speed reading?? who does it

[dustyperez]

Hey guys, so I'm in online school and It requires lots of reading sometimes of boring ass shit. I do pretty well with grades so I'm not exactly dumb but I am a slow reader with bad comprehension. I always wander off in my mind and have to re-read so much.

Has anyone ever tried one of those speed reading courses where ya just look at the words or whatever and speed thru pages and pages?

[chadthestampede]

I've done a little bit of work with it for my students as I find it helps with timed tests. Basically the idea is that when you read normally you sub-vocalize, or essentially read aloud to yourself.

What speed reading does is work to avoid sub-vocalization by comprehending rather than reading. If you pay attention you'll notice that if you read a short sign or a brand name, you don't read it aloud in your head, but if you are reading longer passages or books you do.

Also, most people have a respectable reading speed but their comprehension is terrible, as they are easily distracted. The trick is to be interested in the material and to force your brain to read at a quicker pace in so your mind doesn't wander.

Something to try for free would be zapreader.com. It's a cool website that you can past text into and it flashes it to you one word at a time - the idea being that your brain only has time to comprehend rather than to 'read' the word in the normal sense. You can adjust the speed to fit your preferences and increase as you go. It's surprising how much quicker you can get in a relatively short period of time.

That being said, speed reading is not some magical solution that suddenly makes you read really quickly. I don't buy into a lot of it, but I think some of the ideas work.

There was a thread like this before and it basically devolved into a dick measuring contest about how fast people can read - or at least how fast they've convinced themselves they can read - so I wanted to get in here first. Speed is nothing without comprehension,

[dustyperez]

Yea ill have to check that out for sure, and I agree about the comprehension part. Whats the point if you dont even remember any of it.

[evandael]

i speed read. but do i speed comprehend?

i often found myself re-reading the same passages over and over again, especially in important classes like statics or higher level lit classes.