Open Thread, August 1-15, 2012

OpenThreadGuy

If it's worth saying, but not worth its own post, even in Discussion, it goes here.

Do any LWers have any familiarity with speed reading and have any recommendations or cautions about it?

Personal experience with speed reading "techniques" seems to indicate that their effectiveness largely depends on your skill, past experience, the topic you're reading about, how much you master the topic and how much of it you really need to understand / remember.

When I tried practical applications, what usually works the most is simple pattern-recognition of complete sentences as "single words", with the rest of your brain filtering through the less-useful words and adjectives and so on, which is extremely reliant on reading a lot of... (read more)

3OrphanWilde14y

I picked up one variant independently from reading Robert Jordan; I can only caution against it based on my experiences. I discovered after I started listening to audiobooks on long drives that I was missing large chunks of (only usually trivial) detail. It's taken several years to unlearn the habit.

0Blackened14y

I've heard that it's often a fraud and that it usually comes at the cost of reduced reading comprehension. But I have no actual experience with it.