How reading fast can help you

What if you could read twice the books in half the time? Would you practise a new skill?

Reading is absolutely an incredibly important skill to have. You can often make yourself an expert on an intellectual subject just by reading enough in that area. But despite the incredible importance of reading, most people are wildly inefficient at it. Like a child that never goes beyond a crawl, most people have enough reading skills to move around, but they are far from running.

Speed reading is controversial and complicated. But being able to read fast is undoubtedly a useful skill to have, just in case.

As a software engineer, we usually need to do a lot of reading, like reading documentation, instructions of a library, articles, blogs, solutions and many similar things.

Speed reading “official” techniques

These from the book:

• Stop Subvocalization¹. When we read out aloud, we are slowed down by our muscles. To move to a new level you need to stop sounding the words inside your head or subvocalizing. Subvocalizing takes time, more time than is necessary to comprehend the words you are reading. It is almost impossible to go much beyond 250 or 300 words while subvocalizing for someone like me. Instead you need to train yourself to read without hearing the words in your head. When we read “in our mind”, some people tend to mimic the same thing they do when they’re reading aloud. They focus on each syllable and pronounce them fully (in their mind). This is very slow. Instead, we should just look at the word and then move on. This is tricky in the beginning, but our brain adapts very quickly. Once you stop subvocalization, you’ll at least double your reading speed without losing any comprehension.²

• Use a Pointer: Your eyes don’t stay fixed in one spot when reading. Eye tracking movements have shown that your eyes actually quiver and move around considerably. And every movement away from your position in text requires a few milliseconds to readjust. These little readjustments in locating your place in a book add up to be very costly if you want to go faster. With computers you can do auto-scroll.

• Eliminate Distractions: Reading can’t happen in an environment where external distractions are overwhelming or amidst an upset mind with so many things going on.

  If you need a break, take a break. Listen to some music or just close your eyes can often improve your focus or go under the Sun. But don’t multitask with your reading or you’ll lose any benefits speed reading can offer. Worse, because you have stopped subvocalizing, you might even skim through several pages before you realize you haven’t comprehended anything that was written.

  Distractions will hamper regular reading but they will make speed reading impossible. Subvocalization creates enough mental noise that it can hold your attention, but without that it can often be difficult to stick with what you are reading.

  External distractions may be a problem, but internal distractions are just as bad. They occur when in the midst of reading you start pondering that conversation you just had with someone, some flashback from past or some of your tasks from future. The way to remove internal distractions comes from clearly identifying a purpose and a motivation.

• Don’t bother reading every word. Your eyes can move very fast and your brain can process things even faster. (Think about how a batter faces a spin bowler). Just move from one part of the sentence to another part very quickly. Your brain will adapt to quickly reading the words in between.

• Don’t bother reading every sentence. Same as above, but applied to paragraphs. This helps with loose prose where sentences are stuffed into paragraphs with not much new content within each sentence. Sometimes you can just read the beginning and end of a paragraph and make as much sense of it as you would if you read all the sentences.

Insights

• Not all sentences/paragraphs/writings are created equally. When reading something there are plenty of sections you can ignore because they’re irrelevant or things that you already know. When you start a paragraph and you know that you agree with the paragraph’s content from the first sentence, you can probably skip the paragraph.

• Think while reading. The above becomes true when we’re actively interacting with the material that we’re reading. Our mind should have a rough idea of what the author might be saying from the title itself. Then, every paragraph becomes one of:

  • an idea you already know - which you can skip
  • an idea you hadn’t thought about but you understand - which you can quickly read to confirm your understanding
  • an idea you disagree with - which you will have to slowly read so that you understand
  • not an idea, just fluff - which you can skip

• Focus on the new. When I’m reading something, I’m always categorizing stuff and looking for the new ideas (the ones I hadn’t thought about and the ones I disagree with). I slow down and make sure that I assimilate these ideas into my worldview. For the ones I disagree with I might even have to stop reading and come up with a reason why the author might have written it down that way (so that I can still accommodate in my worldview about other people’s worldview).

• Read with purpose. If we read something without a question in our mind, we’re going to be slow and we’re going to be bored. I pick up books only when a review leaves me sufficiently critiqued. I pick up articles only if it sounds like there’s something in it that I do not know. I quickly scan through to find this and finish reading.

Conclusion

In essence, speed reading is about intentional reading. It is about focusing on reading as a way to assimilate information, rather than reading for the sake of reading. And it is about cutting the cruft from our reading behaviour. There’s no controversy or cheating in that.

Footnote: inspired to put this article for my reference(would keep on adding new ideas) from Akshay Dinesh

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