Speed Reading Baloney

Took an Evelyn Wood speed reading course my senior year of high school. It was the only thing I ever did to prepare for college. Turned out to be useless. The only time it boosted my reading rate was when I was sitting in the speed reading class doing timed reading drills. When I bragged to a friend at school that I would soon be reading 600 - 900 words a minute, he just smiled at me and said, "Why would I ever want to do that? When I read something fine like The Brothers Karamazov I don't want to rush through it."

A couple days ago I got into a discussion with my brother-in-law, a computer engineering professor, who claimed speed reading works, even when reading Shakespeare, Tostoy, or Dickens. So I did a little research.

Cecil Adams http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/863/does-speed-reading-really-work summarized a study done by Marcel Just et al., published in The Psychology of Reading and Language Comprehension (1987). Marcel Just and his colleagues tested three groups: speed readers, normal readers, and "skimmers"--that is, people who were told to read rapidly but had no special training.

The researchers found that the speed readers read a little faster than the skimmers (700 WPM versus 600 WPM) and much faster than the normal readers (240 WPM). But the speed readers' comprehension was invariably worse, often a lot
worse, than that of the normal readers. What's more, the speed readers out-comprehended the skimmers only when asked general questions about easy material. When asked about details, or when reading difficult material, the skimmers and speed readers tested equally poorly.

Conclusion: speed reading might help you read TV cue cards faster, but for technical stuff, the kind S-R boosters want us to read faster so we can whomp the Japanese, it's pretty useless. Reading seems to be like losing weight--there's just no fast and easy way to do it. For more, see The Psychology of Reading and Language
Comprehension, Just et al., 1987.

Another article at msnbc.news dated March 2007, "Slow Down: Speed Reading is Bunk, Studies Say." http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/17705002/

When you read, your eyes act like spotlights on a stage. The construction of your eyes allows them only to focus on one small area on the page at a time, so the idea of speed reading is bunk, according to several studies published in the Journal of Vision this month. Although you might have the illusion that you
see the whole page, you can actually only see small groups of letters at the point where your eyes are focused. Only eight or 10 letters fit in this tiny window, called the visual span. The rest of the letters are just a blur, said Gordon Legge, a vision researcher at the University of Minnesota . . . Because of the constraints of the visual span, reading more than 300 words per minute is almost impossible.

"Speed reading is misleading," said Legge, whose research is published in the March issue of the Journal of Vision. "There's no magic there. You're just planting the little island of vision quickly through the page.”

According to its proponents, real speed reading, as opposed to skimming or “smart reading” (i.e. strategies intended to boost reading speed and accuracy through such pre-reading techniques as scanning the table of contents, index, headings, identifying specific information sought before reading, and ensuring optimal reading environment, etc . . .) invariably involves the elimination of subvocalization – that little voice in your head that a normal reader listens to when reading. As one proponent of speed reading put it, subvocalization acts “as a speed limit” on reading rate. Eliminate that little voice in your head and a person can read many times faster. It’s what we all do when we see a small collection of objects, we can tell how many there are without counting. It’s what we do when we see the word “CAR.” Proficient readers don’t subvocalize “C – A – R “ when they see that word. They recongnize the word “CAR” on sight just as they would recognize a familiar face. Teachers would call it a “sight word.” The question is, can you have whole paragraphs, if not whole pages, of sight words. Proponents of speed reading claim that you can be trained to read long passages of text without subvocalizing it.

The official Evelyn Wood Reading Dynamics website describes the speed reading process this way: “. . . you are taught to see every word on the page, but to read for meaning not words. Speed is increased by reading many words at once...not by reading one of many words.” The Evelyn Wood site also claims this visual process will allow you to read “as fast as you can flip the page.” http://www.ewrd.com/ewrd/index.asp “Once you learn to read by sight only,” the Evelyn Wood site claims, “you will be able to read . . . whole ideas with each glance.” In describing “dynamic comprehension”, the trade name for the specific Evelyn Wood technique, the folks at the Evelyn Wood.com summed it up this way: “It is like watching movie.” (sic)

Of course, the word “CAR” is a whole idea, and any proficient reader can read that whole idea with a glance. There are also one or two whole ideas contained in the Gettysburg Address and Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech. Come to think of it, Hamlet’s soliloquy is but one whole idea. The Evelyn Wood method would have you read the Gettysburg Address, Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech, and Hamlet’s soliloquy “by sight only.” As you read these works using her method, you will be reading “whole ideas with each glance.” In the words of the Evelyn Wood website, it will be like watching a movie.

But is reading War and Peace, The Iliad, or Les Miserables really like watching a movie? Can an average person trained in speed reading techniques zoom through them at three, four, or five times the average reading rate without a significant loss of comprehension? I don’t think so. In his 2010 book, Teach Like a Champion, Doug Lemov says of reading:

“Developing students’ ability to comprehend the full amount of information carried within the text relies on an “expressive ear” that can extract meaning from subtext, tone, register, innuendo, and analogy. Mature books rely even more heavily for their meaning on the portion of the argument carried by these subtextual elements. Unlocking those forms of meaning must be continually practiced and modeled even, and especially, in the later years. The best way to truly understand Shakespeare, experts will tell you, is to read it aloud.”

How, one might ask, would one fully comprehend tone “by sight only?” Even proponents of speed reading allow that speed reading is not the best way to approach complex or difficult material such as an article in a medical journal, a legal contract, or an article on some topic in mathematics.

As one speed reading proponent noted:

"Sub-vocalization is still important in the understanding of complex concepts but, it is not necessary and is undesirable for most of what we read. E-mail, magazine articles, and news articles simply do not require deep comprehension to understand. Subjects like mathematics, philosophy and complex concepts are not suited to speed reading techniques. Speed reading techniques are still useful in covering reviews and summaries of these topics."

The question remains: why would anyone want to zip through Shakespeare, Anna Karenina, or Bleak House or any other great work for that matter - unless they're bored? There are things in life that must be experienced at a slower pace in order to be fully appreciated. Imagine a person gulping down a bottle of the finest wine in one tilt, swallowing a gourmet meal with one or two chews, then zipping through every floor of the Louve in twenty minutes. Now that person claims to have appreciated each of those things – the wine, the gourmet meal, the Louve – as fully and completely as though he’d partaken of them in the conventional manner.

“At all events, whatever the cause, our students have lost the practice of and the taste for reading. They have not learned how to read, nor do they have the expectation of delight or improvement from reading.” -Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind