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Speed Reading – An Essential Survival Skill for the Knowledge Worker

Benjamin Ellis — Fri, 18 Apr 2008 02:38:09 +0000

One of the key skills for knowledge workers is good, if not superb, reading speed. Even though print media is in decline, we have more, rather than less to get through. E-mails, wiki pages, white papers and documents all scream ‘read me’. Yet there is a great deal of misinformation about speed reading around. Many of the methods have little or no scientific research behind them and may even do more hard than good.

Evelyn Wood, usually cited as the originator and pioneer of “Speed Reading“, developed a system called Reading Dynamics. It certainly makes some tall claims.

However, just as studying people with exceptional memory gives insight into how memory might work, but does not endow us with those people’s powers, studying people with exceptional reading capability is only of indirect help.

There are many courses on the market today. Some courses maintain that comprehension is not important, others that it is. Some focus on eye movement and some don’t. Some warn against subvocalization (reading ‘out loud’ inside your head), and some don’t. It is a confused and confusing world out there.

How do you build a tool kit to deal with the volume of material that hits your retina each day? Start with the end, not the means. When thinking about reading, the first question is this: What is the reading for? Is it to get loosely familiar with some materials prior to a meeting? Is it for pleasure? For study? Each of these purposes suggests a different strategy.

First, a little theory, via the BPS research digest: “Reading is a team effort“, reporting research by Pelli and Tillman (2007). Reading includes three major levels:

Letter decoding – Identifying individual letters. This can be blocked by changing letters, but keeping word shape, e.g. “Reading” becomes “Pcedirg”. Squint and you’ll get it.
Whole world recognition – Seeing blocks of letters as a word. This can be blocked using alternating case, e.g. “ThIs tExT AlTeRnAtEs iN CaSe”.
Sentence context – Predicting words based on context. This can be blocked using jumbled words, e.g. “Contribute others. The of Reading measured”.

We use all three techniques to read effectively. It appears that faster readers make more use of sentence context, but the research also implies that letter decoding contributes for the bulk of reading speed, and this is also supported by other research.

This contradicts many speed reading courses, which focus on reading larger and larger groups of words. There is no academic research I have found to show that this is effective. Because of the way that written English works, there is no way to know what a unit of sense is until after it has been read. Even super readers seem to only read in blocks of 2-3 words. Many of the techniques taught are actually equivalent to skimming, rather than reading. This might improve apparent speed, but it does so at the cost of comprehension.

This leads on to the issue of eye movement efficiency. This is another big focus of many techniques, but again, it is controversial. Lazy eye movement can slow down reading, so think about the following:

Avoiding eye wandering – Don’t hop around the page, unless this is a deliberate intent.
Avoiding back-skipping – flicking back and rereading – although this can be beneficial for tricky passages.
Avoiding forward-skipping – flicking ahead, again unless this is a deliberate intent.
Keep a good distance from the page – not too close (only reading a bit at once), or too far away.

Most of the visual processing capability of the brain is concentrated on the very middle of our vision. The resolution and brain power available outside of this area falls off very dramatically. Being too close to the text limits the amount of brain power we can apply to reading – so keep a good distance and you may well see your reading speed increase.

There is a risk of straining at gnats and swallowing camels here. Much of our reading takes place at a computer screen. This introduces additional factors that have a large impact on reading ability. Poor font use, especially websites where font spacing is overridden, slows reading.

We have the modern luxury of wonderfully large monitors, which is not always a good thing. Avoid excessive line lengths, sometimes is pays to narrow the window if you have to. This makes it easier for the eyes to accurately back-skip, to find the beginning of the next line. Various pieces research have also looked at the affect of colour combinations in reading from computer screens. The key take away is to go for something that is high contrast, for example black on white, not something like red on green.

Many speed reading courses also feature meta-guiding. That is a very swish way of saying use a finger or pointer to read, as you did when you started reading. This can be useful for training the eyes in skim reading, but doesn’t seem to help with reading at speed. It can be used for setting yourself a target reading speed, but again this sacrifices comprehension for speed. Apart from the street-cred/image issue, meta-guiding isn’t really practicable on a computer screen and is probably unwise with most refresh rates, because of flicker.

Subvocalization was mentioned earlier. Stilling that inner voice – not reading out loud, moving the lips or even vocalizing inside the head – is often taught. The evidence on this is again mixed, but it does seem to have some speed benefit, although it may impact comprehension. Try to still that inner voice, try blocking the chatter by humming – it sounds odd, but it does work.

Breaking the link between reading and speaking makes a difference to skimming text at speed. However, this is again relative to other effects, for example, minimising attention-distractors, such as background music.

Returning to purpose: If we are reading to learn, then many speed reading techniques are a false economy. If I can read 25% faster, but retain only 75% of the material and have to read it twice, I have lost out. Sometimes the short cut is the longest way around.

There is a movement towards slow reading in philosophy study. Anyone who has to read a modern philosophy text book will understand why. You can read those things ten times and still have no idea what the author was saying.

To put it another way, driving at 100 miles an hour on a narrow winding road is unlikely to be sensible. If the vocabulary is unfamiliar, there are no short cuts to speed reading, other than grabbing a dictionary. When you are stuck with a piece of text, it is worth rereading and reading aloud. Hearing words allows you to apply more of your brain. Try to visualise what is being said and actively engage your imagination as well. All of this will help with comprehension and retention.

Note that we read and retain first and last words best, for example the beginnings and ends of paragraphs. A useful writing tip – put important things there.

