(Re)Learning to Read for Speed & Comprehension

Off Topic
#1

Continuing the discussion from What books do you normally read:

I’m so jealous of all you pleasure readers out there. I confess to rarely-to-never reading just for fun. Because I suck at it. I come from readers, too; my father has read every “Western” and Sci-Fi on the planet, several times, I do believe, in addition to a bunch of stuff I’ve only recently learned he bothered with, and his mother before him read Westerns with similar voracity, plus all the romance novels Harlequin ever published, I think, and those were just her “junk food”.
Me? I peaked at about an 8th grade reading level. I have a renewed vigor for trying again to learn to read for comprehension, but would hope to leverage it for pleasure reading if mastered.
Have any of you struggled with reading for speed, or comprehension? What techniques did you find useful? (Got a link to a web page with tricks & tips & maybe practice passages? Or maybe a book with easy-to-read in the same vein?)
Thank you for looking.

#2

I read this a while ago it might help. I am an avid but slow reader. https://tim.blog/2009/07/30/speed-reading-and-accelerated-learning/

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#3

Kinda yes, and my solution was audiobooks. I get through an average of 30 books a year now just on my commute to work and time in the shop.

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#4

Me too. I love audiobooks. My wife and I have almost 700 books in our Audible library. I have very little down time for pleasure reading, but my daily commute is my multi-tasking time.

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#5

have you tried using different fonts? I know that there are fonts out there that help with dyslexia. So I’m sure that there are some that can aid with reading speed

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#6

I am not dyslexic but I really like the the dyslexia font in my Kindle just easier to read.

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#7

My kids learned to read and speed read by having the captions on while watching tv. Each caption is usually 4 seconds. This is a good, free way to practice.

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#8

ooh, you could get into anime @jast . lots of subtitles there

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#9

I am pretty dyslexic and had a very hard time learning how to read as a kid, I could not read till ~3rd grade. What helped me more than anything to find a love of reading and general fluency when reading was audio books + reading along. As a kid I would sit in my bed and listen while reading along to books for days. The first time I read Ender’s Game was like this.

The trick with reading along with an audio book is adjust the playback speed to match your reading speed. Also take breaks from the audio and just read, amazon whispersync is great for this.

As far as comprehension when reading I learned a lot of tricks in my dyslexia classes that I still use today.

  1. Skip words that you don’t know how to read. If you do not know a particular word just skip it for now then as you keep reading try and reconstruct the word from the meaning derived from how it is used. It is critical to not let weird words disrupt the flow of your reading. The inverse is also true if you can read a word but don’t know what it means just keep going and put together the meaning later.
  2. Names don’t matter. Don’t get hung up on names they are often wholly made up and effectively meaningless without context, fiction is particularly bad about this. Just focus on the shape of the whole word so you can recognize when that shape is used again.
  3. Don’t be afraid to start over. Rereading something after you get lost is perfectly reasonable and a good thing to do, it is not anything to feel bad about. When you go back and reread something start a few paragraphs before you got lost and slow down your reading a bit. This will help you catch any context you may have missed along the way this first time. If on the second pass you still feel you missed something go back farther and read it out loud.
  4. Engage all of your senses/body. Follow the words along with your finger or pen, I do this alot when reading more complex things or technical documents. Use your mouth when you are having trouble with a word or are having a hard time focusing, making the oral movements of a word without actually speaking out loud is really helpful to me especially when writing.
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#10

OTOH, being a speed pleasure-reader can be expensive…

I worked for a tutoring group in college, and my boss was in love with speed reading. She wanted all the tutors to use the speed reading machine. Back in the 70’s it was a thing that would run the words of a specific text past you at the speed you set, and then there was a comprehension test that you took. Nowadays there’s probably a computerized version of that. Frank’s solution sounds pretty good, though. I gave it up pretty quickly, as it didn’t significantly increase my reading speed for text-books, as I give up some comprehension in the speed, but it increased my pleasure-reading speed. And I was already having trouble buying enough books to read!

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#11

Those are really great ideas. I’m not dyslexic, but I can see a lot of value in every one of those suggestions. Thanks for sharing these, Frank. I’m going to start using them.

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#12

One year, before New Years, I had the epiphany that while I bought a lot of books, i didn’t actually finish very many. So, that year, my New Years resolution was to finish a book every month. That way I might motivate myself to pick up a book I had abandoned at some point earlier or start/finish a new one altogether.

That progressed to reading every evening before going to sleep and during meals.

Since retiring, I added reading in the morning before starting the day for a couple of hours.

I probably go through 40-50 books a year now. Maybe more.

Finally giving into the ebook craze increased the reading volume as well. I started with a Barnes and noble nook. Eventually, I upgraded to an iPad, and at the behest of my aunt, added reading apps on my phone. When I noticed that I was spending a lot of money on ebooks, I went to my local library to see about borrowing books there in e-form. While the apps can be real battery or data hogs, and you do have to wait for popular titles, it’s pretty awesome. Different city libraries have different apps. For example, Garland uses Libby, whereas Lewisville uses Cloud Library. Interestingly, libraries are no longer restricted to city resident. Most Texas municipal libraries will issue a card to any applicant who resides within the state of Texas. Hence my Garland and Lewisville cards.

My person genre preference is mysteries. Sometimes it’s “heavy drama” mystery, like the Alex Cross series by James Patterson. A lot of the time, it’s a fast-reading genre known as “cozy mysteries”. Which are basically Hallmark Channel mysteries in book form. In fact, many Hallmark movies are based on cozy mysteries.

BookBub is a service that you can sign up for that sends you a short list of books based on the preferences you indicate that are temporarily available for use a buck or two. Many of my cheap purchases have lead to binge-reading marathons when I really like an author or author series.

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#13

Fantasy books are particularly bad with this. Let me pick on Wheel of Time. Started with reading Eye of the World, switched to audiobook somewhere along the way on maybe book 3? and realized I had sort of mentally been saying several character names “wrong” but then on a different one of the audiobooks they use an even DIFFERENT pronunciation. :woman_shrugging:

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#14

I want to defend WoT, since I love it, but yeah it really does do that. LOTR is almost worse, since several characters have a bunch of different names or titles, and other characters will switch between them almost without warning

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#15

This is why I keep getting distracted when reading a Girl With the Dragon Tattoo books or even an IKEA catalogue. I keep trying to decipher how to say the Swedish names/words in my head.

But one “plus” to reading ebooks is that when you encounter a word outside of your vocabulary, you can hold your finger down on the word and choose “define”. Nine times out of ten, you can get a definition so you can put it into context. And if a stupid use of multisyllabic vocabulary, promptly forget it.

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