Speed Reading is the Devil!
In the first MP3 lecture of one of my correspondance courses, one of my professors took half an hour to give us a mini-lecture on speed reading. It made me really upset, and I think I've finally figured out why.
First of all, let me say that this professor isn't doing anything for my stereotype of female academics. Coming as she does from a literary background (all her studying was done in English lit.), she fits into the model of so many other female english professors I've met. Career driven, over-commited, passionate, flighty -- they've got so much to say and so much to do that their lectures are a bit like watching a barnyard chicken cull -- lots of running around, sans head. To be fair, these women are definately good at their jobs -- frequently prolific publishers and lecturers who will do anything to help their students understand the material. Some of these professors are also quite well organized (unlike this one, who is constantly losing her papers, which, when you can't see her shuffling for them, just sounds dumb), and live lives of modelled efficiency. But they need that efficiency (whether it be organized or not) because they've always got so much going on that I get the feeling they never stop to breathe.
And it's that sense of "I'm late I'm late for a very important date!" hurried-ness that inspires the need for speed-reading, I think. The professor taught it to us as a survival technique -- "Reading at 800 words a minute is not fun, but it gets you through that textbook in a hurry and frees you up to do other things." She admitted to frequently reading four or five books at a time, and likened reading academic articles to being a sea bird skimming over the surface of the water, diving down when she sees something of interest.
But this is wrong. Just plain wrong. I love text, and I love words, and I love books. Why would I want to speed my way through good writing? Why would I want to have a life so full that I have no other choice but to read 800 words a minute just so that I can fit in a few more facts into my already overstuffed brain? I can't know everything, or even 1% of 1% of everything, so why not just sit back, relax, and enjoy things a bit more?
Furthermore, the best of kind of reading for 'speeded reading', according to my professor, are academic articles. As I said before, I'm apparently supposed to fish for the information that will be useful to me, then cast the article aside and move on to the next thing. But how is that honouring the person who worked hard to craft this article? Furthermore, how is that going to make me feel about my own article, which I have poured myself into and which (if everyone follows this scheme) will never be anything more than a piece of fish to be picked over and used for other people's similarly fishy articles. It's a never-ending cycle of speeded-up production and consumption, with little space afforded to thought and reflection and genuine human care.
This is not the way it should be, and this is exactly the reason why I decided not to be an academic in the world of English Lit. It seems like everyone's so busy following the 'publish or perish' rule that they've forgotten why they got into this in the first place -- because words are precious, are important, are powerful. To speed-read anything but fact-based textbooks and the newspaper (which is tomorrow's bird-cage linings) is, to me, a travesty and an insult to both the practice of writing and the writer herself. This whole notion of speeded reading is a symptom of the modern world where faster is better and extra time means an extra book or activity to be squeezed in. Any wonder why we're all stressed and over-tired?
Much as I love efficiency, I would rather read less (do less, see less) and know more. And have time in between to breathe deep and appreciate (slowly, langourously) the wonders of the world around me.
posted by bento at 5:33 AM
5 Comments:
Agreed, except by that reasoning I wouldn't speed-read newspaper articles either. How is it any less of an insult to the writer if they happen to be a journalist rather than an academic? There's a lot of work that goes into putting together good news-writing.
8:18 AM
While I agree with the spirit of what you say, as an aspiring academic, I feel honour bound to point out that it is IMPOSSIBLE to read all the things that you are supposed to since the articles just keep on coming. And you are required and expected to have read them if you want that degree. ( Just today my supervisor was scanning my bibliography for Books That The Viva Committee Will Check For. )
And in defense of the fishing method: it is actually quite a good one, since it helps you get through some impossibly turgid text. If the article was well written and interesting, after that first swoop you just stay down, having no desire to seek better feeding grounds. Perhaps the knowledge that readers have neither the patience nor inclination to waste time will encourage writers of academic articles to think also about how they write, not only about the ideas they must convey. I for one, would be very grateful for an increase in quality academic writing.
10:08 AM
you're right about journalists, Kenso, they deserve just as much respect for their craft as anyone else. but it is, of necessity, a less long-lived medium.
And, miss machismo, I know that speed-reading is sometimes a necessary evil. however, I don't like the academic establishment that has made it so (sacrificing, I think, quantity for quality, and I hope along with you that the fishing method (which I have used too, I will admit, with apologies to the writer) will encourage academics to write better articles that demand our full attention.
thanks for your replies!
1:04 PM
I don't know whether this is helpful or not, but one of my friends is a journalist and told me that for a lot of publications you're trained to write in a, I think she called it funnel but I don't think that makes sense, where you use the first two paragraphs to put in all the information, and then the rest of the article you expand upon the information in the first few paragraphs. So some articles may be written with the idea of speed-reading them in mind.
I also have to agree with miss machismo on it being impossible to read everything. When it's nine at night, you have a meeting with your advisor at eight the next morning and you barely understand the abstract, scanning through to get the sentient points is often all that can be done. And I don't know how it is in humanities and sciences, but in mathematics, all details are cut out already (you really need to read papers with a pencil and scrap paper to work everything out) so it's sort of conducive to speeding through them.
Which reminds me, I have a stack of papers I told my advisor I'd read before I go... :)
1:52 PM
A small addendum - I just found out my journalist friend is re-training to be a social worker, so I guess she mustn't have liked writing articles for speed reading through :)
1:58 PM
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