Okay, so I was sitting on the train reading and this woman next to me is reading a page in like 15 seconds or something. I read very slowy and haven't read many books in my life but would like to improve. Is this something that just comes with time? Or do you have to not be born a faggot?
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Anonymous2008-09-25 13:36
>>1
Not being born a faggot helps, but with practice you may read nearly as fast as someone like me.
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Anonymous2008-09-25 13:41
You can't read any worthwhile book that fast and process the information. How fast you can process the material is what limits your speed, not how fast you can read. The silly woman was probably just skim reading.
There are different degrees of information processing. She was making a map of the plot, characters, interactions, etc., and letting the story fill in the relationships among these abstract entities. That's what I do when I have something to read for college, cuz let's face it; ain't no worthwhile literature that a professors makes you read.
>>7
And it will rape your ability to take in the book. Only useful for reading worthless garbage that you're just trying to finish because you hate to quit in the middle (e.g. Wyrm, by Mark Fabit).
>>10
It's self-evident, unless you were being wholly sarcastic in the last sentence.
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Anonymous2008-09-26 1:25
>>11
I wasn't. I don't find regurgitated classics to be very interesting.
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Anonymous2008-09-26 2:40
>>12
What do you consider 'worthwhile literature' then?
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Anonymous2008-09-26 3:36
>>3,8
So can I improve my information processing by reading lots? I don't want to rip through a book in an hour or anything, I just have a lot of books I want to read and I don't want it to take forever to get through just one.
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Anonymous2008-09-26 4:07
Fuckeng hell, this one of the worse inventions women made. Retarded creatures, they are.
Your reading speed will improve very fast if you just pick up a book and start reading. When I was little my first "real" novel was The Hobbit. I don't remember how many pages it has, but probably less than 300, and it took me weeks to finish it. Today I can read through a simmilar book in two or three hours.
Also some books are an easier read than others, which has a huge impact on my speed. Maybe the woman was just reading something shallow in massive print, (not to sound mysoginistic, but I never saw a woman read what I would consider a real book).
Most importantly you only live once and reading speed shouldn't be your concern, just have fun.
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Anonymous2008-10-01 3:35
>>19
I took a quick glance at it and I'm pretty sure it was some trashy romance novel. Thanks for the help by the way.
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Anonymous2008-10-02 6:21
>>19 300 pages two or three hours.
Enjoy your comic books.
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Anonymous2008-10-02 7:38
300 pages, 2 500 symbols per page, is about 750 000 symbols. Normal, adequate and attentive reader generally does about 70 000 symbols per hour. A 750 000 symbol page book, thus, reads in about ten hours; 2 or even 3 hours less if you're real fast. A 750k book in 3 hours is 250k symbols per hour, which is about 3.5 times faster than normal attentive reading, and perhaps 3.5 times more - prohibiting - in terms of experiencing art.
15 seconds per page is very strange. Normal attentive reading speed is around 15-19 symbols per second (about 3 words per second - that quite fast, isn't it). In 15 seconds such a normal reader would devour about 290 symbols, which is about 1/8th of a normal page. So, either the woman was reading at eight times the speed of already fast attentive reading; or her page contained 8 times less symbols, which is about 48 words per page, likely being a preschool kid's picture-book or similar. Either way, the woman was an idiot for either skipping 7/8th of each page, or reading a preschooler's book on a public train.
>>1
there are speed reading courses that are very effective
the basic theory (tried and true, no-bullshit for reals, yo) is that when you read a book, you (if you are moderately literate) recognize words as indivisible units so you don't read C-A-T as three letters, but recognize the shape of the letters together to be "cat"
through speed reading you learn to recognize longer strings of characters as single units and instantly understand them
eventually you get to see entire lines of text as a single unit, allowing your reading to be very fast
there are a few people who SUPPOSEDLY can read entire pages in this fashion, but i've never met one
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Anonymous2008-10-09 7:48
>>24
And when you have learned this pointless method and embedded it into your head for good, have fun enocuntering a new word and having your brain assplode.
I say, if you don't want to read it slowly and carefully, you don't want to read it at all. All or nothing. Speed reading is pointless. It's no fun? Throw it away.