![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Personally I'm not a particularly fast reader. When I was young (before I had a clue that I'm mildly dyslexic) I tried some of the techniques for speed reading and found they just made reading not fun for me. Now that I'm much older I realize that I have the most difficulty reading at all when it is a chore, neither interesting nor fun. So speed reading was just a mistake for me. I was just lucky enough to have broad enough tastes, that reading for school mostly went fine.
One thing they taught for speed reading was not sounding the words in your head. I studied enough psychology to know, that reinforcement is a great tool for learning, and guess what speaking the words in your head is. It's no wonder that some speed readers struggle with comprehension, not all, but enough that some studies like the one Merphy mentions, question the idea of teaching speed reading to just everyone as a great study technique.
I recently bought a book of Agatha Christie Miss Marple stories. I've been particularly enjoying them. I'm reading the book of stories slowly, partly because I keep wanting to 'save some for later' and partly because I like thinking about each mystery as I finish it, its strength and weakness as a story, its strength and weakness in logic, and how much the solution came from evidence given in the story or just comes out of thin air. My way of having fun reading each story.
From:
no subject
But my takeaway from the speed reading is it is basically "skimming". You are supposed to read down and not across. Kind of take a quick snapshot of the page and the information, move on. Which works fine - if your mind doesn't tend to skip over paragraphs, words or sentences. Or flip words and letters around or replace them. And no sub-vocalization or moving lips or reading aloud to reinforce - which again works fine if your brain doesn't have a tendency to replace words with other words, or skip over whole sentences without reinforcement.
That said - I've gotten good at skimming "non-fiction texts" over time - but mainly because they are not that substantive in content. News articles certainly aren't, most blog posts aren't, journal articles aren't, nor are many technical scopes.
The other problem with "skimming" is while this works very well with certain (not all) "non-fiction" texts - because you don't need all the details in non-fiction. Many non-fiction writers over-write anyhow, so skimming works very well in nonfiction. Skimming does not work in fiction. (Not that fictional writers aren't guilty of overwriting, they are - but you have to follow the details more closely to understand character arcs, motivations, and plot.) You need the details to follow a plot. In an Agatha Christie novel - if you skim, you won't figure out the plot or be able to follow it or understand why someone killed someone else. I read in an article recently, can't remember which one, that fiction requires far more attention, concentration, use of memory, and time investment from a reader than non-fiction does. It's actually harder to read fiction than non-fiction - that's why so many people don't tend to read it. It takes more time to read, more attention to detail, more patience, requires that you remember what happened previously, and far more concentration that it takes to read a work of non-fiction.
My sisterinlaw rarely reads fiction, for example, and reads very quickly. While my brother, who does read fiction now, reads it very slowly as does my niece. Another example? I have cousins who can read and comprehend non-fiction, but can't figure out a fictional novel - they can't follow the plot or the characters - mainly because they are reading it too quickly, they've been taught to read fast. And for fiction? That doesn't work that well. Or that effectively.