day, completely mixing up several of the dwarves. And I miss a number of nuances of language - a clever bit of wordplay might pass me entirely. Really, it comes down to the author's style - someone like Stephen Baxter might be on the harder side of sci-fi, but I'm able to chew through his books in hours because there are generally few extra characters. Everything just kinda... proceeds linearly. There's little to track other than what's immediately available. On the other hand, your typical high fantasy fare has to be chewed over the course of a few days if I'm to follow what's going on.

That sounds about right. More word play and characters would entail more processing needed for comprehension.

>> Of course, speed reading gets some meaning lost.

The whole premise of this article is that it does not, that "speed reading" is reading faster without losing meaning, and this is precisely what most people cannot actually do.

The author calls the activity you are referring to "skimming", and says it is what most people do.

No. Skimming is when you reading linearly and then decide "OK, I can probably skip this paragraph". Speed reading is the way to read in parallel, without ever tracking sentences word by word.

I don't know that I 'speed' read, but I read rather quickly, enough so that I detest any kind of video explanation because I would have finished reading it by the time they finished mumbling some pointless introductory nonsense.

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