speed-reading bloggers

Have you ever read something that was not written by you but that could have been? I just did. Here’s Jane Galt:

I read fast. Really fast. … I have never taken a speed reading course, and never tried to learn how to read fast; I’ve been doing it . . . well, I don’t know how long, but at least since I was in junior high school. The only tricks I know for learning how to read fast are:

1) Be born to parents who read fast, and a lot 2) Read a lot yourself when you are a child

As I get older, though, I’ve figured out how I do it: I skip things. This may seem obvious, but I actually had to catch myself doing it; it is not a conscious process, and if I think about it, I can’t do it. Somehow, my brain selects chunks of text that it thinks won’t convey new information, and avoids them. Perhaps this is not optimal, but it works well enough for me to have made A’s in most of my college lit classes. [I didn't take many college lit classes ---ed.] I can still read faster than most people while reading completely, and I do for some things, like textbooks, but it takes effort and I don’t enjoy it as much.

What brought this on was Tyler Cowen’s post on How to read fast

Galt thinks that most bloggers read fast (and describes someone witnessing Glenn Reynolds’s awesome speed-reading***). She’s probably right about that.

It’s only logical. I blog daily, and I consume (”read”) a whole lot in order to be able to produce, on average, four content- and link-rich posts a day. I won’t begin to guess the ratio (do I consume ten times as much as I produce? five times?). The point is that I need to be able to “read” fast in order to produce that much.

I’d argue, though, that when I’m reading at my fastest, I’m not reading “completely,” as Galt says she does when she reads five or six pages a minute. Not even close. The faster I read, the more often I have to backtrack in order to comprehend what I’m reading. The “searching for keywords” process that allows fast readers to hurtle through a text doesn’t really allow for complete processing. Not in my experience, at least.

Galt continues:

The interesting thing is that while I read a lot, I also re-read a lot, mostly fiction. For good books, I find each reading a deeper experience; it now occurs to me that this is because I’m reading a slightly different group of paragraphs than I did the previous time. My friends who read slowly, never reread.

I re-read a lot, too. I re-read constantly, in fact—as I’m reading. I’m forced to, because oftentimes there’s a lot riding on my getting what I read. Close reading (for nuance, for deep meaning, for shades of difference) requires you to slow down.

My “slow” is probably faster than what some people would consider “fast,” but there’s no virtue in this for me. I have family members who read slowly. They remember and treasure every word they read in the books they loved. Like Jane Galt, I re-read a lot of fiction, too. I have to, because there’s a lot I just don’t remember from the first time around…because I skipped over it.

That’s why, like Galt,

I have a pretty remarkable gift for forgetting whodunnit; I can read them every five years, and never see it coming.

I dunno. I can’t quite come around to thinking that this is a good thing.
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*** The prodigious Reynolds is, obviously, Mr. Incredible.