When you mastered speedreading, slow reading is not an easy task. We describe the reasons for slow reading, the difficulties that rise when reading slowly and how to deal with them. Recently I read an article on reading slowly. Reading slowly is a hard task for superlearner. Suddenly you have all this time and nothing to do, you need to slow down your saccades (take longer periods between saccades), and even vocalize the text.
So question is: what are the scenarios that force us to read slowly and how to handle them?
- Reading aloud. When reading aloud we have no choice but vocalize what we read. Personally I prefer to do read-analyse-vocalize cycle. I speedread several words till the eye saccades, think about my intonation, and vocalize trying to control my voice and posture. I breath in during my speedreading and try to make an eye contact with my audience during vocalization. To be honest I am very good at finding reasons not to read aloud at all…
- Poetry. When reading poetry or other exquisite literature it is fun to enjoy the sound of the text and the shape it takes in the book. My technique involves speedreading a sentence or a line and then trying to generate audio markers as we do learning foreign language. The audio markers break words into pieces and allow joy from every piece of the word. Alternatively I subvocalize the phrase in my brain to feel how it would roll down my tongue. This goes well with high-level visualization of the scene described and multisensory markers for emotional input. For me superlearning improves feeling of a good literature, however there is so much to do that I hardly have any time for it.
- Foreign languages. Speedreading assumes that you can understand the text and generate the markers faster than you talk. I can do thin in three languages. In all other languages I need to slow myself down, and try get markers per word. Typically the side-effect is 100% retention of the text, even when using Google translate. I am fine with that.
- Complex text. Some complex text, especially math, may be hard to speedread. Often when reading formulas you need to generate marker link per letter since each letter has its own marker. These markers are unique for specific article, since every scientist may choose his own notation. Fortunately most mathematical tricks are repetitive and you can generate marker per trick, but then you should make sure you do not miss anything. When I face a complex formula I just subvocalize every letter and letter and use the right brain hemisphere to understand the mathematical logic behind the formulas.
This article has been generated based on my personal experience. I did not find statistics or online stories of how other speedreaders face slow-reading. When slow-reading Anna simply (sub)vocalizes and (re)reads everything indiscriminately. This is highly inefficient. Jonathan simplifies the content he handles till the level he can speedread it. Maybe there are better strategies to slow read out there, if you find them please tell me at [email protected].
