Brace yourself...things are about to get nerdy.
Reading has always been one of my favorite pass times. The world is full of interesting books and there are so many things I want to read about. To see if I could improve my reading, I decided to start tracking my progress through each book I read to see if I could discern any patterns. Specifically, I wanted to see if I read any faster or slower during a certain time of day. This was a tricky premise to test for: I wouldn't have a good way to gauge the number of words on each page. Since I definitely didn't want to do a page by page word count, I would have to compare reading sessions for number of pages and just assume that the number of words per page would average out within each book. On my bookmark I would record the start page and start time, then when I finished the end page and end time. Then divide the number of pages I read by the amount of time I spent reading. Viola! Reading Rate.
My first book was "Sons of the Conquerors" by Hugh Pope. It was an interesting overview of the Turkic world in a post-soviet era. Its not the kind of book I would usually gravitate towards, but I like to explore beyond unfamiliar territory. When I finished the book, I entered all of the numbers into a spreadsheet, ran the calculations, and charted my data. The results? Hard to say…
I'd like to take a moment to apologize for the horrible looking excel graph. My focus here was on the data, not on it's visualization.
The X axis is time of day, the Y axis is reading rate. I’m not much of a statistician, and my method was less than rigorous. In general, it seems like I read faster in the evening, which would make sense since this the time of least distraction? Maybe?
Seems inconclusive. I wanted more, better data! My next book was some non-fiction, "Creation by Gore Vidal. This time I estimated page percentage at start and finish (rather than page 2 to page 5 I recorded page 2.3 to page 5.9) The results? Even less conclusive...
This is the same graph as the first one. X-axis: time of day, Y-axis: pages/minute.
I'm not seeing any kind of trend, so based on these two books, it doesn't seem like there's much of a correlation between how fast a person reads and the time of day. Darn! I thought for sure I'd be a slower reader in the morning. No doubt there is some other factor that dramatically outweighs time-of-day. I'll just have to keep reading to find out!
O heeeeey! Finally reading this thing. So. Have you taught yourself speed reading? Are you vocalizing the words in your head as you read? You’ve probably seen this but it can help you stop that habit if you do:
http://www.spreeder.com/
I’ve been working on upping my comprehension… it’s hard for me!
-Kelsey
Hey Kelsey,
Yeah, speed reading is hard for me too. I could to throw my eyes across a line of text, but I would get to the end and realize I hadn’t retained a single word. Like you said, comprehension is the tricky part.
I have tried spreader, and even got a dedicated tablet app to try it out, but I don’t think I used it long enough to get over the rapid fire words.
When I was trying to speed up my reading, one thing I would do to fight sub vocalization (hearing the words in your head) was chew gum, or actually just mouth some nonsense like “blablabla” over and over again. I don’t know how well it worked, but the goal was to keep myself from mouthing the words or vocalizing them.
O also speaking of Stats and research and what not. If you’re not listening to it already you should. Freakanomics podcast. It keeps my mind busy while I draft. You’ll like it.
I like Freakanomics. Sadly it’s fallen out of my rotation, but I appreciate analytical approach they bring to each topic.