Story on the effects of skim reading.

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How Skim Reading (all to common in a world of information overload) effects brain development.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfr ... are_btn_tw

In particular, this profoundly impacts my work life. Every day I am sent e-mails and documents I am expected to have read through, and yet the Scrum methodology dictates that I utilize 6 hours of my work day writing code. I am constantly apologizing for not having read something through, and yet when I do try to read something, I typically skim it because I want to devote as little time as possible to the activity.

I read the link. Only two sentences stood out to me:

Results indicated that students who read on print were superior in their comprehension to screen-reading peers, particularly in their ability to sequence detail and reconstruct the plot in chronological order.

Ziming Liu from San Jose State University has conducted a series of studies which indicate that the “new norm” in reading is skimming, with word-spotting and browsing through the text.

It seemed like the article was almost stumbling along in the dark trying to find a solution. It was from an NT perspective. Since the concept of Skim Reading is similar to the concept of Speed Reading, I thought I would throw in my 2 cents worth from an Aspie perspective.

I have a short term memory problem that dramatically short circuited my ability to read when I was young.

This recalls another type of special education that I received. When I was growing up, I never enjoyed reading for reading sake. I only associated reading with schoolwork. The only exception to the rule was comic books. But when I entered high school, the requirement to read efficiently became extremely important. My school must have recognized my limitation and placed me in a strange type of special class during my freshman high school year. The training was a type of reading comprehension training. The closest I could describe this approach was a class in Speed Reading. They would flash a paragraph or two of information for a very brief period of time and then measure my comprehension. They tried to teach me tricks on absorbing written material quickly and effectively.

My ability to learn was hindered by my lack of short-term memory. I would read the first sentence of a paragraph and then I would read the next. But by the time I finished the second sentence I forgot what the first sentence was about; so I would reread it. Then off to the third sentence but part way through that I forgot what the first two sentences were about, so I reread them. So it might take me an hour to read one paragraph - a single paragraph. What speed- reading taught me is to quickly identify one or two key words in a paragraph. This was the essence of the paragraph. Once I found them, they would anchor the entire paragraph around those couple words. So instead of reading linearly, I would read information from the inside out. I learned to comprehend meaning by drilling down from those key words to frame the entire paragraph.

This gave me the ability to quickly capture the essence of a paragraph or drill down deeper by rereading all the words that surrounded the core. All the fine details, and as the article described it as "internalized knowledge, analogical reasoning, and inference; perspective-taking and empathy; critical analysis and the generation of insight". Perhaps what the students of today need is a course in Speed Reading, the ability to read from the inside out efficiently.

Couldn't agree more, jimmy! Wasn't aware it could actually be taught. Speed reading is something I really appreciate being able to do, and has been a huge asset throughout life. I'd hate to lose such a skill.

Thank you jimmym for your insights. I apparently learned what you are describing as speed reading, mostly because I was bored and just wanted to know what the content was and, as I grew older and knew more, what, if anything, was new to me.

The bit about retaining more from paper text than from a screen. I rarely read content from a screen, but I do read fiction on a screen. I find I loose track of the plot more often on screens than I do on paper books, which would be in line with the article.

I will say there are some authors who write so elegantly that reading every word is delicious and for those writers, I take my time.

I don't think I would have gotten through university if I couldn't speed read. I'd remember the information for however long I needed it for, but forget it afterwards. This was probably because the majority of what I read were very dry journal articles. A lot of them.

My love for fiction has been a bit burnt out since I did all that reading at uni. The pleasure isn't there now.

At first I thought this was about people who don't bother to read your whole post first before responding when they decide to argue or disagree with you. Hence the tunnel reading and the cherry picking and them totally ignoring the context of your post and ignoring the rest you wrote. Even writing a short post, bam you still get an idiot because you can tell they didn't read your whole post or they wouldn't have written that.

But nope, this was about something else. I only skim read when I am curious what the article is about but if I actually want to comment, I will take the time to read the whole thing. Most times I only read it halfway through and I am done because my attention span is short and I got bored reading it.