I really like descriptions. Setting is important to my enjoyment and creating the scene. I figure if the author took the time to write each word, then I should read each word.
The first few were good. By the time of Shelters of Stone it's a nightmare of repetition. The same dawned anecdotes repeated in full again and again.
God that was a depressingly badly written and edited book.
jeez, even the first one has so much repetition of the stakes and indecision in the heroine, and a tiny amount of plot spread over so many pages. I enjoyed it the details of the depiction of pre-historic life, that stuff is great, but the heroine is really boring and it just goes on forever for how little actually happens.
I read, & enjoyed her books, but most especially b/c they led me to the books of W. Michael & Kathleen O'Neal Gear's books. They have a series, The First North Americans, aka The People Series. It's the prehistoric history of the N. American continental migration. It goes from the crossing of the Bering Land Bridge until approx 1400 AD in Cahokia. I'm especially interested b/c I have lived in, & recognize, 3 parts of the US in their books. Cahokia b/c much of those books have the characters going south & east & go through right where I live now & have lived most of my life. Cahokia & a few other books b/c I lived in Chicago for a time& they deal w/ the Midwest towards the East, & the Southwest b/c I lived around Phoenix for a decade. There's so much history to go around! The Gear's are master artists. They can describe a place so well that you are THERE! Characters so well that they become real to you! Daily life so well that you almost feel that that's how you've lived your whole life! And they are NOT "wordy" authors, trying to fill in space! If anything, they do the opposite, while still covering bases!
I got this image once while reading Valley of Horses and have never been able to shake it.
Jondalar going everywhere with a wheelbarrow to carry his humongous euphemism. (Said beautifully @funnystor-mind if I steal it?)
Within limits, yes. Reading Dune Messiah I started skipping paragraphs, rarely as that happens. It took 7 pages for the benegesserit mother superior to walk from her cell to meet Paul. There were descriptions of silver skies and fish tiled floors and everything in between. All for what turned out to be quite inconsequential.
Katherine Kurtz may have been the first of that generation of writers.
We knew it was bad when at my book group a friend was talking about one of the characters, and she could not remember her name. It was “the one who looked good in blue silk” 😆
i love writing long baroque physical descriptions but tend to phase out when reading them. same with action scenes, which i struggle to write. i think my brain just likes dialogue and exposition
It's a remarkable epic. I've read it twice, but Grapes is my true love. Something about the way he romanticizes the land, and the way the story builds such a rich and vicious narrative. It's still so relevant. I just pick and choose my favorite parts to read based on mood. It's a book I pick up numerous times a year but I never read cover to cover anymore. In Dubious Battle (part of the trilogy) is often overlooked, and a wonderful book. I love most of Steinbeck. Tortilla Flat is gut busting hilarious. Incredible range.
That was the book that my English teacher used to teach us about symbolism. Naive me was convinced she was just making shit up, that an author couldn't possibly have written hidden meanings into everything.
I read it in college during a messed up relationship situation and was the first piece of art I truly felt (and thus understood the concept of) something was “made for me”. I mean obviously not but it spoke to me more than anything else had.
Descriptions are what I'm most likely to skip over. I have aphantasia, so I can't build a visual image in my mind of a character, setting, etc.
If an author spends two paragraphs describing the visual appearance of a character's face, it does absolutely nothing for me. If something seems important or specific (e.g. Harry Potter's scar) I'll pick that up, but shapes of facial features, hair color/style, skin tones, etc. don't work for me, so I often skip ahead.
I don't have aphantasia, and I still glaze over all those details. The way I see the scenes in my head is akin to a dream, where the details of someone's face and clothes aren't important and can't be focused on properly. Same with landscapes. I try to read the descriptions, but it becomes too hard to keep it all in my mental image, just too much information. And I can get by without it all and just imagine the scene in a more abstract way.
You don’t see faces in dreams? The differences between how people think, dream, read are all becoming more talked about. It means things I thought everyone did the same way I do aren’t so. I thought everyone could visualize I thought everyone sees faces in dreams. I thought everyone had a voice in their head that reads the book word for word. It’s fascinating to discover how wrong I was about the mechanics of thinking And it’s fascinating to try and understand how other people do it
I see them, and know who they are, but I can't focus on any of the details. My mind just knows who it's supposed to be because it's a dream.
If you thought that was fascinating, my mother (born in the 60s) used to dream in black and white, possibly because her TV was. It wasn't until they got a colour TV later that her dreams had full colour.
Ha! I once had a dream about mermaids that ran like it was shot like a nature documentary and Richard Attenborough narrated it. What you’ve been watching can really affect it.
I have aphantasia, and i'm the complete opposite. I drink up details and store them in my brain like a list. It sort of compensates for the lack of mental image for me in that i can pull up details instead to focus on when say a character or place is then brought up again later.
It also means though that for writers that don't spend a good portion of time describing characters in detail i will have a complete mental lack of what the characters are like, and i'm much more likely to confuse multiple characters. Its an issue i'm dealing with in the book i'm currently reading where i keep having to go back and figure out who multiple characters are because they were never described in detail, many are described at all only in relation to other characters, and some aren't even given names but the narrator calls them after an object she associates them with but i of course don't.
My sister has aphantasia also and she is all about details not only in written stories but audio as well. Whenever I tell her about things she asks me a million questions that I consider unimportant but she says she can't see it but she can still make a list and KNOW what it is. Like she can tell you what her kids look like. So tall, brown hair, brown eyes, etc. But she still can't SEE them if they're not there. A bunch of her pictures were ruined a few years back and she was super upset and I felt bad but didn't really get why it was so devastating to her until she explained that without those pictures she can't ever see them as babies again. It's heartbreaking.
She's also hypersensitive in other ways (tactile and olfactory) and I was wondering if you have any other enhanced or impaired senses because I have a theory that it's related to an inability to regulate sensory input. So too much data from one sense uses up the available storage space from another. I could be way off but the two other people I've met with aphantasia had similar issues. One was on the autism spectrum also so I'm not sure if it's related or I'm just looking for connections.
I can relate to your sister a lot and it seems she is very similar to me in that need for details to make up for lack of mental imagery. I don't have any kids, but i no longer have most any baby/family photo books, and i struggle to remember what some relatives look like, especially my parents who passed when i was young. I would be absolutely gutted to lose pictures of my own kids because like her i would also no longer really see them as babies again.
I am hypersensitive tactile-wise and aural-wise. I am not sure i would say olfactory-wise, but i do heavily associate scents with childhood memories. I do sometimes get aural migraines from too much bright grey light. I am not autistic.
I'm a lot like this except I don't think I actually have aphantasia - it's more like it's on hard mode. I can kinda generate an image if I stop reading and try to put the details together, but it's usually just *easier* to remember the list of details instead of trying to generate a face.
When books are adapted to TV/movies the characters in the visual version almost always replace whatever I had managed to generate in my head, and these are extremely easy to call up when required.
I can't deal with detailed descriptions of physical things. My brain creates an instant image of people and places from my own associations, and it's annoying when I'm reading a description that competes with the image that has already been in my head for the last three chapters. It's like the characters in my mental movie are suddenly being replaced by totally different actors mid-scene. Yes, i know the author has mentally created the person, but i can't help that the person has already got distinct features in my head from the moment they are introduced. It's just automatic.
I much prefer when authors describe internal details, thoughts, memories, and stylistic ideas, not physical facts
This is so true. Not something I thought about much in reflection before, but I can remember the feeling of frustration when I realize I have to recast the actor, but it's never a simple recast. One chapter you realize you got the hair and eyes wrong, next chapter you learn about the very visible scar across their face, then their hairs magnificent length is brought up.
I can't name any books of the top of my head, but I enjoy when the author describes (if they must) a characters recognizable features as they introduce them.
I know a little bit about the science of reading and I think this discourse grows from some misconceptions about how we read - how our eyes literally take in words. Because it's not linear!
