I recently read Speed Reading, by Kam Knight.
I've pushed off digging into speed reading for some time, based, I think, on a number of objections:
Aesthetic discomfort — in a way, it feels distastefully mechanical and efficiency-centered;
Laziness — altering my reading habits feels uncomfortable;
Disbelief — I’ve been skeptical that one could truly improve reading speed without sacrificing comprehension and memory.
Finally, rather than dig into the question in the abstract or by looking at research or reviews that discuss "speed reading" as a monolithic thing, I decided it would be worthwhile to dig in and just give it a shot. I was particularly interested to do so, since I just left a job and intend to do quite a bit of reading in the coming weeks and months.
Significantly increasing the rate at which I read and assimilate information would vastly improve the outcome of this time spent, and felt well worth the preliminary effort.
What follows is a recap of the main take-aways of the book, followed by my conclusions about the experience. The book is split into a number of high-level sections, and aims not just to have you move from page to page faster, but to maximize your retention as you read.
Basic Argument
The book advocates for “speed reading,” as opposed to simply fast reading. One should tailor one’s reading speed to the complexity and importance of the material, and balance speed against comprehension. To do so, the author advocates “pre-reading” to quickly gain a sense of the argument and structure of a work and prepare a scaffolding for deeper engagement, and then advocates a variety of tactics to mechanically speed up one’s reading. Finally, he recommends techniques for maintaining comprehension and maximizing recall across time.
Used together, these techniques should increase reading speed where appropriate, while limiting any sacrifice of comprehension. Over the course of the book, I applied a number of these techniques and found the balance effective — roughly doubling my reading speed without appearing to sacrifice comprehension or retention.
It should be stressed that this is material-specific, and that I haven’t employed or practiced all the techniques discussed. But I would generally recommend this quick and easy read for anyone interested in reading more, faster.
Pre-Reading
If we aim to read quickly and well — to get and retain as much from each book or article as possible in as little time — it behooves us to spend some time on preparation.
Particularly, clarifying one's purpose in reading something, determining the structure of the reading material, and planning one's approach accordingly all allow one to read with maximal efficiency (given one's goals).
Purpose - One's reading purpose need not be long. It just needs to be clear enough to direct one's activities: I am scanning this article to better understand Bitcoin energy consumption; I am losing myself in this mystery novel for relaxation; I'm reading Plato's Republic to develop a starting opinion on the human and governmental ideal.
Structure - Once a purpose has been clarified, it helps to understand the structure of the reading material. Scan the table of contents and introduction, to get a sense of the structure of the argument you'll be walking through. Perhaps scan the conclusion as well. This can help provide a scaffold for what you encounter.
Strategy - Finally, tailor your reading approach to the nature of the material, in addition to what you want from it, and what you already know. Don't race through a complex treatise — unless you're already familiar with most of the complexity.
Bringing a sense of purpose, structure, and strategy to bear allows you to read at the pace and in the manner optimal for your goals, and to get the most out of the process.
Speed Reading Basics
Fundamentally, we read slowly because we read each individual word or letter, often vocalizing, pausing, and returning to re-read.
If we can, instead, ingest groups of words without vocalizing or pausing for unnecessary lengths of time or regressing to previous material, we can read much faster. Having a reading goal and maintaining focus and cadence can help with this process.
The basic technique for "speed reading" is to read multiple words at once, rather than each individually. There are two main techniques covered in the book:
Space reading - Focusing on spaces between words, rather than the individual words. This allows your eyes to capture the group gist of a set of words in the same way it captures the gist of a face, rather than focusing on features. At first, you can focus on the space between each word, then each two or three, then, eventually, perhaps the center of each line, gulping more words per pause as you go.
Chunking - Reading words in chunks (of 3-5, for example) rather than singularly. This requires explicitly chunking them in your mind, which requires some sense of grammatical/syntactical structure.
These two techniques are mutually exclusive. One either space reads or chunks, and based on my preliminary testing, space reading appears easier.
For both of these techniques, it is important not to "subvocalize" — or sound each word in one's head (or using one's lips). This slows down one's reading to the rate of one's vocalization, and is often prohibitive to either technique.
To avoid subvocalizing (if you do it), make sure to keep your mouth closed while reading. Additionally, humming (at controllable speeds) can block the subvocalization process, and listening to (wordless) music can drown it out.