Hopefully a three stage model for reading is starting to emerge in your mind:

Do I need to read this - skim for context and relevance.
I need to read this – read for understanding and retention.
Do I understand this – review for clarification and comprehension.

In some ways this is not a new idea. SQ3R (Survey, Question, Read, Recite/Recall, Review) has been around for a while. It is a five step system that contains these elements. It isn’t usually presented as a speed reading method, but it is the long way round that avoids costly short cuts. If the skimming step is used to fast-fail irrelevant documents – scan and discard or scan then read – it is a very productive work flow

A pre-scan/skim of a document helps understand the information structure. Making yourself concious of the meta-content, what it is about and what you expect to learn – primes the brain to absorb the information and makes it ready to comprehend and remember (see Learning your way to a better memory).

Questioning prepares the brain and focusses on the intent of the reading. Then read, reciting key passages and practising recall. finally, review the information that has been gleaned.

So, essential speed reading:

Skim when you are skimming – let your eyes run purposefully and silently.
Read purposefully – be inquisitive and don’t be afraid to pause to understand.
Reflect on what you read – reading and forgetting is the most inefficient reading of all.

Papers and posts:

Rayner and Pollatsek, The Psychology of Reading.

Allyn & Bacon, (1987) The Psychology of Reading and Language Comprehension. Boston.

Francis Pleasant Robinson (1946), Effective Study. New York.

Pelli DG, Tillman KA (2007) Parts, Wholes, and Context in Reading: A Triple Dissociation. PLoS ONE 2(8): e680. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0000680

RONALD STURT (1990) The psychology of reading: an essay in honour of Mona Going. Health Libraries Review 7 (2)

Mills ad Weldon (1987), Reading text from computer screens.

Power up your business with a Wiki

Benjamin Ellis — Fri, 28 Mar 2008 20:35:57 +0000

Reading a recent post on David Tebbutt’s blog – You calling me a consultant? – took me to: What’s the real value of social software in enterprise from Adriana Lukas, which leads us to this post…

My longest experience with business social software has been with wikis. I first used a Wikis in a businesses about ten years ago, and have now seen a number of projects across different companies. Case studies are still hard to come by, partly because introducing wikis touches on some sensitive issues. It is not just about the technology, it is about a cultural shift. In many command-and-control cultures information is (seen as) power, but social software moves people towards sharing it. That is a big change.

Be Careful What You Measure

The major benefits of wiki technology are tangential ones. As such they present challenges for metrics, but I have seen multi-million dollar roll outs of ‘traditional’ applications hit their metrics, but be a productivity disaster. Metrics cut both ways, and there is the risk of MacNamara’s fallacy:

“The first step is to measure whatever can easily be measured. This is OK as far as it goes. The second step is to disregard that which can’t be easily measured or to give it an arbitrary quantitative value. This is artificial and misleading. The third step is to presume that what can’t be measured easily really isn’t important. This is blindness. The fourth step is to say that what can’t be easily measured really doesn’t exist. This is suicide.”

The quote is from Charles Handy, but it came via wikipedia and I’ve already said enough about wikipedia research. The Adam Curtis BBC program ‘The Trap’ explored this topic well, if you have the chance to watch it, it is well worth it.

Measuring human systems, like users with a wiki, is non-trivial. You change what you measure, simply by measuring it. This is not to say that things shouldn’t be measured, but they should be measured with caution. It might sound a little trite, but there is truth in saying that the most valuable things are invaluable (or immeasurable).

Wikis are most successful when they are introduced while the company is still small and growing. That way they become part of the culture. Not to say that big businesses can’t be successful with wikis, but it requires a good training program around them. The only wiki-failures I have found were in very large companies, where the technology was introduced with minimal training and no clear objectives, and predictable results.

What are the major benefits of a wiki to a business?

These apply just as well to any form of social workgroup, not just to businesses. They also apply for groups of two to hundreds, but the scaling of wikis is a topic for another day.

Knowledge Availability

Wikis remove much of the chance factor in finding knowledge in the business. Most intranets contain woefully out of date information, through no fault of the intranet owners. Users are left to chance upon the right person who is ‘in the know’. Wikis also reduce the dependence on key knowledge workers for answers to common questions.

Even if the answer isn’t on the wiki, at least users can glean an idea of who to ask (based on who has been adding what to the wiki). This speeds up the business and offloads the burden on senior staff. This is especially important when you are in a hiring phase. No new hire pack? Search the wiki.

Change Control

Basic, but missing from so many information systems in common use. The ability to rollback and track changes is inherent in most wiki software. This can be a life saver and is why wikis are the enterprise CMS of choice for me.

Knowledge Permanence

Wikis are the most constructive and least disruptive way of documenting projects that I have found to date. If someone leaves, at least some of their knowledge remains within the organisation, on the wiki. The same is true for extended absence due to illness, travel or long holidays.

Knowledge Creation

Sparks come from striking two things together. The same is true with knowledge. I have watched brilliant ideas emerge in real-time on a wiki page, right in front of my eyes. Something new on the wiki combined with something someone already knows leads to new knowledge in the business, across multiple people.

Geographic Freedom

Wikis work across geographic boundaries and across time zones. That supports remote offices and remote workers on a global basis. This is key to keeping a business competitive. Water cooler chat is good, but it doesn’t scale across national boundaries.

Cross Platform Portability

Because wikis are web based, the only client required is a browser. That means wikis work across different operating systems and even for mobile devices like Blackberries and smart phones.

So, hopefully now you can see why I am a wiki fan.