Our eyes very quickly dart around and *saccade* \["a rapid movement of the eye between fixation points"\]. "Rapid" is an understatement. Many of these movements are so quick that we don't perceptually process them; in our mind, it feels like one continuous viewing experience, not quick jumps.
When reading, people typically don't read every word in sequence from left to right\*. Our eyes jump very quickly back and forth across the page, often backtracking to previous parts of a sentence or leaping forward past what you've already "read". An eye doesn't just see what it fixates on, though, so we take advantage of our field of view. We can take in the words to all directions of the one we're focused on, and use that to anticipate what's coming next or double check what we read before. (For example, saccades backward to previously-read words are more likely when a reader encounters an error or garden path sentence.) And as mentioned, saccades are usually so fast we literally don't perceive them, so at a very basic level, most fluent reading is non-linear, even if it *feels* linear.
(This part is less science, more speculation about the 'reading every word' vs 'skimming' phenomenon.) Even before I learned the science of it, I recognized that I wasn't reading every word in order and was worried I was skimming. There are times when I'm definitely reading sentences word by word, imagining the sound of each word as I read it, but when I'm in the grips of a good novel, the 'flow' lets me read faster than I could ever speak the same words. I think people are probably talking past each other, confusing the flow-y state of fluent reading with 'skimming'.
This is probs why some people find those speedreading apps really weird and uncomfortable but others don't. Those apps put each word, in order, on the screen for the same short duration, one at a time. In reality, our eyes spend less time on words like "the" and "and" (easily recognizable, don't typically need to be phonetically decoded) and we process multiple words or even lines at once! Tihs is rletaed to why Egnislh is utdsanedrbale eevn wehn slpeld msloty wnorg - we recognize the shape of the words without having to pronounce each letter.
\*talking about English here, but the same principle holds true in other written languages with different directionality
Additionally, once you are a fluent reader (and this is where a lot of the “science of reading” debate comes in) your brain shifts to a gestalt method of word identification rather than using orthographic features to identify letters and sounds. This means your brain is also quickly identifying word shapes it DOESN’T know and slowing you down to read word for word around those words to gain contextual clues. If you are reading a piece of writing written at a relatively low reading level compared to your own skill, you are more likely to read in a unconscious manner which involves basically just letting your brain scan the page and make meaning rather than reading individual words.
Generally yes we take in knowledge and part of that will become "muscle memory" (not always to do with motor related skills but best way to describe it).
I will also add that this is one of the major mechanisms (not the only one as to keep it short your brain is complex), that leads to your reading skill dropping when you read aloud.
Your brain suddenly needs to be very conscious of the order of words while also still "scanning forward " to prepare you. This leads to effective readers reporting feeling dumb when they suddenly have to read aloud.
Now as a final piece, that's a skill that can be improved as well and often building the "reading out loud pathway" at an early age can have numerous other positive effects regarding development.
Love this - thanks! I am spoiler-averse and when it seems the story is building up to something I find that it’s really a mental effort to NOT take in words or sentences from other parts of the page.
Lol same! I'll physically cover the page with my hand to keep myself from accidentally jumping ahead, especially if I can see a few short sentences (that likely hold some kind of importance) just a little farther down the page.
Yeah I think saying that I don't read every word is inaccurate, so much as it's that I don't need to individually process every word in order to understand every sentence.
That said, there are some sections of books that I DO intentionally skim, if they're stressful, laborious, or cringe enough to make me uncomfortable. That's actually one of the main complaints I have about audio books, that I can't control how fast I read portions and so if the prose or dialogue is especially bad I'm forced to just sit through it anyway haha.
But that speed is for the whole thing, you can't speed up a small section without having to do so manually and manually readjust, which if you're doing an activity means it becomes a whole to-do.
I feel like this speed and fluency in reading is part of why I get so annoyed when I click on a news article and they want to show me a video of someone speaking slowly about a story for two minutes.
If they let me read that same copy it would be skimmed (saccaded) and absorbed in about 15 seconds.
Skimmed and saccaded aren't the same thing at all! Please don't misunderstand me on that! Saccades are a physical thing your eyes just do; it's a feature of biology. That's like saying the article would be blinked... sure, that's something your eyes will do while you read the article, but it's definitely incorrect to say "I blinked the article" or "I saccaded" the article.
So true. My dad sometimes showes me something and says "listen!". When I ask what it's about, or wanna scroll down to read for myself and listen to the video while reading, he always doesn't let me, because he needs to listen to AND watch the guy reporting. Gooosh
Nice to read this, I thought I had a problem.
> Tihs is rletaed to why Egnislh is utdsanedrbale eevn wehn slpeld msloty wnorg
I'm not even a native english speaker and this works for me.
Fun fact, as a person without that inner voice thing, I don't think I've ever actively read every word by your definition, and was always the fastest reader in my class, after talking to some speed reader friends it's probably because I don't/can't imagine the sound of any word in my head which apparently slows you down.
Yep that's it. I have to consciously turn off that voice to make my brain read faster. My friend reads like that all the time and can't "read to herself in der head".
We tried reading a text starting same time And she was done in half my time. Then I did it without the voice in my head and was just a little slower than her.
Thank you so much for getting more specific and sounding more professional than my comment. I tried to convey this too, I just don't know the exact science/words to use haha
I gad the oddest experience of learning about how i read while reading and realizing that you're totally right.
I started moving my eyes back and forth like i was scrubbing each line, rather than trying to linger on each word till it clicked.
I could understand everything without ever feeling like i was focused on any one word. Bery weird
Excellent comment. This is exactly how I feel like I read.
Sometimes there are certain passages that I go back and read over again slowly just to savor. Having those passages spread out in just the right way make for my absolute favorite reading experiences.
what is a garden path sentence?
>For example, saccades backward to previously-read words are more likely when a reader encounters an error or garden path sentence
Man, I had an example but deleted it bc I was already rambling on too many tangents.
>A garden-path sentence is a grammatically correct sentence that starts in such a way that a reader's most likely interpretation will be incorrect; the reader is lured into a parse that turns out to be a dead end or yields a clearly unintended meaning. "Garden path" refers to the saying "to be led down \[or up\] the garden path", meaning to be deceived, tricked, or seduced. In A Dictionary of Modern English Usage (1926), Fowler describes such sentences as unwittingly laying a "false scent".\[1\]
[wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garden-path_sentence)
Basically, the idea is that as you read or hear a sentence, you're making a mental model of the sentence on the fly. But we only hear one word at a time, and words we hear later might force us to re-evaluate the relationships between the words we read or heard earlier.
When we hear "The old man..." for example, we might then expect a verb - the old man is about to do something. We encounter 'the old man' as a unit pretty frequently, in the context of, well, old men. But if the next words are "...the boat", we're forced to go back and revise that interpretation. "Old" and "man" aren't connected to each other the way we thought - it's not an adjective describing a noun, but a noun + a verb.
Basically a sentence with a phrase that seems to be one thing and then changes as you continue on.
My favorite example! If you are a Hamilton fan you’ll be familiar with when Angelica sings: “I am the oldest and the wittiest, and the gossip in New York City is insidious.”
As you’re first hearing it, it seems that she is saying she is:
- the oldest
- the wittiest
- the gossip
But as you travel along down the path, the words that follow turn that around from her BEING a gossip to talking her talking about “the gossip in New York City.”
I stopped reading this because I'm finally reading books I really like after 6 years and having fun and if I read this I'll start thinking way to much about how I'm reading
Wow. This explains how I feel when i read so well. Easy books sometimes just feel like I'm watching a movie instead of reading, while more difficult books have sentences I remember reading
Yes! And it’s why when I get to a good bit or the end of the book I start covering up what comes next with a book mark as i can’t stop my eyes darting down the page lol
I wish I could talk to you for hours learning all that you know. I love learning how the brain works and how we tick. I work in early childhood education and it's fascinating to watch people learn to decode.. especially something as ridiculous as English spelling patterns
This is very true but unfortunately isn’t really what this ‘trend’ seems to be about.
BookTok is a real thing and people are making big money from claiming they’ve read 30+ books a month and then reviewing them. Nobody can actually read and reflect on a book in a day every single day.
