This article was written 2024/01/07
So, I’ve now spend a week learning to speed read. Here are my thoughts about this experiment.
The resource I used presents two different exercises (For proper explanations about the process, I recommend reading it yourself).
*Edit 2024/01/09: In order to avoid plagiarism, I opted not to fully reiterate what the exercises are. For this reason, it is advised to at least skim the sections “Second – Trackers and Pacers” and “Third – Perceptual Expansion” from the original article”
The first exercise, labelled as “trackers and pacers”, consists of two incremental steps. The goal is to focus on “maintaining consistent speed and decreasing fixation duration”
by using a tracer (e.g.: a pencil) to go through each line at a consistent speed (first 1sec and then 1/2sec). The second exercise focuses on “perceptual expansion”
and contains three incremental steps. The goal being not to go back and forth to the very beginning and very end of the line, reducing travel time.
Each day, I proceeded by:
- Taking an initial baseline speed test on swiftread.com
- Going through the five steps of the exercise reading a copy of Frankenstein on my e-ink tablet (I chose Frankenstein because I’d already read it before, and it’s public domain)
- Taking a speed test after the fact
First thing to note: from the second day onward, I was already using the “distance” of 3 words from each end of a line, as per the last perceptual expansion exercise. Even for the Trackers and Pacers exercises. Thus, I wasn’t really focusing on perceptual expansion anymore.
Next, while doing these exercises, I was usually having trouble understanding what I was “reading”, even if I was in the moment. The exercises do state that it’s fine not to be able to comprehend your reading during the exercise, but I thought it was still noteworthy. As I progressed through the week, I got a little more comfortable with understanding what I was reading during the slower exercises, but not from the faster ones.
I also think that ideally, I should always have conducted these tests in a quite and comfortable environment. For instance, on one of the days (01/03), I was in a library surrounded by loud people that kept making the table I was using shake. This didn’t feel like the best of environments for something like this.
Also worth noting, during the last few days, it seemed like my eyes were moving on their own while taking the final speed test. I’m not sure about the actual implications of this, but I found it interesting all the same.
Finally, it turns out that wanting to get a baseline of my reading speed felt kind of stressful. And since I worried more about the speed than the comprehension, I tended to be worried about how going back to read things I missed would affect my speed. Moreover, thinking about these concerns also took away from my concentration. However, there were some days where I was more confident about quickly rechecking a few details, and I feel like going through the speed tests themselves I also learned a little about how they worked and how to take them, even though I still got nervous and often didn’t get perfect comprehension.
Now, the results:
| Day | 01/01 | 01/02 | 01/03 | 01/04 | 01/05 | 01/06 | 01/07 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Before: Speed | 223 WMP | 407 WMP | 327 WMP | 399 WMP | 389 WMP | 361 WMP | 329 WMP |
| Before: Comprehension | 50% | 33% | 100% | 100% | 67% | 67% | 67% |
| After: Speed | 505 WMP | 453 WMP | 472 WMP | 429 WMP | 590 WMP | 604 WMP | 467 WMP (482 WMP) |
| After: Comprehension | 75% | 100% | 67% | 100% | 100% | 67% | 33% (100%) |
First, let me explain an oddity in the results. For the last day, there are two “after” results displayed. This is because the first one I got was a much longer text than usual, and I figured the added stress impacted my results, and thus decided to run a second one.
So, what are some of the result. First of all, my baseline seems to have been increased from what it was the first day, although it’s hard to tell how much of an outlier my first test could have been.
Next, while there is a lot of fluctuation from day to day, it seems like after the exercise, I was always reading significantly faster, without really sacrificing comprehension.
Based on this, what are my thoughts? Well, I think that while it did increase my baseline a bit, it doesn’t seem to be a “permanent” fix. Thus, I think this might be a valuable exercise to do before a reading session, when intending to speed read. Call it a “primer” of sorts. However, I probably wouldn’t do the entire exercise as is, especially since I’m not really doing any perceptual expansion anymore. Instead, I would probably do 2 minutes quickly (~1sec per line), and two minutes even faster (~1/2sec per line). (Also note that this speed metric is fairly arbitrary, since it depends a lot on the font). Moreover, I don’t think speed reading is something I want to bring to all of my reading. I think there are times where it’s reasonable for me to slow down, and either enjoy or think a bit more deeply about what I’m reading. However, I do think there are still some good uses to speed reading, such as a quick overview of an article or paper, or going more quickly through a boring or annoying section of a book/article. But as the exercise’s blog post itself highlighted, when using speed reading for studying, it’s better to read multiple times for added exposure and recall improvement.