“Unlimited Breakthrough Super Rapid Speed Reading Scientific Hacks” could well be the name of a book on speed reading. Thousands of books about this topic have been published since the 1950s, and although they promise mythical reading performance, for most people the only thing going fast is money out of their bank accounts for those hollow promises.
Great speed in reading is a dubious achievement; it is of value only if what you have to read is not really worth reading. A better formula is this: Every book should be read no more slowly than it deserves, and no more quickly than you can read it with satisfaction and comprehension.
Mortimer J. Adler
Many speed reading literature is based on unsupported premises like the following.
- Increase your reading speed by 300% in less than 24 hours;
- How to read 300% faster in 20 minutes;
- Read 3X faster and improve your memory in 12 hours or less!;
- Read anything up to 8 times faster!;
- How to read 5X faster in a simple 5 step formula;
- How to read one page in 3 seconds!;
- Accelerate your reading speed and comprehension by 400% in less than 24 hours.
With so many numbers being used in these titles, one could almost sort them by the announced speed rate and simply choose to buy the “fastest” one. If only it were that simple. These tempting claims are really just marketing attention grabbers trying to reel you into the fallacy-filled world of speed reading.
Many years ago, as a youngster, I became curious as to how I could become more productive. I recognized that knowledge gives people choices, and I wanted to make my own choices in life. In my efforts to achieve that goal, I bought a book to learn how to speed read. It was written by a former director at the Evelyn Wood Reading Dynamics. For those who don’t know, “Evelyn Wood Reading Dynamics” is the name of a company and a popular speed reading program based on the works of Evelyn Nielsen Wood.
Evelyn was a teacher in Utah, United States in the 1950s. She claimed she could read at up to 2,700 words per minute (wpm) by sweeping a finger or the tip of a pen along the lines as she read.
Having in mind that the average adult reading rate is between 200 and 400 wpm, that claim would’ve had many heads turning in that time. Not only then, but it still does today, especially around the uninformed people. After all, who doesn’t want to read faster in a world of information overload? You want to find the secret trick that will allow you to spend less time reading stories, manuals, or textbooks.
Much of the speed reading literature swears by these common principles – or “hacks” as the Internet hype likes to call them.
- Widen Visual Span (looking at blocks of words per eye fixation using peripheral vision)
- Suppress sub-vocalization (stop internally pronouncing each word as you read it)
- Stop regressions (re-reading words)
When I finished reading the book and completed all the exercises I realized I had learned one big lesson. Next time I shouldn’t be so naive when choosing and paying for a book. I felt tricked by the information I had wasted my time on. This sort of book will lull you with detailed methods along the lines of “look there, never look back, point here, and then zigzag across down the first page and up the middle of the second page”. Rest assured this nonsense will take you nowhere useful as a reader.
What about comprehension?
A little psychology goes a long way. Some publications basically lie with a straight face claiming you retain 100% of what you speed read. Others, more comically, however, postpone any attempt at discussing comprehension until the very end of the process, and then they go like “time’s up, I gotta go” leaving you to measure your comprehension by yourself – implying confidence you will “surely” score higher than before. They’ll rather be the bearer of good news, i.e. “faster reading” and have disappeared by the time you find out that your comprehension went crashing down.
Due to a carefully planned and persuasive talk by speed reading proponents, after you’ve paid the money and still can’t reach the claimed goals, you may be left puzzled thinking to yourself “I must have done something wrong”, instead of blaming the real cause, the methods. Some authors admit to a comprehension drop but only in the first attempts at the methodologies, further explaining that you need to “keep practicing” in order to recover and improve your comprehension. With this false argument, they’re effectively transferring any failure responsibility to your lack of practice and not their methods.
Their effectiveness in fooling readers, lies in the difficulty of measuring comprehension objectively, which in turn creates a playground for scammers to use smoke and mirrors and turn the table on you.
Scam Meets Research
Let’s get serious now. Although some readers are naturally quicker than others, what can you reasonably expect from speed reading materials?
A study found that, for 40 learners of English, a nine-week long course on speed reading developed their reading fluency. In their results, most learners increased their reading speed, some very substantially. However, the average improvement was only 52%. Only 13% doubled their reading speed, and no student was able to triple it. A reader is not expected to go above around 700 wpm after learning to speed read.
Research has also demonstrated that readers who are able to double or triple their reading speed are likely to lose comprehension of the text. The way to maintain an understanding of the text and still be able to go through it faster is to increase your vocabulary. Language skill is thus decisive for reading speed.
In the delicate balance of the comprehension vs speed debate, the following story stands out. Six-time world champion Anne Jones apparently achieved 4200 wpm devouring a Harry Potter book of 784 pages in 47 minutes back in 2007. She then summarized the book for some news networks.
It should be noted, however, that she had the advantage of having read the previous Harry Potter books. This gave her mental context where to store any inferences based on partial information she found in the new book. Also, there was no thorough scientific comprehension test done to her, leaving questions about her actual comprehension of the reading. Even if she had been able to pull this off with relatively good comprehension, she would not have been able to explain it to other people because she would most likely naturally have a special ability, which would not be transferable to others by spurting out a list of simple speed-reading tricks.
As it turns out, several speed reading myths are debunked by research that proves we are biologically limited in the way we see and read. This bears importance for our context.
- Our peripheral vision cannot read an entire line of text or large parts of a page. This is because visual precision is highest only in the fovea, which is just 1º away of visual angle from the center of the vision, in any direction. This is less than a thumb’s width at a comfortable reading distance. Outside the fovea area, you still have a 4º angle of moderate visual acuity, but light information in that area is averaged before being sent to the brain, so you have lower precision making it difficult to recognize words. Apparently, in this region, you can only identify the smaller and most common words such as the three-letter “the”.
- Our eye movements cannot be sped up. The typical 250 ms that takes experienced adult readers to fixate a word involve motor responses that are physically limited by the functional components of the eye.
- Text can be ambiguous due to using words with multiple meanings or grammatical punctuation. For this reason, regressions – moving backward in the text to a previous word to correct a problem in comprehension, are what allows people to correct misunderstandings. Because stopping regressions is one of the principles of speed reading, this equates to a drop in comprehension.
- Subvocalization (silent reading) plays an important part in word identification and comprehension, meaning that we cannot suppress it without hurting comprehension.
Don’t be caught in the trap
Most of the speed reading courses and literature don’t deliver on their promises, so don’t waste your time and money. Instead, practice reading – which means to learn reading by actually reading all sorts of books and other texts you enjoy. This will improve your vocabulary and understanding which will ultimately increase fluency and speed.
Further Reading
If you want more information on Evelyn Wood’s speed reading scam, you can check out the book “Scan Artist” by Marcia Biederman.
Photo by Thaís Silva from Pexels