It definitely is trading off with comprehension, if only because time spent thinking about and processing ideas roughly correlates with how well they cement themselves in your brain and worldview (note: this is just intuition). I can speedread for pure information very quickly, but I often force myself to slow down and read every word when reading content that I actually want to think about and process, which is an extra pain and chore because I have ADHD. But if I don’t do this, I can end up in a state where I technically “know” what I just read, but haven’t let it actually change anything in my brain—it’s as if I just shoved it into storage. This is fine for reading instruction manuals or skimming end-user agreements. This is not fine for reading LessWrong posts or particularly information-dense books.
If you are interested in reading quicker, one thing that might slow your reading pace is subvocalizing or audiating the words you are reading (I unfortunately don’t have a proper word for this). This is when you “sound out” what you’re reading as if someone is speaking to you inside your head. If you can learn to disengage this habit at will, you can start skimming over words in sentences like “the” or “and” that don’t really enhance semantic meaning, and eventually be able to only focus in on the words or meaning you care about. This still comes with the comprehension tradeoff and somewhat increases your risk for misreading, which will paradoxically decrease your reading speed (similar to taking typing speed tests: if you make a typo somewhere you’re gonna have to go back and redo the whole thing and at that point you may as well have just read slower in the first place.)
It definitely is trading off with comprehension, if only because time spent thinking about and processing ideas roughly correlates with how well they cement themselves in your brain and worldview (note: this is just intuition). I can speedread for pure information very quickly, but I often force myself to slow down and read every word when reading content that I actually want to think about and process, which is an extra pain and chore because I have ADHD. But if I don’t do this, I can end up in a state where I technically “know” what I just read, but haven’t let it actually change anything in my brain—it’s as if I just shoved it into storage. This is fine for reading instruction manuals or skimming end-user agreements. This is not fine for reading LessWrong posts or particularly information-dense books.
If you are interested in reading quicker, one thing that might slow your reading pace is subvocalizing or audiating the words you are reading (I unfortunately don’t have a proper word for this). This is when you “sound out” what you’re reading as if someone is speaking to you inside your head. If you can learn to disengage this habit at will, you can start skimming over words in sentences like “the” or “and” that don’t really enhance semantic meaning, and eventually be able to only focus in on the words or meaning you care about. This still comes with the comprehension tradeoff and somewhat increases your risk for misreading, which will paradoxically decrease your reading speed (similar to taking typing speed tests: if you make a typo somewhere you’re gonna have to go back and redo the whole thing and at that point you may as well have just read slower in the first place.)
Hope this helps!