One friend of mine decided to, as an experiment, read with a 1-minute interval timer (dings every minute), and force themselves to turn the page at every ding. Depending on the book, this is very fast—quick googling suggests 500 words per minute. They didn’t expect to keep reading at such a pace; it was an experiment. But after the experiment, they decided that they much preferred reading this way, and kept it up. The lowered comprehension was greatly compensated for by the ability to get content from many many books quickly.
A different friend of mine reads very slowly and thoroughly. This friend learned that many people have the experience of reading a paragraph and then realizing that they haven’t understood it, and re-reading. They were quite surprised at this, and compared it to learning that lots of people just aren’t conscious—how can you read something without comprehending it?? How can you be in the process of reading a paragraph without comprehending it, without realizing that you’re not comprehending it, for so long that you get to the end of a paragraph before you notice??
If the first friend wrote a book on reading, it might look similar to other books on speed reading (although I’d expect it to be many times better than the usual).
If the second friend wrote a book on reading, it would be a book on slow reading. It might involve stopping after every paragraph and seeing if you agree with the author’s conclusions. It might involve looking up a lot of reference material in other books, before you’ve even gotten very far in the book you’re trying to read. It might involve taking copious notes. By the time you finish a book, you might be able to re-write it yourself, but better.
I think I could very roughly put friends on a spectrum from speed reading to slow reading. The speed readers would generally have the characteristic of a broad knowledge base. They would bring in impressive amounts of knowledge to any conversation. However, if you want detail on subjects, you’ll often stump them. Their knowledge is shallow. They’ll often have to send you to read some paper or other to answer the questions they can’t answer themselves. And the papers often won’t back up their summaries because they read the paper only shallowly, and more or less trusted the abstract—which, often, aren’t an accurate summary of what’s in the paper.
The slow readers would be the careful thinkers. They have a deep knowledge base, with fractal detail. If they read a paper, they can tell you what’s wrong with the abstract, and what they think the real conclusions are. They won’t settle for outside-view knowledge of anything; they require a gears-level understanding before they consider themselves to have learned something.
There’s almost no ceiling to what you can understand from a given text. It’s just a question of how far you care to go.
So, in addition to raw comprehension rate, there’s also what kind of knowledge you want to foster. This probably varies from text to text. In some cases it’s best to absorb a broad base of material rapidly. In other cases it’s more useful to get a really detailed understanding, questioning all of the author’s conclusions, working through everything yourself.
So, in addition to raw comprehension rate, there’s also what kind of knowledge you want to foster. This probably varies from text to text. In some cases it’s best to absorb a broad base of material rapidly. In other cases it’s more useful to get a really detailed understanding, questioning all of the author’s conclusions, working through everything yourself.
I tried to take a stab at when to do which model in this post.
One friend of mine decided to, as an experiment, read with a 1-minute interval timer (dings every minute), and force themselves to turn the page at every ding. Depending on the book, this is very fast—quick googling suggests 500 words per minute. They didn’t expect to keep reading at such a pace; it was an experiment. But after the experiment, they decided that they much preferred reading this way, and kept it up. The lowered comprehension was greatly compensated for by the ability to get content from many many books quickly.
A different friend of mine reads very slowly and thoroughly. This friend learned that many people have the experience of reading a paragraph and then realizing that they haven’t understood it, and re-reading. They were quite surprised at this, and compared it to learning that lots of people just aren’t conscious—how can you read something without comprehending it?? How can you be in the process of reading a paragraph without comprehending it, without realizing that you’re not comprehending it, for so long that you get to the end of a paragraph before you notice??
If the first friend wrote a book on reading, it might look similar to other books on speed reading (although I’d expect it to be many times better than the usual).
If the second friend wrote a book on reading, it would be a book on slow reading. It might involve stopping after every paragraph and seeing if you agree with the author’s conclusions. It might involve looking up a lot of reference material in other books, before you’ve even gotten very far in the book you’re trying to read. It might involve taking copious notes. By the time you finish a book, you might be able to re-write it yourself, but better.
I think I could very roughly put friends on a spectrum from speed reading to slow reading. The speed readers would generally have the characteristic of a broad knowledge base. They would bring in impressive amounts of knowledge to any conversation. However, if you want detail on subjects, you’ll often stump them. Their knowledge is shallow. They’ll often have to send you to read some paper or other to answer the questions they can’t answer themselves. And the papers often won’t back up their summaries because they read the paper only shallowly, and more or less trusted the abstract—which, often, aren’t an accurate summary of what’s in the paper.
The slow readers would be the careful thinkers. They have a deep knowledge base, with fractal detail. If they read a paper, they can tell you what’s wrong with the abstract, and what they think the real conclusions are. They won’t settle for outside-view knowledge of anything; they require a gears-level understanding before they consider themselves to have learned something.
There’s almost no ceiling to what you can understand from a given text. It’s just a question of how far you care to go.
So, in addition to raw comprehension rate, there’s also what kind of knowledge you want to foster. This probably varies from text to text. In some cases it’s best to absorb a broad base of material rapidly. In other cases it’s more useful to get a really detailed understanding, questioning all of the author’s conclusions, working through everything yourself.
I tried to take a stab at when to do which model in this post.