Orwell - Improve your speed reading
robinduckett.github.com
robinduckett.github.com
I don't see the advantage of flashing a word at a time. Reading works best when the eye can scan a bunch of words simultaneously. If anything, I'd try flashing a line of text at a time.
Unless you're talking with former debaters, I'd slow down that speech a little. Even if you live in New York!
Holy cow. I was getting bored and consequently losing focus at 300wpm. No wonder "people" don't like to read, if a huge chunk of "people" can't even go that fast.
If you know how I can fix that, any advice will promptly be implemented :)
And it's updated exactly as you said, and I timed it. "slowly" is exactly once per second as far as I can tell.
http://www.github.com/robinduckett/orwell is the repo, take a look yourself :)
Well, it obviously could, so I guess what I'm asking is are you willing to do it? :) I, for one, would be very, very grateful for it.
If I want to absorb a complex idea and integrate it into my base of knowledge, I need to pause while reading, digest what I've read, figure out its implications, and think about it in relation to what I already know and understand. Speeding up the physical act of reading doesn't add any value here.
When I try to use these techniques, I usually end up mechanically scanning the text word by word without consciously comprehending anything, and having to keep going back to re-read the same paragraphs over and over again.
The best analogy I've found is Hofstadter talking about the process of becoming good at Jumbles (where you have to unscramble letters to find the word). Early in the process, he had to actively, at the forefront of his mind, rearrange letters and test them. As he got better, that active task was offloaded to some barely-conscious 'letter combining capacity' that would only toss up fairly plausible combinations. It might not be a real word, but it had a high level of salience, whereas his active thinking-about process would make bizarre, impossible combinations that would include letters not even in the jumble.
Similarly, the 'active' task of reading is, for me, a pretty passive process now, and I actually have more of my mind to devote to thinking about what I read while my eyes do the boring work of getting the input 'inside'.
How did you learn this skill? Did you automatically start doing this or was it something you intentionally learned? If you intentionally learned it was there any particular method or book you used? I know there are a lot of books/products about the topic but I don't know which ones actually have value and which don't so I have just been trying them one at a time. I have only met a few people in real life who seem to have this skill and they typically are not able to describe how they are doing it. Any information you can provide would be greatly appreciated, even if it is just a description of the process you went through.
Thanks!
Second, I think another big component was my involvement with academic competitive debate. This required learning how to process a lot of information, both verbal and written, as quickly as possible, and maintaining an internal map of how various 'nodes' of argumentation interrelated. Having to then organize that into extemporaneous speeches puts it into practice.
Anyway, I don't have a good 'route to get here' because I didn't really catalog the transformation. A few things I do, though. First, I read paragraphs at a time (I also speak in paragraphs at a time: most people speak in sentence fragments at a time). I do this by tracking two points every 2-3 lines: one about 25% of the way in, the other about 75% of the way in. For a long time early on, I was reading with my index finger and pinkie finger touching the page tracing down as I read. I know people talk about "reading down the middle" but that's never really worked for me, but the 'double bounce' does. YMMV. I don't trace now because my hands just get in the way.
Second, I learned to stop "saying" what I was reading. Now, for whatever reason I was never one of those people who said the words out loud while they read. But I was 'saying' them in my head and then translating them. I don't know how to express this clearly: I learned to 'listen' to my eyes, I guess, and I sortof mentally hang out in the 'what does this mean?' zone. So it's still being processed at the word/clause level, but it's 'preprocessed'. I think part of this is because I'm constantly asking "what's going on?" in the text, so there's always a context. The times that doesn't work well, though, is in more rapid dialog. I'll lose track of who is saying what. I also have a tendency to skip names (I'm bad with names in general) and so it becomes, say, "K-lady" instead of "Kahlan". (In my defense, Goodkind ends up making all his characters 'generic good' or 'generic bad' anyway.)
Anyway, hope that helps. Feel free to ask questions: thinking about what I'm doing when I read isn't something I practice much. One thing I learned in high school was to not read where I sleep. I later learned the body gets 'confused' which sortof makes sense to me. I tend to read sitting up with the book at nearly eye level (not in my lap). I also read in the tub a lot (hope that's not TMI).
Do you find that you have more or less comprehension when you read this way? Is this the only way you read now or do you turn back on the subvocalizing a read slower at times? Do you read using different techniques depending on the material or how well you want to understand it?
Thanks again for the thoughtful response!
The goal of speed reading is to increase the rate at which you can _comprehend_ what you read, not just increasing the number of words your read per minute. My dad practiced speed reading while getting his PhD in business management precisely so that he could read the mountains of dense, academic research he needed to in less time. He can read and comprehend fully around 600 wpm. Try telling him that it doesn't work to really understand anything.
It's not something you can master in a week or even a month. It takes a long period of dedicated practice but it can definitely help anyone willing to commit to the training.
I dabbled with it when I was in high school and had something like a 50% speed up after a week, but I'm not a particularly disciplined student. I'm sure that if I had kept with it I'd have been able to double or triple my reading speed.
Perhaps you're trying to make an implicit point regarding subjectivity vs. objectivity, but if this is the case, I'd point out that (a) the effectiveness of speed reading is an inherently subjective question, and (b) you responded to my anecdote with only your own anecdote, despite explicitly making an absolute claim.
One suggestion: For me, at least, my reading relies on the shape of the sentence. And I think for everyone they would be looking at the right edge of the sentence as more words are coming in. So it's really jarring to have the right edge jumping around, and it might make more sense to right-align the marquee.
You lose the spatial cues of where each word's position is each time a new word is shifted on to the screen. Something like a smooth stock ticker would be much better.
Although, Spreeder looks much better.
For instance suppose I am reading in 5 word groups. Some groups I read faster than others. So even though my average reading speed is a bit above 700 wpm, at 700 wpm in your application I have noticeable pauses where I've finished the current chunk, and I have chunks I do not finish. It is very frustrating.
- let users play with fonts/colors/spacing to find their optimum setup.
- aggregate user preferences to find good defaults
Then you have an interesting blog post to write.
I think you should blow away the scrolling and have just two controls: chunk size and speed. Personally I found chunk size ~50 to be ideal.
As for the "blow away the scrolling", I made this to be configurable, sure it's nice to be simple, but I made it so I could tweak it on the fly. You wouldn't have found any chunk size to be ideal if I hadn't made it editable in the first place :P
"log in to save your preferences!"
As for "blow away the scrolling", I guess I'm channeling steve jobs: "This is the right way to do it."
People could prefer scrolling text, but from everything I know about reading, they ultimately will read faster if they use chunks.
I would love a "Speedify" button
1) It would be cool if the up and down arrow keys would make it faster and slower, or have some kind of gradual slider or something.
2) Doesn't speed reading have less to do with actual linear speed and more to do with effective and efficient scanning of the page? (I've heard people talk about moving from top left to bottom right)
+1 for right-aligned text.
Edit: I also second mahipal's recommendation to right-align the text.
Does this mean I actually read at 2000 WPM?
EDIT: it seems to get a whole lot easier to read when i align the text left. when it was aligned right i was wasting time getting my eyes to the always shifting beginning of the new line