3/26/2023 0 Comments 7 speed reading 2016This means that we can take in only a word or so at each glance, as well as a little bit about the words on either side. Our eyes are seriously limited in their precision outside of that. There is only a small area in the retina (called the fovea) for which our visual acuity is very high. Reading half-paragraphs led to better performance on a test of memory for the passage’s meaning than did reading only the first or second half of the text, and it worked as well as skimming under time pressure.īut speed reading? Techniques that aim to guide eye movements so that we can take in more information from each glance seem doomed to fail. Participants in a 2009 experiment read essays that had half the words covered up - either the beginning of the essay, the end of the essay, or the beginning or end of each individual paragraph. This is probably a good skimming strategy. ![]() Some speed-reading systems, for example, instruct people to focus only on the beginnings of paragraphs and chapters. We can definitely skim, and it may be that speed-reading systems help people skim better. In a recent article in Psychological Science in the Public Interest, one of us (Professor Treiman) and colleagues reviewed the empirical literature on reading and concluded that it’s extremely unlikely you can greatly improve your reading speed without missing out on a lot of meaning.Ĭertainly, readers are capable of rapidly scanning a text to find a specific word or piece of information, or to pick up a general idea of what the text is about. ![]() Unfortunately, the scientific consensus suggests that such enterprises should be viewed with suspicion. Today, apps like SpeedRead With Spritz aim to minimize eye movement even further by having a digital device present you with a stream of single words one after the other at a rapid rate. The course focused on teaching people to make fewer back-and-forth eye movements across the page, taking in more information with each glance. The first popular speed-reading course, introduced in 1959 by Evelyn Wood, was predicated on the idea that reading was slow because it was inefficient. And as the production rate for new reading matter has increased, and people read on a growing array of devices, the lure of speed reading has only grown stronger. Nonetheless, it has long been an aspiration for many readers, as well as the entrepreneurs seeking to serve them. The promise of speed reading - to absorb text several times faster than normal, without any significant loss of comprehension - can indeed seem too good to be true. ![]() “I read ‘War and Peace’ in 20 minutes,” he says. OUR favorite Woody Allen joke is the one about taking a speed-reading course.
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