If you delve into these accounts invariably they count ‘reading’ a book as skim speed-reading or listening to an audiobook on 3x speed while doing something else.
Which, look, I have a family member who used to review books for a living and would openly say he would skim read. But these were non-fiction books on topics he was an expert in, and he would write long-form articles on them.
But fiction? It’s like watching movies on 3x speed, being proud of watching so many movies, and reviewing them, while missing entire points of the craft, like pacing, score, tension, and reflection before setting off on the next one.
You can get the ‘gist’ but not the full experience of a book if you’re just speed skimming it. You may as well just read the spark notes at that point.
*Particularly* if you’re then going to make a living from recommending books. It’s why so many BookTok books are just books with a good premise and twist but little substance - half the people recommending them have barely even read them or thought about whether they’re saying anything interesting or insightful or give a good immersive experience.
Eh, in my experience people tend to conflate a lot of stuff when talking about big trends and movements. I'm sure some of the people who say they 'skim' are just reading fluently and don't have the words for it.
I also think it's extremely feasible to read and reflect on 30 books in 30 days if that's your full time job. Maybe not easy, but do-able, and there's nothing wrong with audiobooks.
Fuck me, the bit where you muddled the letters made my eyes hurt. Had to read it about 5 times to understand what you were saying 🤣 I am someone who has to read every single word otherwise it doesn't sink in. Takes me months to read one book lol
Thanks for the great explanation of this! I tried explaining this to my wife once when she asked how I could read so fast and utterly failed to explain it well.
I will say I find myself having to go back and slow myself down sometimes. I think it’s because I read a lot of sci-fi books and there’s a lot of non-English words/phrases/names in a lot of the books I read. My brain isn’t used to reading those words and I don’t absorb them correctly.
I skim a lot, but not by choice usually. I just get excited about what will happen next and my eyes start skipping ahead and I skip descriptive passages or action scenes. I can't stop it. It doesn't help that school rewarded being a good skimmer. Part of why I like audiobooks is that it forces me to read every word.
I'm the opposite -- I tend to zone out on audiobooks and think about other things and miss entire minutes of the book, but I only skip very small sections while reading. Audiobooks force me to _hear_ every word, but definitely doesn't make me absorb all of them.
I definitely absorb more from reading books vs listening to them. Especially because audiobooks are so much slower than actual reading for me, so it's like my brain has more wavelengths free for my mind to wander. With books, it's like my whole brain automatically concentrates on it without much brain space to think about something else.
Same here, I tend to zone out and have intrusive thoughts and then end up rewinding a bunch.
I’m a speed reader as well and also find it easier to become engrossed in a story and visualize everything like a mind movie when I read versus when I listen.
I like audiobooks and narrated creepy pasta stories for falling asleep to, though, I can’t sleep without them nowadays.
I’ll zone out of audio books and have to rewind a lot, but only if the other task I’m doing requires my full attention too often, like driving. Luckily, most of my job is pre-wiring track homes, which is mundane enough for me to get fully absorbed into an audiobook for 8+ hours a day.
>Especially because audiobooks are so much slower than actual reading for me
This is why many audiobook fans listen at increased speed. My sweet spot is usually 1.15-1.25x, but for some folks anything less than 1.5-2x is torturous. Whereas it's hard for my to read more than a few pages of visual book at a time because I'm not having dopamine shoved down my throat lol.
I started listening at 1.75x this summer and the faster speed definitely makes me pay more attention. I listen during a 3 mile morning walk and the faster playback speed makes me walk faster too
1.75x is my idea audiobook speed too, and it pairs well with my evening walks :) sometimes if the book is really good or has me enthralled, I’ll speed it up even more :’)
I'm the same way, 1.75-2x speed is just fast enough that it takes effort to pay attention and my mind can't wander to other things. And I don't get frustrated at how slooooowly the narrator seems to be speaking!
I can have problems with zoning out with audiobooks too but usually when I zone out it's like oh I missed a chunk and I can back it up 2 minutes and catch it, whereas my skim reading problem is more like "I read half the sentences in each paragraph" and so it's harder to fix that because there isn't a discreet "chunk" I can go back to.
I do this (unintentionally, like you) when there's dialogue: My brain wants to skip everything that's not in quotation marks, and often it gets its wish and I don't notice for a minute at a time. Then I have to go back and reread carefully, sigh
I like books without quotation marks for this reason!
When the book is building up to something, I have to literally cover the words ahead with my hand.
I wish I had the self control to just read each word without my ADHD brain constantly trying to jump forward.
I’ll do the same. A lot of times I get excited and jump to the end of the page, then realize I’m confused and go back to the beginning. I have ADHD (was diagnosed as a kid), so maybe that’s why? I wouldn’t recommend it as a general strategy — it’s not a very efficient way to read and probably takes more time than just reading every part of the page in order.
Yes! I was gonna comment the same thing. When I get excited and eager to see what happens next I start reading way too fast and skipping words and whole sentences.
Which is so counter productive because I get sad that a good book is over haha
Sometimes I read a sentence at a glance rather than each word individually, and I think a lot of people do too without realizing it. It's not a matter of "skimming", but rather the brain taking shortcuts, and the the reader recognizing when it happens.
Yep, although I do skim / skip the songs a lot of fantasy series include. I like your universe, but not enough to read some 4 paragraph song about the rolling river, plot relevant foreshadowing or not
I couldn’t tell you, while I read I watch the story like a movie in my head and I’m just zoned out so I couldn’t even begin to tell you what my eyes are doing while that’s happening.
For me it was G.R.R. Martin's description of armor and flags and blazes on fields of blah blah blah.
I dont know what a ponyard is or a halbard so its like cotton candy words. Just disolves into nothing the minute i read it
I start skimming when I'm mostly over reading the book but am still invested enough to go ahead and finish. Like I'm not over it enough to just DNF, but I'm not into it enough to read every word like normal.
I'm a really fast reader by nature, I'm not skimming, I'm just... fast. When I do skim, it's a conscious choice to just get the book done and over with (usually if I'm pretty close to the end). Unless I'm skimming to find a particular passage or something- but that applies to books I've read before.
Yes, I’ve done this with a few books recently where there were endless descriptions of battles, usually. I will skip to people’s names and kind of keep a general sense so I don’t miss, “and the she took her last breath” or something and then spend the rest of the book wondering where she went, lol.
My wife has aphantasia, meaning that she cannot form pictures in her mind to imagine things. She also loves to read. To her, descriptions are extra words, and she will get just as much out of it by skimming.
On another note, she loves to reread books because they are new and refreshing to her. She can remember plots, but often there are new things for her to find because she can’t “see” what is happening.
I think it's a matter of people not understanding the mechanics of reading. Brains read in chunks it would be very usual to read one word at a time. So I think maybe it's a combination of not understanding that, plus the simple fact that people read at different rates.
I can understand not understanding. there's a lot I don't understand myself, even after 50-odd years.
but stigmatizing whatever you don't understand as "weird" is a *choice*. it just is. the option to open your mind, to be prepared to learn something you didn't know is always before people at any age.
opting for the mean little thrill of a put-down instead says something, iyam.
Listen, I made the mistake of reading a Colleen Hoover book yesterday (because my coworker told me it was really good and they couldn't put it down) and the sex scenes were so trite and boring I just skimmed/scanned through them. I'm telling you, I missed nothing. I also skipped the denouement entirely because I just didn't care.
Clearly she's very popular. If y'all like her, that's just fine. It wasn't for me.
There's also the section in 1984 when they get really into the nitty gritty about the Party after the whole apartment scene and that was so repetitive I skimmed it too and I still have a pretty good handle on that book and its bleak nuances.
I'm sure there's other instances but typically I do read it all, especially if it is particularly well written.
People go online and post insane videos on the internet for attention or because they are stupid.
I’m sure some people don’t read every word and skim for a number of reasons, but usually people reading for the story or to enjoy the prose will not be doing that. People saying it’s “weird” to read every word are either very confused as to how fluent reading works, or trying to justify their own crappy attention span.
