Are you a slow reader?

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I'm a very fast reader, but I miss things. Unless I concentrate, I unconsciously skip most of the description in books, perhaps 'cause my visual imagination is very poor.

I'm a very slow reader and it can get very tiresome to make constant mistakes. Often the text moves on the page, changing font size and color which slows me even more. I prefer audio books. I got into them in college when the amount of reading required increased and I couldn't' keep up, no matter how hard I tried. I have ordered a kindle in the hopes that the contrast controls, font size settings and "read to me" function will help out, along with reducing clutter in my space.

In graduate school I did try some speed reading techniques that really saved me and ironically, my comprehension was better. It takes a great deal of effort, however so I don't do it often. Essentially, what you do is move a straight edge down the page more quickly than you can actually read and as you encounter each line you take a little mental picture of it. By the time you get to the end of a paragraph you have a series of quick pictures that create a narrative.

I'm a very fast reader. Perhaps at times a bit too fast.

I am not sure if I am a fast or a slow reader....I guess I must be pretty close to average. I read very carefully and attentively for school though......as it has been my special interest for the last couple of years. I retain a lot of the details when I read for school. When I read this way I am MUCH slower than when I read for fun and am not obsessive about trying to remember and understand what I have read.

Speed reading is actually not very good when it comes to what you have to read for school. Speed reading has actually been shown to reduce attention to (and therefore memory) for detailed or technical material. I don't have a reference for this, but it is from a neuropsychology of memory class I took last year. Anyways, if you need to really understand the material to write a paper on it or remember details to take an exam, slow and steady is the way to go.

I read in a rather... interesting way. I've found that my reading speed and ability hasn't much changed since around the 5th grade or so (I'm 23 and graduating college in a month now). I read out loud almost with a personality, taking the written word and giving it a sort of acted liveliness, even when I haven't even read it before. I can read fast enough to where the recital actually slows it down enough to be able to give it a smooth tone, to where I don't get monotone in my reading by devoting too much "processing" to reading the words. It's not entirely easy, though - while the words are read using only about 20% of my "capacity", actually reciting the words aloud takes another 60%, leaving maybe 20% to modify my tone and consider the words being read. I hate talking.

But the words just seem to flow off any given page - I don't see letters and words, I see meanings as I look over a page of text. If I look at a single word, I see the concept behind it - such as the meaning, "a negative" behind the three letters "not", if that makes any sense. So when I read a sentence, I still see and process the words in a linear fashion, in order, but I don't have to think of the word that's written - it's just "there". Hence I do a darn good job at proofreading... a word that should fit, but doesn't due to a typo or spelling/grammar error, snaps right out.

That also means I can sometimes sort of "speed read" like a computer disk drive, flying across paragraphs reading little segments of sentences as I "index" across the page. Does absolutely nothing to get a meaning behind a written page for me, as I'm spending about 80% of my thought scanning the page, and 20% figuring out if what I just scanned is the word I'm looking for. Probably all those hours spent solving word-search puzzles.

... eh, hmm. Yeah, I also type a little much... *heh*.

I read like a rocket - learned reading before I got very far with speech, have consumed a dozen or so books a week ever since (and that's getting on for a very long time). Like falconfour, it's more like inhaling the meaning from the page than constructing it from the words, although I have pretty good recall of the words when I need to use it.

My reading speed depends on the relative subject of topic.If it is of fictional or biographical relevence it tends to be slower than I could call average
pace.If it is something that is reference or educational,I absorb the information with the every detail at a pace that is considered above my average speed.

When I was in school; reading was the one thing I was good at. I used to like reading before I started high-school but my reading speed as always been very slow & my eyes tend to get sore after reading books a while. I have bad ADHD thou & have problems paying attenion/day-dreaming & zone out while reading. I don't have good eyesight either

Thank you for posting this link. This has completely changed my life in a matter of days. I am a fast fiction reader but painfully slow, easily distracted textbook reader. I have been getting through my class reading so much easier and faster now. I just follow my finger as it moves along quickly and my reading comprehension is still quite good.

I am fast reader since childhood, and I like it. I like it very much, it is like an obsession.
And a year before I studied at fast-reading courses, and it helps me very much, especially with textbooks. Not only read fast, but organize information in the mind.
But the next part of the course I took part in was much more difficult for me - it was about reading a fiction and how to see images described. I like to read fiction, but usually don't have visual images, and I failed to learn how to do this fast.

I love reading and began reading very early (though I was held back somewhat by the adults around me who didn't want me to "grow up" too fast, etc). But though I write very fast, I've always been reading very slow, and it bothers me because there's so much I'd like to read!!

I tried the spreeder test and got the overall understanding of what the text was about. Something about how fast it could take to comprehend and see each word and this program could help me get faster at reading.

It was pretty annoying because I only saw about half of the words and had to guess what it was about because I knew more or less beforehand.

I guess that says something about how slow I read. - I've tried these get-to-read-faster training programs before but they never helped me. As soon as I up pace I don't see the words. It's as if I have to be able to "say" each word for myself (inwardly) in order to understand, but then I do understand and remember how it was written, etc...

Is this a form of dyslexia? I have a friend who says so (he has AS too and has done a good deal of research, but also tends to have some peculiar views, so I don't know what to think of it). - I spell fine, except for having the irritating tendency to swap letters and words, but that's not because I don't know how to spell, it's because I mix up where in the line I am when writing a word or saying something. Sometimes I swap 'me' for 'you' and such, but I've seen this tendency in many people with AS, and I don't think that's so strange (it's related to our Autistic traits).

I'd REALLY love to learn how to read faster. Man, what I couldn't get to read then!!... '^L^,

No, 700-800 wpm with full comprehension, and I'm able to search a page for certain words/sentences/etc in about 1-3 seconds. I'm prone to procastinating, so my fast reading speed/comprehension is something which I depend on.

I would say that my reading speed is average. When I read books, and newspaper and magazine articles, I want my brain to pick up something from the material. So speed-reading won't help me pick up anything from the material. And if I spend an hour reading, my brain will feel a little bit tried and I will thus, take a 5-min break.

I read so fast that my wife doesn't want me to flip through her books before she gets a chance to read them.

I'm an extremely fast reader. Reading is one of my best skills actually.

The Speed of read (or the Sped of read past) topic

depends on interest. Meaty history and philosophy are slow to digest, whereas some biographies go lickety split.

I have noticed when I read I go into to this hyperfocus and am not aware of the passage of time until I snap out of it. Much philosophy has been spilled on this theme of consciousness and awareness since the time of the Early Greeks.