Improving your Reading

for Comprehension and Speed

image of a reader

Richard Anton
February 24, 2024

There are two areas of reading people typically desire to improve: comprehension and speed.

Reading Comprehension

According to Mortimer Adler's classic book How to Read a Book there are four levels of reading:

  1. Elementary Reading: This is the most basic level and involves the literal comprehension of words and sentences. It's what we learn to do in primary school: decoding the symbols and understanding the basic meaning of the text.
  2. Inspectional Reading: This level involves skimming or scanning a text to grasp the main ideas and structure quickly. It's helpful for:
    1. Previewing a book before diving in.
    2. Getting a general overview of a topic.
    3. Identifying specific information like dates, names, or keywords.
  3. Analytical Reading: This involves a deeper engagement with the text. You analyze the author's arguments, consider different perspectives, and critically evaluate the content. This requires: 4. Asking questions about the text's purpose, claims, and evidence. 5. Identifying the author's point of view and potential biases. 6. Connecting the text to your own knowledge and experience.
  4. **Syntopical Reading: **This is the most advanced level and involves engaging with multiple texts on the same topic. You compare and contrast different perspectives, synthesize the information, and form your own conclusions. This is essential for: 7. Building a comprehensive understanding of a complex topic, 8. Identifying underlying themes and arguments across various sources, and 9. Developing your own critical and independent thinking skills.

These levels of reading vary depending on the type of text and purpose. For instance, basic reading is suitable for comic strips, quick reading for news articles, deep reading for research papers, and comprehensive reading for complex philosophical topics.

A good article covering these levels is The Four Levels of Reading: Improve Skills One Level At A Time on the Farnham Street blog run by Shane Parrish who is also the author of the book Clear Thinking.

Reading Speed

Speed reading techniques are controversial, with some claiming major improvements and others claiming this is bunk. Personally, I find some of them quite helpful, but they require a higher degree of focus to maintain the level of comprehension when using them. They also don’t necessarily get you the wild claims some speed reading courses promise, but I do believe they can gain you moderate but significant improvements to your reading speed while preserving most of your comprehension.

The first step to improving your reading speed is to baseline it. You can use the speed reading test at https://readingsoft.com/ which includes questions on comprehension to gauge your starting point.

For a very brief introduction into some of the techniques I think are more realistically useful, I recommend reading the article Scientific Speed Reading: How to Read 300% Faster in 20 Minutes by Tim Ferris of The 4-Hour Workweek fame. Another helpful article which is comprehensive but also includes some techniques I am a bit skeptical of is https://blog.mindvalley.com/how-to-read-faster.

For a balanced discussion of speed reading by Scott H. Young, the author of Ultralearning, I strongly recommend the article I Was Wrong About Speed Reading: Here are the Facts. The tl;dr is that speed reading probably increases the speed you can skim or ready material you are more fluent with by around two times faster, which would be something like 200-400 words per minute for the average college graduate to 500-600 or so. This seems realistic to me, since I have learned and semi-regularly practiced some speed reading techniques, and I read at 705 wpm on the https://readingsoft.com/ test while scoring 82% on their comprehension exam. Probably at 600 wpm I could get closer to 100% comprehension.

The techniques I have found useful are:

  1. Use a pen or other pointer to pace your eye movements and stay focused. Practice moving it faster to accustom your eyes to move more quickly without backtracking.
  2. Start your eyes (and pen/pointer) a bit in from the beginning and stop a bit from the end to allow your eyes to take in one or two words on each end without waiting on the eye movements to cover them.
  3. Practice viewing several words in a “chunk” and try not to subvocalize, but be warned that subvocalizing is actually important to comprehension.

Don’t expect these techniques to work on a calculus book or a dense scientific paper, but it can help you skim them faster before diving into them more deeply on later passes.

References

Adler, M. J., & Van Doren, C. (2014, September 30). How to Read a Book_. _Simon and Schuster.

Ferriss, T. (2007, April 24). The 4-Hour Workweek_. _Crown Archetype.

Parrish, S. (2023, October 5). Clear Thinking. Random House.

Young, S. (2019, August 6). Ultralearning. HarperCollins.