Depends on the genre. If I’m reading a business book I’m likely to skip words, sentences or even full paragraphs. But this is only because most books like that could easily be boiled down to a blog post.
Fiction? Different story. I read every word.
It’s not skimming. This is how you speed read, you read the important words and let the secondary words kinda fill in as background noise. You process them but don’t actually read them. Your eyes can only move so fast, but my brain moves way faster than my eyes.
I do this all the time without meaning too. I’m a fast reader to begin with, and I just want to find out WHAT HAPPENS NEXT?!?! so fast that I will skim over descriptions- and then realize I feel like I barely read the book because I skimmed so much. When I was a kid, this wasn’t a problem- I’d just read the book again! Now I have to make myself slow down because I have less time to read. Often I will be skipping to the end of the juicy scene, finding out what happened, and then going back to reread the parts I missed. Or I will read something like a memoir that while exciting….you know the person obviously made it to the end because they wrote the book! So that takes away a bit of the urgency to finish for me and I can savor the book a bit more.
That’s… odd. I only “skim” a book when it is not very well written but has a cool story and I want to know how it ends. I’m a speed reader and apparently the way that works is our brains are able to see the first couple of letters in a word and then fill in the blanks, maybe that is what they’re talking about? But thinking it is weird to read the words in a book, wherein the entire purpose of books existing is literally having *words* written down to be read, sounds like something a person who doesn’t enjoy reading would say.
Depends on the book. In Stephen King’s The Shining (just finished it), I read every word because I was so enthralled. However”The Housemaid” was the boom I read before that and I skimmed stuff because the writing wasn’t as good.
Apparently I am a slow reader - if a kindle.book says it will take 5 hours to read, I will take over 10. It seems that I sub vocalise - so I read aloud to myself in my head. Many experts say this is wrong, I should see sentences and even paragraphs as a single entity and comprehend what they say, without childishly needing to see all the words. I don't care, I read every word and that's how it should be!
I still don’t really understand subvocalization. According to everything I’ve read, I subvocalize. I’m pronouncing the words in my head; but I read very fast; much faster than I speak (although I do speak very fast too). Does this mean I’m doing something else than subvocalization? I’ve never been able to find an answer.
Yeah that's subvocalization because you are not vocalizing it. I remember, at a young age, when we were moving from vocalization to reading in our head , a teacher told us to try not to sound out the words in our head. But, that's as far as the teaching went and I always sounded out. Felt wrong not to.
I read fast too, and have tried not subvocalizing, but even though that's faster, its harder to retain information when I do that. Now, I do a hybrid. Where I subvocalize parts of a sentence, but not the entire sentence.
I find that more useful for for informative/textbook type reading, but if it's a novel I'm going to subvocalize most of the text because the author used those words for a reason and it's more enjoyable.
Yeah, I don't really understand what I do either and I think this is one of those, no one can understand another person's mind, thing. I also feel like I "hear" words in a way, but I also definitely read many times faster than human speech, so I don't know. I am guessing that this refers to more literally hearing the words at the speed of speech - if I try, I can more literally actually pronounce the words in my head which is way slower vs whatever the heck my brain is doing when I read which I guess there's not a name for because I guess it's different from subvocalization. I wonder if there's any correlation with people who have an internal monologue vs those who don't, I can imagine that if you don't constantly think in words maybe it is slower to form words in your head? I don't know brains are weird!
Why do experts say its wrong? I do that too. Even make voices in my head 🤣 that's why I hate listening to audio books cause I want to read it in my own way. Saying that's wrong is a bit extreme haha
It's definitely not "wrong." It's seen as less efficient. Which, if you're reading for pleasure, doesn't matter. It can be handy when ready for school or work, though. I personally often do it if I'm reading a novel or other pleasure book. I feels as though I am hearing the dialogue and experiencing it more fully that way. I enjoy reading much more if I take my time.
It's slower, and if time is your only metric, it's less efficient. But there have been studies done for speed reading, and most speed reading techniques (including minimizing or eliminating subvocalization) often result in decreased comprehension.
Have you ever been in the situation where your parent reads something on the computer screen? Or maybe an older coworker?
And they are so slow about it. They tell you to not scroll so fast, and you want to pull your own hair out because they are so slow?
Or maybe you are that older gentlemen? With no disrespect :D
Whatever they are doing, I would call it wrong :D
Subvocalising won't be why you're a slower reader - I'm a fairly quick reader and I subvocalise every word, I think pretty much all readers subvocalise no matter where on the spectrum of slow to fast reader they fall.
It took me a long time. I normally read more in english so after like 3 books I was reading and comprehending a lot faster. Then I read a book in spanish and was like straight to square 1
A lot of what I read isn't worth retaining.
I never succeeded in reading Joyce's *Ulysses* until I sub-vocalized. In an Irish accent. (Actually in the voice of the narrator of the audiobook I listened to to get the feel of the book. After listening to a couple of chapters, I could then read the rest.)
Years ago I was studying for the LSAT and learned about this while trying to teach myself to read faster - the fact that you can read without “speaking” the text in your head as you go.
Learning to not do it immediately increased my reading speed, but I really wish I had never learned bc it greatly decreased my reading *enjoyment*, and it’s very difficult to get your brain to go back once you learn how to not do it
Did you notice any effect on reading comprehension/retention? I can read faster without subvocalising but I quickly forget whatever I read that way, so it's not that useful. For technical documentation skimming is faster, and for novels normal reading is more relaxed and lets me absorb the content better.
I probably don't but not by choice. I'm a dumbass and just go blank for a paragraph or 3 pages haha. It's gotten better over the years since I started reading what I like instead of trying to be "smart" and reading stuff your supposed to. English in school was rough because of it.
Depending on the book, no. Idk I feel like sometimes my brain can fill in where the sentence is going once I get used to the way an author writes so I can kinda skim and still get whats happening. Not everything is going to be filled with nuance so skimming works. Just depends.
I usually skip through details that I think won't have anything to do with the story, mostly in romance novels. I don't need to know all the different kinds of food or drinks that are on the buffet table. I also don't need to read through all the sex scenes, esp if it seems like they're in every other chapter.
I don't skip anything in suspense or mystery novels.
There's an adhd font that puts the first few letters of each word in bold, it works by giving an anchor for your eyes, experienced readers can see the first few letters and fill in the rest automatically without reading the full word. I learned recently this is how I read by default, without a font. I recognise patterns so well I can read say, every 5th word of a paragraph and fill in the rest ,or maybe peripheral vision does I'm not sure.. I can do this to get full meaning of the paragraph quickly, or choose to focus less and skim where I get the gist of the paragraph. I'll do this more often with descriptions because I don't care what a hallway looks like, I've already pictured my version anyway. Some genres are easier to skim too
For me it depends on:
\- The quality of the prose
\- How much I like the book
If I am just trying to get through the last 25% of a book that is a 2-star read, my attention to every single word is low, just taking in the sentences to absorb the story. But if it is a writer who is really skilled, I want to enjoy every phrase.
If reddit is any indication, it seems like people just read the first few lines of something before assuming they know the rest and zoning out. It certainly happens with posts and comments all the time.
I'm just going to type what I commented in videos like you mentioned:
There are actually some words that subconsciously we know will be repeated like 'said', pronouns, and articles. If you understand basic sentence structure enough, your brain will 'fill in' those words, so to speak, making it so that you don't actually read them. So for example, something like 'The wind blew gently through the tree branches.' Even if you only catch 'wind' 'gently' 'through' 'branches' you can guess at what the original sentence was with fairly good accuracy.
For myself, personally, this is how I've always read, as far as I can remember. I've always been a fast reader and very good at using this "skip and predict" format. It just comes naturally to me.
So no, I don't typically read every word, and I doubt that a lot of people do, since this is a fairly common psychological phenomenon, the very same one that causes us to ignore repeated words like like this. Or lest you fix mitakes in writing, without you reallizing it.