Over time, as you practice reading quickly, subvocalizing will dissipate.
Speed Reading Enhancements
Space reading or chunking, along with eliminating subvocalization, are sufficient to significantly improve one's reading speed. (I can attest!) But layering on other techniques can perhaps augment these improvements. Fundamentally, these techniques aim at the same goal — increasing the number of words you read per eye movement, and speeding up the rate at which your eyes move.
The main enhancements discussed in the book are:
Shortening Fixation - When you read, you move your eyes in steps, pausing — or fixating — on a given word, space, or chunk. Because the time it takes you to read is a pure function of fixation time and chunk size, shortening the period involved in each fixation has a commensurate effect on reading speed. Shortening fixation time is a function of practice. Simply try to keep your fixation periods short and consistent, moving briskly and consistently along from space to space or chunk to chunk, and building a practice of avoiding excessive pauses.
Avoiding Regression - When we read, most of us "regress," or re-read what we've already read. This regression — either the result of "zoning out" or a simple habit — has obvious negative effects on reading velocity. To practice avoiding regression, one can physically disallow it, for example by moving an index card down the page as one reads. Additionally, one can train oneself to avoid regression by simply disallowing it. When you realize that you "zoned out" and missed the content in a particular paragraph or page, continue to move on, conditioning yourself to the mandate that reading requires focus, and incentivizing attention and comprehension on the first pass.
Augmenting peripheral vision - Reading speed is chunk size times fixation length. Above, I discussed shortening fixation, but one can also improve reading speed by expanding the number of words one imbibes at a time. Doing so requires being able to take in more words at a "gulp," and in essence, this requires training and expanding one’s peripheral vision. The book recommends a number of tactics for doing so, and advocates combining them all:
Shultz Tables - A number grid for training peripheral vision. Focus on the center number, and use only your peripheral vision to read through the other numbers in the grid, expanding the grid size or decreasing reading time to progress over time.
Sticks and Straw - An exercise for coordinating your peripheral vision on both sides, by inserting two toothpicks into the ends of a single straw, orienting them with your peripheral vision while staring at the straw's center.
Raining Letters - Reading side columns of letters while focusing only on the center column.
Centered Text - Drawing a line down a body of text, and expanding your horizontal range of comprehension while keeping your eyes fixed on the center line/word.
Combined, these three techniques — reducing fixation time, avoiding regression, and expanding your visual range — theoretically work together to increase the rate at which you can move between clusters of words, and the size of each cluster. At least in theory, together, these should result in greater reading velocity.
I have my doubts that one can drastically improve one’s intellectual absorption of textual material in one’s visual range, and I am unlikely to practice these techniques to work on this particular aspect of reading.
Improving Comprehension
Improving reading speed is irrelevant if not accompanied by sustained or improved comprehension and retention. The chapters in this section focus on improved reading comprehension. They are simple — more “basic concepts” than "tricks" or techniques — but appear to be good tools for focusing on getting the most out of your reading as your speed increases.
Focus on the main point - Any communicated information, be it an article, book, speech, or sentence, generally contains both a central thrust and supporting details. While reading, look for the central point, and make sure that you grasp and hold onto it, rather than focusing equivalently on central and peripheral text.
Track the topic sentence - As a specific technique, try to identify and retain the "topic sentence" of each paragraph. Typically, paragraphs are composed of these topic sentences, which lay out the "argument" of the paragraph, along with supporting details and a concluding sentence. If you identify the topic sentence, you've identified the core point, which you can track across paragraphs more easily to make sure you're absorbing the core intentions of the work.
Improve vocabulary - Finally, the author focuses on improving vocabulary. If your vocabulary is lacking, your reading (and comprehension) will slow way down. Similarly, a particularly verbally dense work is difficult to understand or intake quickly. Consequently, one should work to improve one's vocabulary by circling and returning to unknown words, looking up words in thesauri (rather than dictionaries), and generally putting in the long work over time.
Advanced Techniques
The book moves onto additional techniques for improving reading comprehension and memory. In particular, it's important to remember what you read, rather than simply scanning through it, and the first two below techniques are dedicated towards that end.
Recall and review - Regularly, while reading something, take the time to bring it back in memory. This can be at a high level — what was the core point of this chapter, section, or book? — and at a level of finer detail. It also helps to "review", poring back over the work to remind oneself of what one missed. (For me, these two steps take the place of periodic chapter- or section-specific voice notes from memory, and then write-ups to consolidate these memories at the end of each book.)
