OT: Speed reading (was: Re: The best programming advice I ever got)

[Nick Sabalausky]

On Thu, 30 Aug 2012 10:45:13 +0200
"xenon325" <1 at mail.net> wrote:
> 
> In the context of learning to learn. Have anyone tried speed
> reading [1] ?
> 
> I'm thinking about taking a course. Seems to be extremely useful,
> but effort is pretty big (few hours each day for few months, and
> I'm ... let's say not really disciplined) and opponents bash it
> quite heavy (e.g. very superficial understanding of the text)
> 
> P.S. Good article. *A lot* of people I know seems to miss that
> point.
> 
> [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speed_reading

I can usually identify speed readers when emailing because they're the
ones whose responses clearly indicate they totally missed at least half
of what I wrote.

Based on that wikipedia page, it sounds like "speed reading" doesn't
really mean anything at all, but is just a catch-all term for any
technique for improving reading speed. I didn't know that before.

A speed reading fan once told me that speed reading is all about
reading one sentence at a time instead of one word at a time (note that
unless you're learning to read, nobody reads one letter at a
time). I don't know if that's a fair description of "speed reading" or
not, but it's definitely a flawed approach: We can read whole words at
a time because:

- There are only so many letters (even in Chinese/Kanji
the characters are constructed out of only so many common radicals).

- There are only so many commonly-used sequences of letters (Ie, words),
and half the words used are VERY common. (Ex: Consider the previous
sentence: "are, so, the, and, most, many, there" Ie, half the words
are extremely common.) Sure, there are MANY valid words, but most of
them are fairly uncommon.

- It's uncommon that getting a couple letters wrong will result in a
radically altered, and still contextually-valid, meaning. That means
there's built-in error-correction, which is why we don't read
every letter and can still get away with it. Reading the overall word
instead of it's component parts typically work just fine.

But extending the above to whole sentences, or even phrases, doesn't
work:

- There are nearly limitless ways of combining words to make phrases
and sentences, unlike combining letters (or radicals) to make
words. (We have dictionaries of words. Think it's even remotely possible
to have a dictionary of sentences?) You're going to see the same
sequence of letters over and over and over and over...but
there's very few sentences, if any, that get re-used like words do.
There are common phrases, but even the most common phrases are no where
near as common as the most common words.

- Getting a word wrong or a couple words flip-flopped is far more
likely to result in a radically altered meaning, than doing to same to
mere letters. And such altered meanings will typically be far less
obvious. Unlike words, there's very little built-in error correction.