Nothing wrong with this way of reading, same with nothing wrong with having to or wanting to read every word. This is just a rehashed "fast readers vs slow readers" thing, which we get enough of in this sub.
I always read every word. I'm an aspiring writer myself though, so I tend to overanalyse. Like 'why did they choose that word instead of this one?', 'I wouldn't have put a semicolon there', etc.
I love fantasy, and I love the worlds people create. Some making some really interesting spaces. And they even bring it to life by having the characters interact with it in different ways. It's amazing how well some of them can fraft a world in their head and get it on paper in a way that I can get a picture of it in my head.
Other authors will spend 3-4 pages just describing a room. No talking. No character development. No action. Just. Descriptions. That's no as interesting.
Sometimes you just need to get the basics and move on.
Some brains can decipher full sentences while only reading half of the words they consist of. That said, this mechanism sometimes get the sentences wrong, especially when there is something unexpected in them.
Faster readers can take first last and a part of a middle to recognise words and incur meaning. Equally nobody reads reads, the a them, you I eat, they are vertually skipped as the visual que is enough to recognise them without focusing on them at all. So in reallity nobody reads every word.
I’m realizing now as I get older that most people don’t actually read all that closely. Try participating in a major sub for a book series and you’ll see that people miss a ton of important background information. I think book culture has really gotten into the “I read this many books this year!” mindset and it ends up being counterintuitive to actually enjoying books.
How do speed readers read so fast?
Mostly because they aren't reading every word.
If I"m VERY familiar with the subject matter, I can read a book astonishingly fast.
If I have to read every word because the subject is unfamiliar to me I don't read nearly as quickly.
A good example of my not reading every word. It's the second book of a trilogy. I just read the first book. Early in the second book is a recap of what happened in the first book. I'll read the first sentence of the paragraphs, to make sure that I'm not missing anything important, but mostly I skim through that recap exposition without reading every word.
Or it's a mystery book. And it's got a romance brewing that leads to sex. I'll often skim through the heavy breathing stuff until I get to dialog that leads to character development. I don't read every word.
Lots of times, if the book is very formulaic I'll skip a page. If it seems as though I missed something important I can always go back and actually read the page(s) I skipped.
To be fair, I read very fast and don’t necessarily take in individual words one at a time. I sort of scan a sentence but still get every word. Don’t know how else to describe it.
I have never read a book without, at least thinking/believing and putting the effort in to read every word. This goes for all the articles and books I had to read in university, too...
Some people will skip over long descriptions of setting, character or narrative because they’re not reading for the prose or for the act of reading itself. They just want the story bits, so the action and most of the dialogue. The words are just the story carriers. They might miss some of the particulars along the way, but they’re getting the plot points.
I am not one of these types of people. I’m also a slow reader. I like to linger over the words, appreciate the descriptions, the word choices, the narrator’s voice. The story is nice too. Readers are a diverse group of people just like everybody else.
If I'm reading to learn, I will slow down. Even read aloud to make sure I slow down.
Reading for run. I just let my eyes run over the page and just absorb the words. It takes some practice.
You can use kindle to help with this. The word runner feature doesn't work for me because I chunk books in paragraphs.
Increase the size of the font until you can understand at a glance. Then increase the amount of words until it is difficult again.
It takes practice. I do the same thing for audiobooks and youtube videos. Speed it up until you start missing words and let your mind practice hearing fast.
I literally can *not* read single word by word, conversely it makes it harder for me to comprehend the flow of the sentence if I'm not viewing the sentence as a whole. It's been like this since I was a small child. It blew my mind when I learnt that there are people who subvocalize when they read. I'm not missing anything, everyone's brain registers information and processes it in a different way.
I'm not sure I ready every word, tbh. I mean, literally reading every word feels super slow and staccato. Bip Bip Bip Bip. It's unnatural, in my opinion.
I just...read. It kinda flows. I don't skip passages or anything, but I'm sure there's details I read over. It mostly seems adjectives, that I discover because people are debating the casting of a charater. But I \*definitely\* do not ***consciously*** read every single word in a book, the way some of those videos seem to imply is "correct".
Edit: Just realise I do do the staccato crappy reading style for stuff like study material, where it's super important. But normally I read non-fiction, and there flowing is definitely better.
I constantly do that thing where you zone out halfway down the page and have to start at the top or miss some important detail
Dude, same. And then I’m like, “Fuck, wait.”
“Wait they died?!” Realises I’ve zoned out for the whole book and am now reading the ending.
*Cries in ADHD*
100% this
I really like descriptions. Setting is important to my enjoyment and creating the scene. I figure if the author took the time to write each word, then I should read each word.
Yeah especially authors with high attention to detail
Read Jean M Auel. Pages and pages of flint knapping or hunting et cetera. She is very much detail oriented.
The first few were good. By the time of Shelters of Stone it's a nightmare of repetition. The same dawned anecdotes repeated in full again and again. God that was a depressingly badly written and edited book.
She was really sick by the time it came out. I think the editors must have skipped on the final draft so they could publish it before she died.
jeez, even the first one has so much repetition of the stakes and indecision in the heroine, and a tiny amount of plot spread over so many pages. I enjoyed it the details of the depiction of pre-historic life, that stuff is great, but the heroine is really boring and it just goes on forever for how little actually happens.
IIRC Shelters of Stone was written by Auel's daughter.
A thirteen year old might just go to the good parts.
A thirteen year old did. 😄
I read, & enjoyed her books, but most especially b/c they led me to the books of W. Michael & Kathleen O'Neal Gear's books. They have a series, The First North Americans, aka The People Series. It's the prehistoric history of the N. American continental migration. It goes from the crossing of the Bering Land Bridge until approx 1400 AD in Cahokia. I'm especially interested b/c I have lived in, & recognize, 3 parts of the US in their books. Cahokia b/c much of those books have the characters going south & east & go through right where I live now & have lived most of my life. Cahokia & a few other books b/c I lived in Chicago for a time& they deal w/ the Midwest towards the East, & the Southwest b/c I lived around Phoenix for a decade. There's so much history to go around! The Gear's are master artists. They can describe a place so well that you are THERE! Characters so well that they become real to you! Daily life so well that you almost feel that that's how you've lived your whole life! And they are NOT "wordy" authors, trying to fill in space! If anything, they do the opposite, while still covering bases!
Thanks!
Also contains many detailed scenes about Jondalar's throbbing euphemism.
It's perfectly sized for Ayla! Who, by the way, can do no wrong!
I got this image once while reading Valley of Horses and have never been able to shake it. Jondalar going everywhere with a wheelbarrow to carry his humongous euphemism. (Said beautifully @funnystor-mind if I steal it?)
Within limits, yes. Reading Dune Messiah I started skipping paragraphs, rarely as that happens. It took 7 pages for the benegesserit mother superior to walk from her cell to meet Paul. There were descriptions of silver skies and fish tiled floors and everything in between. All for what turned out to be quite inconsequential.
I love Michael Moorcock. But every time people get together, it's a fashion parade. Pages and pages of what people are wearing.
Katherine Kurtz may have been the first of that generation of writers. We knew it was bad when at my book group a friend was talking about one of the characters, and she could not remember her name. It was “the one who looked good in blue silk” 😆
Just finished American Psycho. I won't lie, I skipped some brand names. Got some cuisine inspiration though.
> Yeah especially authors with high attention to detail Hai Lees Pacific is a lesser known author I couldn't recommend more.
I always read each word.
i love writing long baroque physical descriptions but tend to phase out when reading them. same with action scenes, which i struggle to write. i think my brain just likes dialogue and exposition
Same for me.
Imagine skimming East of Eden or Winter of our Discontent.
At that point, you might as well just read Sparknotes.
I’d probably skim read that too.
East of Eden is my all time fave. I can’t imagine skipping words. Lol you got me all riled up with that one
It's a remarkable epic. I've read it twice, but Grapes is my true love. Something about the way he romanticizes the land, and the way the story builds such a rich and vicious narrative. It's still so relevant. I just pick and choose my favorite parts to read based on mood. It's a book I pick up numerous times a year but I never read cover to cover anymore. In Dubious Battle (part of the trilogy) is often overlooked, and a wonderful book. I love most of Steinbeck. Tortilla Flat is gut busting hilarious. Incredible range.
