The Fry Side

A project I have started working as of late is learning to speed read. I want to do more with the free time I have outside of kids and work, but I have long been a slower reader and my comprehension is somewhat weak. A big reason for it is because the level of distraction around me seems to grow anytime I stop moving for a few minutes. I do remember halfway through college, ditching the TV in my room and my focus and endurance for reading and schoolwork shot right up.

But my free time for reading, for pleasure or knowledge, is lacking. So I started learning a bit about speed reading. There are a number of different approaches that make a difference for me. And between Lifehacker and The Art of Manliness, I think I’m off to a good start.

First, I have started trying to stop subvocalizing as I read. Subvocalization is when you pronounce the words you read in your head, even though you’re not reading aloud. It’s a natural consequence of learning to read, since we learn to read out loud so we can correlate the larger vocabulary we speak as children with the little scribbles in Harold and the Purple Crayon.

The trick I use is to whisper A-E-I-O-U as I’m reading. You can count to four or five to accomplish the same thing. Basically, you’re forcing a divorce between what your vocal chords are doing and the words your eyes are bringing in.

Second, I am learning to fight against backtracking. I know that so often I would be reading along and suddenly I’d have to bounce back to previous statements or even paragraphs. For some reason, I would zone out or not retain what I had just read (again, often it is a distracting environment) and I would have to go back and re-read. To fight this, I have started using a bookmark as a way of forcing myself to focus on single lines.

I put the bookmark atop the line I am reading and keep it moving downward, so it forces me to stay ahead of it. This has proven to be one of the most useful tricks so far. It works in line with other advice to track with a finger to keep one’s eyes focused. However, there is also advice to use more of your peripheral vision, so the bookmark line aids in learning to take in a whole line as a chunk.

Third, for some of the lengthier things I have been reading online, I use bookmarklets (a program linked via a bookmark in your browser) called Readability and Spreeder.

Readability converts the main text of a webpage, say a news article, into a straight simple column with none of the other sidebars or ads to distract you from reading the information. Readability is also nice to print webpages from, again because of the clutter elimination. (I use the novel format, the medium text size, and the extra-wide margin so I can keep all the text within my single field of view and don’t have to move my eyes to go through the text.)

Spreeder is a program that you put text into, and it flashes chunks of words at you fast enough to let you read them, but not long enough to let you subvocalize them. The latest bookmarklet they added lets you highlight text from anything you’re reading, and it automatically loads it up into Spreeder so you can hit play and get to speed reading (ideally anyway). The downside to this is that if you are interrupted, then you miss some of what you read. But going back and re-reading something faster than normal won’t hurt you.

A friend of mine years ago mentioned that he went under hypnosis and learned to speed read that way. I was skeptical at the time, but now I have a feeling he may have just had the subvocalization shut off right then and there. Being an academic already gave him a head start on being able to read swiftly and well before that, but he did say he jumped from 250 to 500 words per minute shortly after being hypnotized.

I’m still working on this, but I think it’s going to come along soon. The big thing is finding a quiet place to do it. One big bummer for me is that I can’t just put on some music and read. Because of my training in music, it may as well be someone talking in plain English to me.

I’d like to create a good reading space in my home. The couch is for television and kids. The kitchen is for everything else (including a lot of my general computing). The bathroom, well, that one’s not a bad place to get some reading done. I’m thinking I want to find an old lounge chair, perhaps with an ottoman, and a side table to set up in the den. That will be where I can knock out some solid, solitary reading time.