Nov
19
2009
Rapid Reading
I am often asked if I am a speed-reader. I am not. Nor have I ever studied speed-reading. Though I know some of the principles, it has never really interested me. Somehow, in the back of my mind or the back of my conscience, I am convinced that speed reading is a little bit less than reading. It seems to emphasize speed over comprehension, quantity over quality. I know that its proponents would disagree, but this is always how it has seemed to me. I’ve never been properly convinced that it can be otherwise.
Part of the attraction of reading is the language. I love words, I love sentences, I love the way ideas are conveyed through them. Speed-reading, by its very nature, has to bypass much of the beauty of language to get to the words and, behind them, the ideas they seek to convey. This strikes me as being akin to walking quickly through an art gallery not stopping to look at each of the works there, but only glancing at them quickly and then reading a description of them. Somehow the beauty of the medium is being lost along the way. I read quickly, but I do not read so quickly that I miss the beauty of well-crafted sentences and the use of just the right word in just the right place.
Despite my aversion to speed-reading, I picked up a copy of Breakthrough Rapid Reading by Peter Kump. This is a self-guided course to learn to read faster, with better comprehension and with better retention (so go the claims of the author). It goes where most similar books go–the importance of using your finger to guide your eyes when reading, the importance of attempting to stop sub-verbalizing words as you read them, the skill involved in seeing many words at each movement of the eye instead of only a single word.
Maybe I doubt my ability to really understand what the book teaches. Maybe I’m stubborn and don’t really want to speed-read. Maybe I’m convinced I’ll lose something along the way. Or maybe I just do not learn well in this kind of a format. But the more I read of this book, the less I wanted to apply the principles. The more I read, the less interested in became in ever being a speed-reader.
However, having said that, there were a few principles that I found useful and ones that I can and will apply to my own reading. I will share some of those in the near future.