Columns by Mike Crowl, from the Dunedin Star Midweeker, Dunedin, New Zealand

Column Eight - 31st Aug, 1994

On Reading Slowly

Periodically I have another go at learning to speed-read, having convinced myself - yet again - that I don't read fast enough. This usually happens after I hear someone like Gordon Dryden claiming he reads four books a day. With such motivation before me, I recently took a book out of the library which said it could teach me to increase my reading speed - dramatically. The author even told me I would improve my comprehension. Now that's a real plus. I worked my way through the first series of exercises - a test set - and apparently passed with flying colours. Well, to put it another way: I read everything at great speed, but in the end didn't have much idea what it was all about (something exciting like the state of the Russian economy three decades ago). My speed, in fact, wasn't a problem. I skimmed through the words like a scythe through a ripe field of corn. But to what end? When I'd finished I could only answer about 60% of the comprehension questions, and even then I guessed some. Why speed read if it goes in one eye and out the other, without at any stage engaging the brain? We have a bit of a fetish about speed-reading in this age. (We have a fetish about speed generally: look at the daft car ads which show the vehicles accelerating at a rate that would blow the speed camera away; or at computers that byte the bits at a phenomenal rate; or at needing to be so close to a phone we have to carry one with us.) I can remember (slowly) reading about American students who boasted they could read War and Peace in a couple of hours. Well, bully for them. How did they manage to comprehend who the characters were at that pace? I have to admit I've never finished War and Peace - I've sunk without a trace twice. And the only way I finished the equally lengthy Brothers Karamazov was by writing down the names of the characters as I went in order to keep track of who was who. There is a place for reading at speed: when the words carry very little substance, you can skim over them like a souped-up hovercraft over the sea. But there's also a place for the leisurely, dawdling read: what you might call tortoise-reading. I don't find this approach recommended in too many self-improvement books, however. Some books are impossible to read at speed with any degree of comprehension, and some books shouldn't be read at speed at all - including War and Peace, and most poetry. How can you get into the hearts and minds of the characters when you're zipping past them at light-speed? How can you appreciate the author's subtleties when you're hopping from one exclamation point to another? It's like seeing a film version of a great novel - all the inbetween bits are missing. If you don't know the book, you wonder why A marries B, or C murders D. Their motives are lost under the great sweep forward. And speed-reading encourages us to read a book which is, in the end, quite different from the one the author wrote. We may pick up his ideas, but we miss the words. We grab at outlines, but see the details only through a hazy fog. We need to read books at the speed the author intended.  Dick Francis, after a reader wrote enthusiastically that she'd read his book in three hours, complained: "But it took me six months to write." I don't take six months to write this column - normally! - but I'd still hate to think of Gordon Dryden giving it one quick blink, and telling me he knew exactly what I'd said.

Speed: When I wrote this, of course, neither cars, computers nor cell-phones had anywhere near the capabilities that they have ten years later.   [Back]

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