I recently finished a book by Dr. Stanley D. Frank called Remember Everything You Read. It’s a book on speed reading.
According to the book, the way most of us read is called “linear subvocal reading.” We scan a line of text from left to right and sound out the words in our heads. Some people even mouth the words. Why do we read this way? The book doesn’t speculate, but I would venture a guess: It is an artifact of being taught to read phonetically. We are told to “sound the words out” from the very start of our careers as readers, and we never stop.
Linear subvocal reading is obviously inefficient. It is limited by the speed of your mental voice, and it activates parts of your brain that should be unnecessary for reading. You are translating text into imaginary sounds, then translating the sounds into meaning, then assembling those meanings into bigger ideas. The Evelyn Wood technique is to stop reading phonetically. “Accept visual, as opposed to auditory, reassurance as you read.” (p69)
The Evelyn Wood approach also involves hand motions on the page while you read. The motions guide your eyes and help you resist regressing over material you’ve already read (and actually understood just fine the first time). It also tries to teach you to read vertically instead of linearly, and to read in layers.
The layers thing is interesting. You don’t just look at the text once. First you get an overview, then a preview, THEN you read it, then you do a post-view, and finally you do a review. The point is not just to read faster, but to improve comprehension and retention.
To summarize the main idea of the book, the goal of reading should be to absorb the meaning out of written passages, not to engage in the exercise of sounding out the words at 250 WPM for its own sake.
After reading the book (at high speed, incidentally) I decided to do research on speed reading. Does speed reading work? Are the claims made in Remember Everything You Read true? Can people read at 2,927 WPM with 92% comprehension, like the student Max mentioned on p161 of the book? What I discovered was… frustrating.
More below the fold.
On the one hand we have speed reading gurus like Howard Berg and Tony Buzan making dodgy claims. They sell fluffy books or offer overpriced training programs that turn out to just be repackaged versions of what Evelyn Wood was selling decades ago.
On the other hand we have skeptics who cite a small handful of research studies on reading speed (some of which are also a little dodgy, in my opinion), and from these they jump prematurely to the conclusion that speed reading is complete bunk.
Here is an example. The Skepdic article on speed reading says this:
Those desiring to increase the speed of their reading would do better to enroll in a community college course devoted to building study skills, vocabulary, and reading comprehension. It would cost them less, and they would not end up wasting their time trying to read 10 lines at a time, backward and forward. They would also avoid the frustration that will be inevitable when they find that while they can skim through material at a greater rate than they can read it, the utility of such a skill is limited (good for most of what’s likely to be in the daily newspaper, for example, but not for studying physics or reading a good novel). Skimming makes both comprehension and taking pleasure in words or ideas next to impossible. Why read fiction at all if you don’t want to enjoy the language and the ideas? Who would want to hire a physician or lawyer who skimmed rather than read his or her texts?
Really? That’s a bold statement. Where is your evidence that enrolling in such a course at a community college increases reading speed? And where is your evidence, incidentally, that community college would cost less? Where is your evidence that skimming is useless for studying physics or reading a novel? Where is your evidence that speed reading makes fiction less pleasurable?
These assertions aren’t rational skepticism, they’re just one personal opinion. Hey Mr. Fancy Pants Skeptic Dude, you’re opinion is no more valid than mine or anybody else’s. And my opinion is that you’re full of steaming piles of horse manure. I got the Evelyn Wood book for free from my library. Free is cheaper than community college. One of the first texts that I practiced speed reading upon was a short story by Earnest Hemingway. I liked it better for reading it fast.
Some of these skeptics are making claims that sound just as dodgy as the claims made by the speed reading gurus. They are too focused on “debunking.” The truth is more nuanced than they’re predisposed to admit.
So, what does the science actually say?
<<SIGH>>… Well, I’ve been trying to dig into the science, and that’s the frustrating part. It’s damn difficult to find the full text of published studies on speed reading online. The few pertinent studies I’ve found on PubMed cost exorbitant sums to read.
It appears that much of the “debunking” of speed reading stems from a single study by Ronald Carver that is some 20 years old and only had 16 research subjects. And it seems as if of those 16, only 4 were actually trained in a formal speed reading technique!
