Cognitive Psychology and Education

Speed-Reading

Students usually have many pages of reading to do each week, and they often wish they could read more quickly. Can we help them? Can we, in particular, help people to speed-read? In fact, it’s easy to teach people this skill, and with just a little practice you can increase your reading speed by 50% or more. However, it’s important to understand why speed-reading works, because this will help you see when speed-reading is a good idea—and when it is a disaster!

The text chapter emphasizes that people don’t need to look at every letter when they’re reading a word. This is because words follow predictable patterns, and so, having seen some of the letters, you can easily guess what the remaining letters have to be. Thus, you can speed up your word recognition by skipping over some letters, relying on inference to fill in what you’ve skipped.

In the chapter, we describe how these claims apply to the reading of single words—with the recognition network often able to “infer” letters that weren’t clearly seen. Similar claims, however, apply to larger units of text—sentences, or paragraphs, or whole pages. These, too, follow predictable patterns, and so, having read a few words, you’re often able to guess what the next words will be. Once again, this allows you to speed up your reading, by skipping along and relying on rapid inference to cover the skips.

This process is essential for normal reading. If you didn’t make these skips, if—instead—you literally looked at every word (and, indeed, every letter) on the page, your reading would be much slower than it currently is. And the same process is central for speed-reading: Courses that teach you how to speed-read actually rely on simple strategies that help you to skip more, as you move down the page, and, with this, to increase your use of inference. As a result, speed-reading is not really “reading faster”; it is instead “reading less and inferring more.”

How does this process work? First, before you speed-read some text, you need to lay the groundwork for the inference process—so that you’ll make the inferences efficiently and accurately. Specifically, before you speed-read a text, you should flip through it quickly. Look at the figures and the figure captions. If there’s a summary at the end, or a preview at the beginning, read that. If there are headings and subheadings scattered through the text, read those. Each of these steps will give you a broad sense of what the material is all about, and that broad sense will prepare you to make rapid—and more sensible—inferences about the material.

Second, make sure you do rely on inference; otherwise, you’ll slide back into your habits of looking too carefully at the page and not relying enough on inference. To achieve this, read for a while holding an index card just under the line you are reading, or perhaps using your finger to slide along the lines of print to mark what you are reading at that moment. These procedures establish a physical marker of where you are on the page, a “pointer” that keeps track of where you are as you move from word to word. This use of a pointer will become easy and automatic after a few minutes of practice, and once it does, you’re ready for the next (and key) step.

You’ve just practiced “following along” with the index card or your finger. What we’re now going to do is reverse this, so that the marker isn’t following your eye-position, it’s instead leading your eye-position. Specifically, try moving the index card a bit more quickly than you have so far—or, if you’ve been sliding your finger along, try moving it a bit more quickly. In either case, try to move your eyes to “keep up” with this marker. This procedure will feel awkward at first, but it will become easier with just a bit of practice. Don’t try to go too fast; you’ll know if you are moving too swiftly if you suddenly realize that you don’t have a clue what’s on the page. Move quickly enough so that you feel you have to hustle along to keep up with your pointer, but don’t move so quickly that you lose track of what you’re reading.

You may want to practice this for a couple of days, and as you do, you’ll learn to move the pointer faster and faster. As a result, you’ll learn to increase your reading speed by 30%, or 40%, or more. But let’s be clear about what’s going on here: You are not learning (as ads sometimes claim) to “see more in a single glance.” (That wouldn’t be possible unless we rewire your eyeballs, and that’s not going to happen.) Instead, you are simply shifting the balance between how much input you’re taking in and how much you’re filling in the gaps with sophisticated guesswork.

On this basis, you can easily see that speed-reading is a good bet if you are reading redundant or repetitive material; that’s a situation in which your inferences about the skipped words are likely to be correct, and so you might as well use the faster process of making inferences, rather than the slower process of looking at individual words. By the same logic, though, speed-reading is a bad bet if the material is hard to understand; in that case, you won’t be able to figure out the skipped words via inference, and then speed-reading will hurt you. Speed-reading is also a bad bet if you’re trying to appreciate an author’s style. Imagine, for example, that you speed-read Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. You probably will be able to speed-read and make inferences about the plot. (After all, the plot is simple: Romeo and Juliet are in love. Their families oppose the romance. In the end, everyone dies.) But you probably won’t be able to make inferences about the specific words you’re skipping over, and thus you won’t be able to make inferences about the language that Shakespeare actually used (unless you happen to be just as good a writer as Shakespeare was). And, of course, if you miss the language of Shakespeare and miss the poetry, you’ve missed the point.

Do practice speed-reading, and do use it when text-guided inference will serve you well. This will allow you to zoom through many texts, and it will dramatically decrease the time you need for at least some of your reading. But do not speed-read material that is technical, filled with specific details that you’ll need, or beautiful for its language. In those cases, what you want is to pay attention to the words on the page, and not rely on your own inferences.

Critical Questions

1.
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Why is speed-reading a better strategy for redundant or repetitive material compared to material that is difficult to understand?
2.
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Why might speed-reading be a poor strategy when reading a poem?
3. Would a speed-reading strategy be helpful to someone with dyslexia? Why or why not?

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