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LOG 001 · TECHNICAL · 2019-05-27

A Realistic Speed Reading Technique

6 min read

Have you been researching speed reading recently? If you google “Speed Reading”, you can find a multitude of opinion pieces. Half the articles tote the value of speed reading and the time-saving benefits, while the other half claim anyone who speeds reads is not processing any of the information.

I’m here to tell you that both sides are correct! Speed reading does reduce comprehension, but not by as much as some people would have you believe. Speed reading is a trade-off between comprehension and time taken to read. The average adult reading this will have a reading speed of around 300 words per minute (wpm). If you practice speed reading techniques, it is not hard to get that speed up to 700–800 wpm with minimal loss of comprehension. Personally, the jump from 300 to 700 results in a 10–20% loss of comprehension. This is normal!

So what good is speed reading? You don’t want to miss out on 10–20% of a book, but on the other hand, finishing the book 200% faster is very appealing.

How to use Speed Reading:

Firstly, I never speed read fiction. Fiction and non-fiction are incredibly different mediums and you should not read them the same way. In fiction, you want to let the author take the reins and guide you through an experience like a movie playing in your head. You certainly don’t want spoilers and you don’t want to be racing through the plot and missing little details.

Consider the reason why you would read a non-fiction book. The primary reason for selecting a non-fiction book to read is to download information into your brain. Since we can’t install helicopter_piloting_for_dummies.exe as they do in the matrix, non-fiction is the next fastest method for adding information into your brain.

You probably aren’t reading non-fiction for fun. Who cares about spoilers for “The Making of the Atomic Bomb”? With this thought in your mind, you should already be realizing that when you read non-fiction, you should not just go through it cover to cover and hope that you’ve absorbed all the important information.

Your goal is to extract information out of this book at the fastest speed possible and, most importantly, to retain that information for later use.

The Michigan University PDF: How to read a book, v5.0

Researchers from Michigan University published a document on “How to read a book”, I’ll briefly summarise the outlined method.

  1. Have a purpose Try to write down why you want to be reading this book and make it clear in your mind which information you will gain as a result of reading it. If you find that this book isn’t what you need it to be, stop wasting your time and start a new book.

  2. Read actively Instead of reading each word in order, cover to cover, decide for yourself how much of each chapter to read through and which parts are important. Depending on your purpose for reading the book, you may want to skim through most of the certain chapters. It is recommended to still read some amount of each chapter to ensure that you get the full context of the book.

  3. Rehearse important content It is important to use multiple modes of memorization to be able to accurately recall critical information. If there is a specific quote that you like, write it down several times. Read it out loud. Try imagining the author speaking it out loud and ascribe some particular qualities to the situation the author is in. If you just read the quote and hope to remember it later, you’re very likely to be imprecise or completely forget it.

  4. Read the book 3 times This is the most critical point to take in. Reading a book once is not enough to fully internalize all the information. If you’ve ever re-watched a movie and learned so much more the second time, you’ll intuitively understand it.

Most people respond to the last point with “Three?! I’m barely reading a book once, let alone 3 times!”

Here’s where speed reading and active reading come into play. Reading a book three times will NOT take you 3x as long as reading it once. Following these steps, you can expect to take 1.5–2x longer to read the book when you first try it. The upside is that you’ll actually be learning and be able to recall everything you want to from the text. With this method, specific quotes and arguments are easy to memorize.

You might argue that you can read more books if you only read them once. Consider the amount of information you actually gain when you read a book just once. I and the researches from the University of Michigan argue that you retain so much more from successive re-reads that it is certainly worth the effort. What’s the point of reading 2x the books if you can’t remember either of them?

The first time you read a book, you are trying to understand the context and identify the structure and important bits of content. This is also a great time to vet a book and decide that you aren’t actually going to read it if it doesn’t seem to be meeting your expectations. Don’t read every word and be sure to skip around to the most important parts of information. You should aim to pace through the book at roughly 5–10x the speed that you’d read comfortably. This means you will need to use speed reading and skimming, don’t worry about specific comprehension yet. While doing this, use a pen or mark-up tool to highlight passages, headings, and phrases which seem the have good information. Don’t get bogged down by these! It can be hard to avoid spending 30–60 seconds digesting an interesting passage, but you need to just mark it and come back to it later.

The second time, you are going to spend a lot longer reading. Speed reading is used sparingly in this step. You should speed read sections which don’t have any markings from your first read, and slow down to a comfortable speed when you hit important passages. Spend the extra time thinking about the important information and take it slow. This stage will take you nearly as long as it would read the book normally.

The last time you read the non-fiction book will be exclusively for note taking. You won’t even speed read the non-important sections. Using a separate notebook, skip from highlight to highlight that you left from the previous reads and determine if the information is valuable enough to write down. Summarise each chapter in dot points and reward critical passages in your own words. If the book has quotes you want to commit to memory, use multiple methods to rehearse the specific quote and be sure to include them in your notebook.

In summary, here’s what to do at each stage:

  1. Discover the book Determine if it is worth reading Understand the structure of the book Highlight passages & chapters which seem important Read incredibly fast and skim most of it over

  2. Understand the book Comprehend all the important passages Read at a comfortable pace

  3. Commit the information to memory Only look at the highlighted passages Summarise chapters & reword important passages Rehearse quotes to learn them word for word

Now that you know when to use speed reading, give it a shot with that non-fiction book you’ve been wanting to read but couldn’t find the time for. If you’re halfway through a non-fiction book, leave a marking at where you are and use this method for the second half. I recommend picking short non-fiction books to get started as It may take a few books to get the hang of the technique. I guarantee that you will be able to recall information significantly better once you’ve got this technique down.

Comment below with the next book you’re going to try this technique on!

For further reading, here is a link to the PDF published by Michigan University. pne.people.si.umich.edu/PDF/howtoread.pdf

If you want to learn how to read faster, Tim Ferriss has a great article with some learning techniques that will hugely increase your speed with just a couple of hours of practice over 2 weeks. https://tim.blog/2009/07/30/speed-reading-and-accelerated-learning/