Importantly, developing a practice of recalling what you read also develops the instinct of preparing to recall it — otherwise known as remembering it — to begin with. By regularly striving to remember material read in the past, we incentivize ourselves to comprehend and consolidate it as we read.
Visualize to focus - Daydreaming, or "zoning out", is the enemy of fast and effective reading. To avoid it, the author recommends engaging with our reading more visually — trying, so far as possible, to simultaneously visualize words, sentences, and concepts as we read. This is a tough balance, so he suggests practicing slowly and building up: First, visualize individual words, then pairs, then sentences. Move your practice from highly visual novels to news, history, science, and drier works. Over time, you should build this practice of visualizing while you read.
Visualizing while reading, according to the author, not only crowds out daydreaming, but it also makes the material more impactful and memorable, since we are highly visual creatures, and our memory is entwined with our sensory input.
That said, I am personally unconvinced that I can exercise significant control over whether and how I visualize written language (particularly abstract intellectual language), or that doing so wouldn’t have a tradeoff against reading speed.
Exercise your eyes - Finally, the author argues that our eyes need some care, rest, and exercise from the work they do. He advocates eye exercises (side-to-side, circular, figure-8, and cross movements), as well as compression and expansion (hard blinking, and scrunching or opening your face).
I found these suggestions similarly tenuous, and un-backed by any evidence of their functionality.
Conclusion and thoughts
I found this book concise, helpful, and promising. Although I won't be able to report back definitively, having just begun to put some of this into practice, I found the advice and guidance immediately helpful. Specifically, I tested my reading speed before and after the chapters dedicated towards that end, and it more than doubled (from a bit below 300 words per minute to a bit above 600).
Moreover, I managed roughly that rate while fully comprehending the material (and, in fact, producing this write-up on it essentially from memory).
There are some serious caveats to this. Particular techniques — such as eye exercises for improving peripheral vision or to “stretch” or “rest” the eyes, and attempts to read in a vertical line without scanning — strike me as highly conceptual, un-evidenced, and likely not to work well. I will likely ignore these recommendations, as I am not convinced they will serve any purpose.
That said, I found the general advice to be sound, however, and experienced some immediate improvements as a result of implementing them.
This was a pretty simple book, without surprising syntax or significant mental requirements. But I feel that applying the techniques from this book consistently over the coming weeks (as the material allows) is likely to net in a significant improvement to my ability to engage with written material quickly and efficiently, maximizing the rate at which I absorb, comprehend, remember, and incorporate this material into my life.
Stretched over a future lifetime of reading, the value from that seems quite positive.
erratum: on should read "constellation of meaningS"
I can go through a big book and talk critically about it after 15 minutes of reading, sometimes less. But it's not just any book. I'm talking about an essay in a field I'm good at like psychology or Girardian theory.
I am then like the butcher of a Chinese emperor who cut up an ox in less time than it takes to say it, and without even wearing out the blade of his knife. He knew exactly where to put it.
When it comes to books, this means that you need to have an excellent knowledge of the field to read a book very quickly, which means mainly going to where it has something to teach you and, eventually (most often) finding that it has little or nothing to teach you.
On the other hand, when the field is a total discovery or when it offers a vertical dive into the archaeology of the meaning of known notions in their present meaning, it is VERY difficult and almost impossible to read quickly because a HUGE work of organization is necessary. For example, two days ago, I spent 3 hours waiting to see my doctor and I only read 12 pages of a book. But the subject (the person) is of such importance and historical depth that I couldn't do otherwise. I had to deal with a multiplicity of "resonances" at every step, which I had to put in order.
In short, the book you analyzed seems to me to be useful for the "technical" aspects of the reading, but they are secondary. The main thing is the meaning and, unless I read too quickly, it doesn't talk about it, or very little and especially very badly. One does not read the Republic to have a "starting opinion on the human and governmental ideal". One reads the Republic when one is capable of tearing it apart AND therefore already has within oneself all the constellation of meaning necessary to assimilate and accommodate it.
In fact, to finish, we can bring back the question of "to read quickly or not" to the opposition made by Piaget between assimilation and accommodation. We read quickly books that teach us little or nothing. The more a book teaches us something, the more important is the part of accommodation without which there is no elaboration of new meanings. And this work is almost incompressible.