NY Times Sorry You Can’t Speed Read by Jeffrey M. Zacks & Rebecca Treiman.

“Unfortunately, the scientific consensus suggests that such enterprises should be viewed with suspicion. In a recent article in Psychological Science in the Public Interest, one of us (Professor Treiman) and colleagues reviewed the empirical literature on reading and concluded that it’s extremely unlikely you can greatly improve your reading speed without missing out on a lot of meaning.”

“Techniques that aim to guide eye movements so that we can take in more information from each glance seem doomed to fail. There is only a small area in the retina (called the fovea) for which our visual acuity is very high. Our eyes are seriously limited in their precision outside of that. This means that we can take in only a word or so at each glance, as well as a little bit about the words on either side. In fact, since the 1960s, experiments have repeatedly confirmed that when people ‘speed read,’ they simply do not comprehend the parts of the text that their eyes skip over.”

“A deeper problem, however — and the one that also threatens the new speed-reading apps — is that the big bottleneck in reading isn’t perception (seeing the words) but language processing (assembling strings of words into meanings).”

“Reading is about language comprehension, not visual ability. If you want to improve your reading speed, your best bet — as old-fashioned as it sounds — is to read a wide variety of written material and to expand your vocabulary.”

Instead of teaching speed reading, those of us in the legal education reform movement are trying to help students attain greater comprehension. Techniques for better reading include treating reading as a process, having a purpose for doing the reading, and setting goals for the reading (what do I want to get out of this text?) In doing the reading, the reader should first skim the text to see what it is about, then read the text carefully. The reader should read and understand every word and how words, sentences, and paragraphs fit together. A reader should evaluate and question the text as she does the reading. Also, the reader should ask how the text relates to what she already knows. Finally, after finishing the text, the reader should reflect on what she learned. Moreover, the reader should evaluate her reading process to see if it can be improved. [From Chapter Two of Think Like A Lawyer: Legal Reasoning For Law Students and Business Professionals (2013)]

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