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Speed Reading: Words Per Minute

By April 14, 2017Reading Habits

Ever wondered how much we read each day? From the newspaper to work mails, study material to invoices and books- all this amounts to reading being a huge part of our life ever since we learnt to read. All this reading material obviously takes up a lot of our time too. And in today’s high speed world, most people are looking for a way to save time and increase their reading speed so they can get more work done in a short span.

Speed Reading, as the name suggests, is a technique used to improve our pace of reading. You look at a word or several words. This is known as fixation. You move your eye to the next word. This is called a saccade. Then, you pause to comprehend the entire sentence you just looked at. Adding all these fixations, saccades and comprehension pauses together, the average human reading speed would amount to about 250-350 words per minute. So it would take about a minute or two to read a regular document.

Research shows that reading is a complex activity. As children, we first learnt to read aloud. Eventually, we turned into silent readers. But as we read, there is a voice in our head that is pronouncing each word as we read it. This process is known as Subvocalization. Proponents of speed reading claim that subvocalization slows our reading speed and that we would be able to read at a rapid pace if we were able to turn off this voice in our head without which, reading happens at the same pace as talking. Subvocalization is a natural process and is indeed hard to unlearn. It takes a lot of practice to consciously stop doing this.

Another reason for a slow pace of reading is that many of us read word by word. This takes time and also a toll on overall comprehension of the entire sentence that we may be reading. Readers who use the chunking method (reading blocks of 2 or 3 words at a time) tend to read faster and understand well too.

Sometimes, readers go back to the beginning of a sentence or a paragraph and reread it just to be sure that they read right. Known as regression, this takes up extra time and is in most cases unnecessary. Also, multitasking while you read slows your reading speed as it is really difficult to concentrate on what you read owing to distractions around.

 

Now that we know the causes of slow reading speed, how can we hustle it up?

Skim

We often skim through texts when we have less time and need to focus only on the important points in our reading material. Skimming generally happens at about 600-700 words per minute but also at the cost of comprehension. When we read slowly, we spend more time on understanding better. Nevertheless, skimming can help us get an overall idea of the text we are reading and aid comprehension when we reread it.

Metaguiding

This is the visual guiding of the eye using your finger or a pointer in order for the eye to move faster along the length of a sentence or paragraph. In school, we were often asked to follow what we read with our finger. It was in fact, the other way round. We read what we pointed at. This helps the eye to focus on the matter to be read and not wander, hence reducing the speed of reading.

Choose your text

It is important to understand that not all reading material can be treated with speed reading. This works for small documents, informal emails or short study material but prose or poetry needs calm and slow reading for good comprehension.

Practice

Speed reading is a skill that is honed over time. Actions like eliminating subvocalization need patience and practice.

Eliminate distractions

Don’t read while watching TV or listening to music. It will be hard to concentrate and you will have to spend more time on the same text.

 

Well, we now know what slows our reading, how we can speed it up and why readers are looking to do it.

But there are quite a few counter arguments.

Some say that Speed reading is anatomically and neurologically almost impossible. One may be able to increase reading speed from the average 250 words per minute to around 500-600 words per minute but anything beyond that is unmanageable. Although there are many people who claim, they have really practiced speed reading and manage it very well, eye movement expert Keith Raynor argues that the mechanical process of moving your eye, fixing it and processing the visual information has a limited speed.

Speed reading experts claim that they overcome this speed limit by taking in more visual information in each saccade. They include multiple words in one fixation instead of just one or two.

This too, seems unlikely. One, the area of the eye which can correctly resolve details, called the fovea, is quite small—only about an inch in diameter at reading distance. Processing more information per fixation is limited by the fact that our eyes are rather poor lenses. They need to move around in order to get more details. This means that eyes are physically constrained in the amount of
information they achieve per fixation.

Second, working memory constraints are at least as important as anatomical ones. The brain can hold around 3-5 chunks of information at a time. Analysing multiple lines simultaneously, means that each of these threads of information must remain open until the line is fully read. This just isn’t possible with our limited mental RAM.

The most important argument against Speed reading is of comprehension loss. Experts believe that anything beyond 500-600 words per minute will cause substantial loss of comprehension. This, in fact, makes the entire objective of reading redundant.

We can definitely train ourselves to read faster and better with the tricks given above. But whether it will amount to better comprehension and retention, therefore being useful, is for the reader to decide.



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