In another study trainees in a particular Japanese speed reading system were indeed able to increase their reading speed, but at a cost to comprehension. However, a very interesting side note to that study states that an expert in that system (for some reason only 1 such expert was tested) had a high reading speed paired with good comprehension. So, here we have empirical evidence that reveals it is not impossible to read fast with good comprehension, though it might be rare.
There’s a book called Psychology of Reading (Keith Raynor) that contains useful info, but it also costs a bloody fortune. It’s stupid how expensive textbooks are. Argle bargle. But a bit of the book can be previewed on Amazon, and it has this to say:
The most complete study of the eye movement characteristics of speed readers was carried out by Just, Carpenter, and Masson. In their study the eye fixations of speed readers (reading at rates around 600-700 wpm) and normal readers (reading around 250 wpm) were compared. In addition, normal readers were asked to skim the text (producing “reading” rates around 600-700 wpm). When tested after reading, the speed readers did as well as the normal readers (when reading at their normal speed and not skimming) on general comprehension questions or questions about the gist of the passage. On the other hand, when tested about the details of the text, speed readers could not answer questions if they had not fixated on the region where the answer was located. Normal readers, whose fixations were much denser than the speed readers, were able to answer the detail questions relatively well. When normal readers were asked to skim the text, both their eye movement patterns and comprehension measures were very similar to those of speed readers.
At first blush, this study seem to suggest that there really isn’t much difference between trained speed reading and untrained skimming. But notice that the study defines “speed readers” just as people who read 600-700 WPM, not people trained in a specific speed reading technique. There is no indication that this study pits true speed readers versus ordinary readers! It actually just pits natural skimmers versus non-skimmers. It should be unsurprising then that the non-skimmers attain similar results when asked to skim.
So, the verdict is still out for me on speed reading.
But these assertions seem safe:
Some of the scientific claims made by speed reading programs are false. For example, many claim you can eliminate subvocalization, but this may not actually be possible.
The outcomes promised by most speed reading programs are exaggerated. A study published in the Journal of Vision makes a compelling case that the visual span, which is the number of letters in a line of text that can be recognized when the eye fixates on a single point on a page, creates a sensory bottleneck in reading. The speeds promised in my Evelyn Wood book are, sadly, unrealistic. The evidence suggests that breaking what the book calls the “subsonic reading barrier” to achieve reading speeds in excess of 900 WPM isn’t possible, and what Evelyn Wood students actually learn is skimming for main ideas.
There are speed reading gurus who are outright con artists. Be careful. Any time you hear the name Kevin Trudeau you should hide your wallet. And by the way, the FTC slammed Howard Berg for making deceptive claims and they shut down his Mega Reading business.
Even if speed reading just turns out to be strategic skimming, that might not be so bad. Strategic skimming is a useful skill to add to the student’s tool chest. It should also be noted that some speed reading programs also teach kids other study habits that are indisputably beneficial.
Slow reading is useful too. You should keep it as a tool in your reading tool chest. Use it for poetry. In poetry the sounds words make adds to the pleasure of reading and contributes to the meaning of the work. Use it any time you want to savor or deeply analyze the exact words, the exact grammar, the exact construction of a passage.
Fast reading with comprehension is not a myth. There are individuals who read over twice as fast as the average while maintaining good comprehension. Their reading speeds are a far cry from 25,000 WPM or even 1,000 WPM, but are still notable.
The goal of reading 500 WPM while maintaining comprehension seems realistic to me.
If a student could increase her reading speed from 250 WPM to 500 WPM without sacrificing comprehension, this would improve her entire academic career. Finishing her reading assignments in half the time would give her more time for reviewing materials, writing papers, resting, and enjoying extra curricular activities.
Speed reading has not been studied thoroughly enough yet. Here are some studies I’d like to see:
– Correlation between reading WPM and GPA for elementary school, high school, college, and post grad. (Please use a big sample, not 16 people.)
– Correlation between reading WPM and SAT scores.
– Comparisons of reading comprehension between normal readers and speed reading experts trained in specific techniques, with results broken out by technique.
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