(cross posting as this seems the more appropriate place)
cross-posted from: https://lemmygrad.ml/post/3198573
I have ADHD, I think it’s possible I had some other form of reading disability when I was younger, but I’m not sure. Just a hunch, my therapist has. One thing I do all the time, that really slows me down, is subvocalizing. If I’m not subvocalizing, I feel like my retention and comprehension are almost nonexistent. For easier literature, it’s not a big deal, but wanting to read more theory, I find myself struggling.
I think, according to some reading tests I was taking today, I read at about 144 wpm which isn’t great. That’s me mostly subvocalizing. If I stop, I can get to 270, but my retention and comprehension goes down quite a bit.
Any advice, tools, websites, services, you might be aware of that can help me unlearn a lifetime of bad reading habits? Everyone wants to sell you a tool or service for STEM shit, but when you’re looking for adult assistance with reading, all I seem to be finding is stuff for Elementary and Middle School level reading.
Speed reading is overrated, and I suspect most people who are doing it aren’t fully retaining the information they’re reading.
I mean, I can read fiction hella fast while subvocalizing, because well written fiction is easy. It doesn’t really require comprehension of new ideas. Theory is hard, and often not well written. Of course it’s gonna slow you down. I can read like a hundred pages of well written fiction in like an hour. Poorly written nonfiction, and I’m lucky if I get through 20 or 30 pages in that same time frame.
I’d say practice practice practice really. For a while, those apps that show you one word at a time were pretty popular but from what I hear they were more useful for speeding up your word recognition for regular reading, not for comprehension while using the app.💁♂️
does “sub-vocalizing” mean “hearing the word in your head”?
Yes, I read at talking speed / reading aloud speed because that’s effectively what I’m doing in my head. Reading it aloud, to myself, using my internal monolog.
You mentioned reading theory. Some styles of text are just hard to read and it takes practice to get fast. I had to read a lot of scientific papers and immerse myself in the concepts and lingo before I could parse through them quickly. It might make sense to just read theory as slow as you need to to absorb the concepts and get comfortable.
As for subvocalizing, I think I would draw a distinction between speaking the words in your head and hearing the words in your head. When I speak the words in my head I find that it slows me down, probably because it engages the speech production part of my brain too much. But even when I stop speaking the words in my head and just scan my eyes across the text, I still hear the words in my head in a more passive way. And it’s strange, because if I heard real audio at that speed it would sound weird, but when it’s just in your head somehow it feels normal. You’re not having to actually parse a real audio signal, your imagination is just ghosting over the sounds of the words as they enter your brain.
Maybe I would read even faster if I stopped hearing words entirely, I don’t know.
I will say that subvocalization literally is reading aloud to yourself. Your larynx flutters when you subvocalize and so iirc the current theory is that it’s a way of promoting comprehension and retention because you are processing it through both audio and visual centers of the brain
Isn’t that what most people do?
The majority probably do but multiple members of my family were surprised to hear that people do it.
fascinating, never thought about something like that
It hit me pretty similarly to finding out that some people don’t make images in their minds. So much of how I think and remember things involves conjuring a quick image (or at least those tend to accompany recall and thought) but I learned from them that it’s not so fundamental a thing to do.
Yes, my wife is also like that. She has a masters degree and I wonder how strong that correlates. I only have a HS diploma.