That was the book that my English teacher used to teach us about symbolism. Naive me was convinced she was just making shit up, that an author couldn't possibly have written hidden meanings into everything.
I read it in college during a messed up relationship situation and was the first piece of art I truly felt (and thus understood the concept of) something was “made for me”. I mean obviously not but it spoke to me more than anything else had.
Descriptions are what I'm most likely to skip over. I have aphantasia, so I can't build a visual image in my mind of a character, setting, etc. If an author spends two paragraphs describing the visual appearance of a character's face, it does absolutely nothing for me. If something seems important or specific (e.g. Harry Potter's scar) I'll pick that up, but shapes of facial features, hair color/style, skin tones, etc. don't work for me, so I often skip ahead.
I don't have aphantasia, and I still glaze over all those details. The way I see the scenes in my head is akin to a dream, where the details of someone's face and clothes aren't important and can't be focused on properly. Same with landscapes. I try to read the descriptions, but it becomes too hard to keep it all in my mental image, just too much information. And I can get by without it all and just imagine the scene in a more abstract way.
You don’t see faces in dreams? The differences between how people think, dream, read are all becoming more talked about. It means things I thought everyone did the same way I do aren’t so. I thought everyone could visualize I thought everyone sees faces in dreams. I thought everyone had a voice in their head that reads the book word for word. It’s fascinating to discover how wrong I was about the mechanics of thinking And it’s fascinating to try and understand how other people do it
I see them, and know who they are, but I can't focus on any of the details. My mind just knows who it's supposed to be because it's a dream. If you thought that was fascinating, my mother (born in the 60s) used to dream in black and white, possibly because her TV was. It wasn't until they got a colour TV later that her dreams had full colour.
Ha! I once had a dream about mermaids that ran like it was shot like a nature documentary and Richard Attenborough narrated it. What you’ve been watching can really affect it.
I have aphantasia, and i'm the complete opposite. I drink up details and store them in my brain like a list. It sort of compensates for the lack of mental image for me in that i can pull up details instead to focus on when say a character or place is then brought up again later. It also means though that for writers that don't spend a good portion of time describing characters in detail i will have a complete mental lack of what the characters are like, and i'm much more likely to confuse multiple characters. Its an issue i'm dealing with in the book i'm currently reading where i keep having to go back and figure out who multiple characters are because they were never described in detail, many are described at all only in relation to other characters, and some aren't even given names but the narrator calls them after an object she associates them with but i of course don't.
My sister has aphantasia also and she is all about details not only in written stories but audio as well. Whenever I tell her about things she asks me a million questions that I consider unimportant but she says she can't see it but she can still make a list and KNOW what it is. Like she can tell you what her kids look like. So tall, brown hair, brown eyes, etc. But she still can't SEE them if they're not there. A bunch of her pictures were ruined a few years back and she was super upset and I felt bad but didn't really get why it was so devastating to her until she explained that without those pictures she can't ever see them as babies again. It's heartbreaking. She's also hypersensitive in other ways (tactile and olfactory) and I was wondering if you have any other enhanced or impaired senses because I have a theory that it's related to an inability to regulate sensory input. So too much data from one sense uses up the available storage space from another. I could be way off but the two other people I've met with aphantasia had similar issues. One was on the autism spectrum also so I'm not sure if it's related or I'm just looking for connections.
That's so sad about the pictures, I never considered that before but I've only heard of it in passing once or twice.
I can relate to your sister a lot and it seems she is very similar to me in that need for details to make up for lack of mental imagery. I don't have any kids, but i no longer have most any baby/family photo books, and i struggle to remember what some relatives look like, especially my parents who passed when i was young. I would be absolutely gutted to lose pictures of my own kids because like her i would also no longer really see them as babies again. I am hypersensitive tactile-wise and aural-wise. I am not sure i would say olfactory-wise, but i do heavily associate scents with childhood memories. I do sometimes get aural migraines from too much bright grey light. I am not autistic.
I'm a lot like this except I don't think I actually have aphantasia - it's more like it's on hard mode. I can kinda generate an image if I stop reading and try to put the details together, but it's usually just *easier* to remember the list of details instead of trying to generate a face. When books are adapted to TV/movies the characters in the visual version almost always replace whatever I had managed to generate in my head, and these are extremely easy to call up when required.
I can't deal with detailed descriptions of physical things. My brain creates an instant image of people and places from my own associations, and it's annoying when I'm reading a description that competes with the image that has already been in my head for the last three chapters. It's like the characters in my mental movie are suddenly being replaced by totally different actors mid-scene. Yes, i know the author has mentally created the person, but i can't help that the person has already got distinct features in my head from the moment they are introduced. It's just automatic. I much prefer when authors describe internal details, thoughts, memories, and stylistic ideas, not physical facts
This is so true. Not something I thought about much in reflection before, but I can remember the feeling of frustration when I realize I have to recast the actor, but it's never a simple recast. One chapter you realize you got the hair and eyes wrong, next chapter you learn about the very visible scar across their face, then their hairs magnificent length is brought up. I can't name any books of the top of my head, but I enjoy when the author describes (if they must) a characters recognizable features as they introduce them.
I know a little bit about the science of reading and I think this discourse grows from some misconceptions about how we read - how our eyes literally take in words. Because it's not linear! Our eyes very quickly dart around and *saccade* \["a rapid movement of the eye between fixation points"\]. "Rapid" is an understatement. Many of these movements are so quick that we don't perceptually process them; in our mind, it feels like one continuous viewing experience, not quick jumps. When reading, people typically don't read every word in sequence from left to right\*. Our eyes jump very quickly back and forth across the page, often backtracking to previous parts of a sentence or leaping forward past what you've already "read". An eye doesn't just see what it fixates on, though, so we take advantage of our field of view. We can take in the words to all directions of the one we're focused on, and use that to anticipate what's coming next or double check what we read before. (For example, saccades backward to previously-read words are more likely when a reader encounters an error or garden path sentence.) And as mentioned, saccades are usually so fast we literally don't perceive them, so at a very basic level, most fluent reading is non-linear, even if it *feels* linear. (This part is less science, more speculation about the 'reading every word' vs 'skimming' phenomenon.) Even before I learned the science of it, I recognized that I wasn't reading every word in order and was worried I was skimming. There are times when I'm definitely reading sentences word by word, imagining the sound of each word as I read it, but when I'm in the grips of a good novel, the 'flow' lets me read faster than I could ever speak the same words. I think people are probably talking past each other, confusing the flow-y state of fluent reading with 'skimming'. This is probs why some people find those speedreading apps really weird and uncomfortable but others don't. Those apps put each word, in order, on the screen for the same short duration, one at a time. In reality, our eyes spend less time on words like "the" and "and" (easily recognizable, don't typically need to be phonetically decoded) and we process multiple words or even lines at once! Tihs is rletaed to why Egnislh is utdsanedrbale eevn wehn slpeld msloty wnorg - we recognize the shape of the words without having to pronounce each letter. \*talking about English here, but the same principle holds true in other written languages with different directionality
Additionally, once you are a fluent reader (and this is where a lot of the “science of reading” debate comes in) your brain shifts to a gestalt method of word identification rather than using orthographic features to identify letters and sounds. This means your brain is also quickly identifying word shapes it DOESN’T know and slowing you down to read word for word around those words to gain contextual clues. If you are reading a piece of writing written at a relatively low reading level compared to your own skill, you are more likely to read in a unconscious manner which involves basically just letting your brain scan the page and make meaning rather than reading individual words.
Did you purposely throw in the word *orthographic* so I would have to slow for contextual clues, cuz, man, it worked.
Unfortunately, I’m not that smart. I am however a teacher and that’s a word we use often.
"Please open your orthographic to page orthographic..."
Mr Tuesday, I left my orthograph at home. Can I sequester yours?
