How to Speed Read Without Skimming

The Wall Street Journal:

Speed reading has been around for decades, thanks in large part to a Utah schoolteacher named Evelyn Wood, who launched her Reading Dynamics training program in 1959.

Today, with so many of us feeling inundated by reading material, apps that teach speed reading on mobile devices have proliferated. Some try to speed things up by showing only a word at a time in rapid succession; others offer exercises or fast-moving text highlights. But do they work? Psychologists have done some reading of their own, and their message is: not so fast.

In a new paper, researchers at MIT, the University of Victoria, Washington University and the University of California, San Diego, delved into the extensive scientific literature on speed reading. They found a clear trade-off between reading speed and understanding. “A reader cannot ‘have his cake and eat it too,’ ” the scientists write. They found “little evidence for a unique behavior, such as speed reading, in which speed and comprehension are both high.”

Read the whole story: The Wall Street Journal