| json_metadata | "{"app":"musing/1.1","appTags":["question","education","life"],"appCategory":"question","appTitle":"Does speed reading really help? Does it achieve both accuracy and speed in understanding a subject?","appBody":"<p>Speed reading training courses have been around for decades, and there has been a recent surge in the number of speed reading technologies that have been introduced to the consumer market. But how effective they are, is still a question mark. There are no magic shortcuts when it comes to reading more quickly while still fully understanding what we've read. There is a trade-off between speed and accuracy. If the readers spend less time on the material, they necessarily will have a poorer understanding of it.</p>\n<p>Reading is a complex dance among various visual and mental processes, skilled readers always read quickly, averaging 200 to 400 words per minute. Some speed reading technologies claim to offer an additional boost by eliminating the need to make eye movements by presenting words rapidly in the center of a computer screen or mobile device, with each new word replacing the previous word. The problem is that eye movements account for no more than 10% of the overall time we spend reading, and eliminating the ability to go back and reread previous words and sentences tends to make overall comprehension worse, not better. The biggest obstacle isn't our vision but rather our ability to recognize words and process how they combine to make meaningful sentences. Therefore so-called solutions that emphasize speeding up the input without making the language easier to understand will have limited efficacy.</p>\n<p>While some may claim prodigious speed reading skills, these claims typically don't hold up when put to the test. It has been proved many times in past that these individuals generally already know a lot about the topic or content of what they have supposedly speed-read. Without such knowledge, they often don't remember much of what they've read and aren't able to answer substantive questions about the text.</p>\n<p>This doesn't mean that we're necessarily stuck reading at the same speed all the time, however, prioritizing more informative parts of a text while glossing over others can be effective when we're only interested in getting the gist of what we're reading, instead of a deeper, more comprehensive understanding.</p>\n<p>Speed readers are actually effective skimmers who already have considerable familiarity with the topic at hand and are thus able to pick out key points quickly.</p>\n<p>The one thing that can help boost overall reading ability is practicing reading for comprehension. Greater exposure to writing in all its different forms provides us with a larger and richer vocabulary, as well as the contextual experience that can help us anticipate upcoming words and make inferences regarding the meaning of words or phrases we don't immediately recognize.</p>\n<p>Ultimately, there is no one ability or strategy that will enable us to zip through a novel in one sitting or process an inbox full of emails over the course of a lunch break.</p>","appDepth":2,"appParentPermlink":"fk3nmlwaf","appParentAuthor":"littymumma","musingAppId":"aU2p3C3a8N","musingAppVersion":"1.1","musingPostType":"answer"}" |
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