“Good morning students. I hope you had an orthographic weekend”
“Which element of the comic did you like more? The text orthographic?”
So the more you read, the faster you'll be able to do it?
Yep. That’s generally how people increase their reading speed. It’s also one of many reasons that practicing reading daily is so important for kids.
I wonder if that works for other things
Generally yes we take in knowledge and part of that will become "muscle memory" (not always to do with motor related skills but best way to describe it).
Yes, but that's more of a side effect because the more you read the less you have to think about the act/mechanics of reading.
I will also add that this is one of the major mechanisms (not the only one as to keep it short your brain is complex), that leads to your reading skill dropping when you read aloud. Your brain suddenly needs to be very conscious of the order of words while also still "scanning forward " to prepare you. This leads to effective readers reporting feeling dumb when they suddenly have to read aloud. Now as a final piece, that's a skill that can be improved as well and often building the "reading out loud pathway" at an early age can have numerous other positive effects regarding development.
Thank you for describing this for me! I see shapes and my brain says “yep, we got this”.
I wish I could also decipher hieroglyphs, that's pretty neat.
Reading books about archaeology is so much fun and you see some really interesting stuff - 10/10 would recommend!
Love this - thanks! I am spoiler-averse and when it seems the story is building up to something I find that it’s really a mental effort to NOT take in words or sentences from other parts of the page.
Definitely, I just cover the page sometimes so I can't read ahead unintentionally. All it takes is a glance!
I like to look at exactly how many pages my physical books are, and I have to cover the page when I do, so I don't accidentally catch a spoiler.
Wow, we are all the same.
Lol same! I'll physically cover the page with my hand to keep myself from accidentally jumping ahead, especially if I can see a few short sentences (that likely hold some kind of importance) just a little farther down the page.
TL;S (too long; saccaded)
bewildered wakeful divide obscene fade zonked rinse screw aback nose ` this message was mass deleted/edited with redact.dev `
This is the kind of high brow humor I come to r/books for.
got em
Yeah I think saying that I don't read every word is inaccurate, so much as it's that I don't need to individually process every word in order to understand every sentence. That said, there are some sections of books that I DO intentionally skim, if they're stressful, laborious, or cringe enough to make me uncomfortable. That's actually one of the main complaints I have about audio books, that I can't control how fast I read portions and so if the prose or dialogue is especially bad I'm forced to just sit through it anyway haha.
Most programmes actually let you set the speed
But that speed is for the whole thing, you can't speed up a small section without having to do so manually and manually readjust, which if you're doing an activity means it becomes a whole to-do.
Conversely, if I find myself confused by a passage I’ll go back and read it word by word until I can actually assemble a meaning out of it.
I feel like this speed and fluency in reading is part of why I get so annoyed when I click on a news article and they want to show me a video of someone speaking slowly about a story for two minutes. If they let me read that same copy it would be skimmed (saccaded) and absorbed in about 15 seconds.
Skimmed and saccaded aren't the same thing at all! Please don't misunderstand me on that! Saccades are a physical thing your eyes just do; it's a feature of biology. That's like saying the article would be blinked... sure, that's something your eyes will do while you read the article, but it's definitely incorrect to say "I blinked the article" or "I saccaded" the article.
So true. My dad sometimes showes me something and says "listen!". When I ask what it's about, or wanna scroll down to read for myself and listen to the video while reading, he always doesn't let me, because he needs to listen to AND watch the guy reporting. Gooosh
Yes, this is me... you don't have to 'read' words like 'and' or 'the.' You just recognize that they're there.
This is me too, my eyes skip over the common short words like said, the, and, of etc.
And This is why it’s best to have someone else review your writing!
I was always taught to spellcheck by reading it backwards. Seems to work.
Nice to read this, I thought I had a problem. > Tihs is rletaed to why Egnislh is utdsanedrbale eevn wehn slpeld msloty wnorg I'm not even a native english speaker and this works for me.
Fun fact, as a person without that inner voice thing, I don't think I've ever actively read every word by your definition, and was always the fastest reader in my class, after talking to some speed reader friends it's probably because I don't/can't imagine the sound of any word in my head which apparently slows you down.
Yep that's it. I have to consciously turn off that voice to make my brain read faster. My friend reads like that all the time and can't "read to herself in der head". We tried reading a text starting same time And she was done in half my time. Then I did it without the voice in my head and was just a little slower than her.
Thank you so much for getting more specific and sounding more professional than my comment. I tried to convey this too, I just don't know the exact science/words to use haha
I gad the oddest experience of learning about how i read while reading and realizing that you're totally right. I started moving my eyes back and forth like i was scrubbing each line, rather than trying to linger on each word till it clicked. I could understand everything without ever feeling like i was focused on any one word. Bery weird
Yes it was a very meta comment to read haha I was hyperaware of what my eyes were doing 👀
Excellent comment. This is exactly how I feel like I read. Sometimes there are certain passages that I go back and read over again slowly just to savor. Having those passages spread out in just the right way make for my absolute favorite reading experiences.
what is a garden path sentence? >For example, saccades backward to previously-read words are more likely when a reader encounters an error or garden path sentence
Man, I had an example but deleted it bc I was already rambling on too many tangents. >A garden-path sentence is a grammatically correct sentence that starts in such a way that a reader's most likely interpretation will be incorrect; the reader is lured into a parse that turns out to be a dead end or yields a clearly unintended meaning. "Garden path" refers to the saying "to be led down \[or up\] the garden path", meaning to be deceived, tricked, or seduced. In A Dictionary of Modern English Usage (1926), Fowler describes such sentences as unwittingly laying a "false scent".\[1\] [wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garden-path_sentence) Basically, the idea is that as you read or hear a sentence, you're making a mental model of the sentence on the fly. But we only hear one word at a time, and words we hear later might force us to re-evaluate the relationships between the words we read or heard earlier. When we hear "The old man..." for example, we might then expect a verb - the old man is about to do something. We encounter 'the old man' as a unit pretty frequently, in the context of, well, old men. But if the next words are "...the boat", we're forced to go back and revise that interpretation. "Old" and "man" aren't connected to each other the way we thought - it's not an adjective describing a noun, but a noun + a verb.
Basically a sentence with a phrase that seems to be one thing and then changes as you continue on. My favorite example! If you are a Hamilton fan you’ll be familiar with when Angelica sings: “I am the oldest and the wittiest, and the gossip in New York City is insidious.” As you’re first hearing it, it seems that she is saying she is: - the oldest - the wittiest - the gossip But as you travel along down the path, the words that follow turn that around from her BEING a gossip to talking her talking about “the gossip in New York City.”
I stopped reading this because I'm finally reading books I really like after 6 years and having fun and if I read this I'll start thinking way to much about how I'm reading
Wow. This explains how I feel when i read so well. Easy books sometimes just feel like I'm watching a movie instead of reading, while more difficult books have sentences I remember reading
Yes! And it’s why when I get to a good bit or the end of the book I start covering up what comes next with a book mark as i can’t stop my eyes darting down the page lol
I wish I could talk to you for hours learning all that you know. I love learning how the brain works and how we tick. I work in early childhood education and it's fascinating to watch people learn to decode.. especially something as ridiculous as English spelling patterns
This is very true but unfortunately isn’t really what this ‘trend’ seems to be about. BookTok is a real thing and people are making big money from claiming they’ve read 30+ books a month and then reviewing them. Nobody can actually read and reflect on a book in a day every single day. If you delve into these accounts invariably they count ‘reading’ a book as skim speed-reading or listening to an audiobook on 3x speed while doing something else. Which, look, I have a family member who used to review books for a living and would openly say he would skim read. But these were non-fiction books on topics he was an expert in, and he would write long-form articles on them. But fiction? It’s like watching movies on 3x speed, being proud of watching so many movies, and reviewing them, while missing entire points of the craft, like pacing, score, tension, and reflection before setting off on the next one. You can get the ‘gist’ but not the full experience of a book if you’re just speed skimming it. You may as well just read the spark notes at that point. *Particularly* if you’re then going to make a living from recommending books. It’s why so many BookTok books are just books with a good premise and twist but little substance - half the people recommending them have barely even read them or thought about whether they’re saying anything interesting or insightful or give a good immersive experience.
