I've never had success with 'speed reading' in a way that allows me to consume more words per minute and have the same degree of retention and comprehension, especially for dense scholarly material.

Efficient scholarship benefits much more, I think, from learning to be strategic and have good intuitions about what to read - on the level of fields of knowledge, on the level of books and articles, and on the level of paragraphs within books and articles. I've been doing something like what I described in this post for at least two years and I have the impression that this is where I've gained the most utility.

The difference between somebody who is just getting into continuous scholarship and myself is, I suspect, almost entirely to be found in the fact that I can be extremely strategic about which fields of knowledge to consume, which books and articles to consume within those fields, and which paragraphs within those books and articles to consume. That's only what it seems like to me, though.

Genuine 'speed reading' can be achieved with a different brain architecture than I have, of course.