I think “words” are somewhat the wrong thing to focus on. You don’t want to “read” as fast as possible, you want to extract all ideas useful to you out of a piece of text as fast as possible. Depending on the type of text, this might correspond to wildly different wpm metrics:
If you’re studying quantum field theory for the first time, your wpm while reading a textbook might well end up in double digits.
If you’re reading an insight-dense essay, or a book you want to immerse yourself into, 150-300 wpm seem about right.
If you’re reading a relatively formulaic news report, or LLM slop, or the book equivalent of junk food, 500+ wpm seem easily achievable.
The core variable mediating this is, what’s the useful-concept density per word in a given piece of text? Or, to paraphrase: how important is it to actually read every word?
Textbooks are often insanely dense, such that you need to unpack concepts by re-reading passages and mulling over them. Well-written essays and prose might be perfectly optimized to make each word meaningful, requiring you to process each of them. But if you’re reading something full of filler, or content/scenes you don’t care about, or information you already know, you can often skip entire sentences; or read every third or fifth word.
How can this process be sped up? By explicitly recognizing that concept extraction is what you’re after, and consciously concentrating on that task, instead of on “reading”/on paying attention to individual words. You want to instantiate the mental model of whatever you’re reading, fix your mind’s eye on it, then attentively track how the new information entering your eyes changes this model. Then move through the text as fast as you can while still comprehending each change.
Edit: One bad habit here is subvocalizing, as @Gurkenglas points out. It involves explicitly focusing on consuming every word, which is something you want to avoid. You want to “unsee” the words and directly track the information they’re trying to convey.
Also, depending on the content, higher-level concept-extraction strategies might be warranted. See e. g. the advice about reading science papers here: you might want to do a quick, lossy skim first, then return to the parts that interest you and dig deeper into them. If you want to maximize your productivity/learning speed, such strategies are in the same reference class as increasing your wpm.
One thing that confuses me is that I seem to be able to listen to audio really fast, usually 3x and sometimes 4x (depending on the speaker). It feels to me like I am still maintaining full comprehension during this, but I can imagine that being wrong
My guess is that it’s because the audio you’re listening to has low concept density per word. I expect it’s podcasts/interview, with a lot of conversational filler, or audiobooks?
FWIW I am skeptical of this. I’ve only done a 5-minute lit review, but the psych research appears to take the position that subvocalization is important for reading comprehension. From Rayner et al. (2016)
Suppressing the inner voice. Another claim that underlies speed-reading courses is that, through training, speed readers can increase reading efficiency by inhibiting subvocalization. This is the speech that we often hear in our heads when we read. This inner speech is an abbreviated form of speech that is not heard by others and that may not involve overt movements of the mouth but that is, nevertheless, experienced by the reader. Speed-reading proponents claim that this inner voice is a habit that carries over from fact that we learn to read out loud before we start reading silently and that inner speech is a drag on reading speed. Many of the speed-reading books we surveyed recommended the elimination of inner speech as a means for speeding comprehension (e.g., Cole, 2009; Konstant, 2010; Sutz, 2009). Speed-reading proponents are generally not very specific about what they mean when they suggest eliminating inner speech (according to one advocate, “at some point you have to dispense with sound if you want to be a speed reader”; Sutz, 2009, p. 11), but the idea seems to be that we should be able to read via a purely visual mode and that speech processes will slow us down.
However, research on normal reading challenges this claim that the use of inner speech in silent reading is a bad habit. As we discussed earlier, there is evidence that inner speech plays an important role in word identification and comprehension during silent reading (see Leinenger, 2014). Attempts to eliminate inner speech have been shown to result in impairments in comprehension when texts are reasonably difficult and require readers to make inferences (Daneman & Newson, 1992; Hardyck & Petrinovich, 1970; Slowiaczek & Clifton, 1980). Even people reading sentences via RSVP at 720 wpm appear to generate sound-based representations of the words (Petrick, 1981).
I think “words” are somewhat the wrong thing to focus on. You don’t want to “read” as fast as possible, you want to extract all ideas useful to you out of a piece of text as fast as possible. Depending on the type of text, this might correspond to wildly different wpm metrics:
If you’re studying quantum field theory for the first time, your wpm while reading a textbook might well end up in double digits.
If you’re reading an insight-dense essay, or a book you want to immerse yourself into, 150-300 wpm seem about right.
If you’re reading a relatively formulaic news report, or LLM slop, or the book equivalent of junk food, 500+ wpm seem easily achievable.
The core variable mediating this is, what’s the useful-concept density per word in a given piece of text? Or, to paraphrase: how important is it to actually read every word?
Textbooks are often insanely dense, such that you need to unpack concepts by re-reading passages and mulling over them. Well-written essays and prose might be perfectly optimized to make each word meaningful, requiring you to process each of them. But if you’re reading something full of filler, or content/scenes you don’t care about, or information you already know, you can often skip entire sentences; or read every third or fifth word.
How can this process be sped up? By explicitly recognizing that concept extraction is what you’re after, and consciously concentrating on that task, instead of on “reading”/on paying attention to individual words. You want to instantiate the mental model of whatever you’re reading, fix your mind’s eye on it, then attentively track how the new information entering your eyes changes this model. Then move through the text as fast as you can while still comprehending each change.
Edit: One bad habit here is subvocalizing, as @Gurkenglas points out. It involves explicitly focusing on consuming every word, which is something you want to avoid. You want to “unsee” the words and directly track the information they’re trying to convey.
Also, depending on the content, higher-level concept-extraction strategies might be warranted. See e. g. the advice about reading science papers here: you might want to do a quick, lossy skim first, then return to the parts that interest you and dig deeper into them. If you want to maximize your productivity/learning speed, such strategies are in the same reference class as increasing your wpm.
My guess is that it’s because the audio you’re listening to has low concept density per word. I expect it’s podcasts/interview, with a lot of conversational filler, or audiobooks?
FWIW I am skeptical of this. I’ve only done a 5-minute lit review, but the psych research appears to take the position that subvocalization is important for reading comprehension. From Rayner et al. (2016)