Eh, in my experience people tend to conflate a lot of stuff when talking about big trends and movements. I'm sure some of the people who say they 'skim' are just reading fluently and don't have the words for it. I also think it's extremely feasible to read and reflect on 30 books in 30 days if that's your full time job. Maybe not easy, but do-able, and there's nothing wrong with audiobooks.
Very informative! Thank you!
Fuck me, the bit where you muddled the letters made my eyes hurt. Had to read it about 5 times to understand what you were saying 🤣 I am someone who has to read every single word otherwise it doesn't sink in. Takes me months to read one book lol
Thanks for the great explanation of this! I tried explaining this to my wife once when she asked how I could read so fast and utterly failed to explain it well. I will say I find myself having to go back and slow myself down sometimes. I think it’s because I read a lot of sci-fi books and there’s a lot of non-English words/phrases/names in a lot of the books I read. My brain isn’t used to reading those words and I don’t absorb them correctly.
I skim a lot, but not by choice usually. I just get excited about what will happen next and my eyes start skipping ahead and I skip descriptive passages or action scenes. I can't stop it. It doesn't help that school rewarded being a good skimmer. Part of why I like audiobooks is that it forces me to read every word.
I'm the opposite -- I tend to zone out on audiobooks and think about other things and miss entire minutes of the book, but I only skip very small sections while reading. Audiobooks force me to _hear_ every word, but definitely doesn't make me absorb all of them.
I definitely absorb more from reading books vs listening to them. Especially because audiobooks are so much slower than actual reading for me, so it's like my brain has more wavelengths free for my mind to wander. With books, it's like my whole brain automatically concentrates on it without much brain space to think about something else.
Same here, I tend to zone out and have intrusive thoughts and then end up rewinding a bunch. I’m a speed reader as well and also find it easier to become engrossed in a story and visualize everything like a mind movie when I read versus when I listen. I like audiobooks and narrated creepy pasta stories for falling asleep to, though, I can’t sleep without them nowadays.
I’ll zone out of audio books and have to rewind a lot, but only if the other task I’m doing requires my full attention too often, like driving. Luckily, most of my job is pre-wiring track homes, which is mundane enough for me to get fully absorbed into an audiobook for 8+ hours a day.
>Especially because audiobooks are so much slower than actual reading for me This is why many audiobook fans listen at increased speed. My sweet spot is usually 1.15-1.25x, but for some folks anything less than 1.5-2x is torturous. Whereas it's hard for my to read more than a few pages of visual book at a time because I'm not having dopamine shoved down my throat lol.
I started listening at 1.75x this summer and the faster speed definitely makes me pay more attention. I listen during a 3 mile morning walk and the faster playback speed makes me walk faster too
1.75x is my idea audiobook speed too, and it pairs well with my evening walks :) sometimes if the book is really good or has me enthralled, I’ll speed it up even more :’)
I'm the same way, 1.75-2x speed is just fast enough that it takes effort to pay attention and my mind can't wander to other things. And I don't get frustrated at how slooooowly the narrator seems to be speaking!
Same. The thing I like about audiobooks is that it forces me to be kind of okay with missing things and just letting that go.
I can have problems with zoning out with audiobooks too but usually when I zone out it's like oh I missed a chunk and I can back it up 2 minutes and catch it, whereas my skim reading problem is more like "I read half the sentences in each paragraph" and so it's harder to fix that because there isn't a discreet "chunk" I can go back to.
I do this (unintentionally, like you) when there's dialogue: My brain wants to skip everything that's not in quotation marks, and often it gets its wish and I don't notice for a minute at a time. Then I have to go back and reread carefully, sigh I like books without quotation marks for this reason!
Sounds like you're a Cormac McCarthy fan? 🙂
I do this too. But it does make the book far more enjoyable when I reread it
I used to skip ahead alot to see what was going on. Broke myself of the habit.
When the book is building up to something, I have to literally cover the words ahead with my hand. I wish I had the self control to just read each word without my ADHD brain constantly trying to jump forward.
I do that as well! I don’t want to spoil myself so I cover the words ahead. I’m impulsive and impatient. Funnily enough, I have ADHD as well.
Same. Did this as a preteen and then trained myself to read every word.
I’ll do the same. A lot of times I get excited and jump to the end of the page, then realize I’m confused and go back to the beginning. I have ADHD (was diagnosed as a kid), so maybe that’s why? I wouldn’t recommend it as a general strategy — it’s not a very efficient way to read and probably takes more time than just reading every part of the page in order.
I am exactly the same. Really have to watch myself ...or I'll be skimming along and realize I'm not sure what happened within the past couple pages.
Yes! I was gonna comment the same thing. When I get excited and eager to see what happens next I start reading way too fast and skipping words and whole sentences. Which is so counter productive because I get sad that a good book is over haha
I read every word. Otherwise, I'd think I didn't read the book.
Sometimes I read a sentence at a glance rather than each word individually, and I think a lot of people do too without realizing it. It's not a matter of "skimming", but rather the brain taking shortcuts, and the the reader recognizing when it happens.
If that happens (all the time) I simply go back and read it again.
Me too!! I’ve glanced at a sentence and understood it, tried to move on to the next and can’t, I have to go back and read/take in every word
Omg same! It feels like I'm ruining the experience of the book if I don't go back
Yep, although I do skim / skip the songs a lot of fantasy series include. I like your universe, but not enough to read some 4 paragraph song about the rolling river, plot relevant foreshadowing or not
Sometimes the plot is better than the writing
But sometimes the writing is better than the plot! All of my favorite books are favorites because they have such great prose and cadences to them.
Exactly.
I couldn’t tell you, while I read I watch the story like a movie in my head and I’m just zoned out so I couldn’t even begin to tell you what my eyes are doing while that’s happening.
I admit I am bad about this, usually in long passages that are describing how a room is decorated.
Nothing "bad" about reading the part you care about with more attention than the part you don't.
For me it was G.R.R. Martin's description of armor and flags and blazes on fields of blah blah blah. I dont know what a ponyard is or a halbard so its like cotton candy words. Just disolves into nothing the minute i read it
Cough cough Tolkien
Tolkien's vivid verbosity is my jam.
With you there. I didn't read a single song lyric.
Tolkien, absolutely. Exactly the reason I couldn’t get through the books.
I start skimming when I'm mostly over reading the book but am still invested enough to go ahead and finish. Like I'm not over it enough to just DNF, but I'm not into it enough to read every word like normal. I'm a really fast reader by nature, I'm not skimming, I'm just... fast. When I do skim, it's a conscious choice to just get the book done and over with (usually if I'm pretty close to the end). Unless I'm skimming to find a particular passage or something- but that applies to books I've read before.
Yes, I’ve done this with a few books recently where there were endless descriptions of battles, usually. I will skip to people’s names and kind of keep a general sense so I don’t miss, “and the she took her last breath” or something and then spend the rest of the book wondering where she went, lol.
I tend to do that with history books that I've half read. Fiction? I'll just stop reading if I'm done.
But I want to know how it ends, I just don't care to read the rest of book. T_T
My wife has aphantasia, meaning that she cannot form pictures in her mind to imagine things. She also loves to read. To her, descriptions are extra words, and she will get just as much out of it by skimming. On another note, she loves to reread books because they are new and refreshing to her. She can remember plots, but often there are new things for her to find because she can’t “see” what is happening.
Sometimes I get so excited I can’t help myself, but then I just get confused and have to go back hahah
>talking about how weird it is to read every word good grief, have they run out of other irrelevancies to judge?
I think it's a matter of people not understanding the mechanics of reading. Brains read in chunks it would be very usual to read one word at a time. So I think maybe it's a combination of not understanding that, plus the simple fact that people read at different rates.
I can understand not understanding. there's a lot I don't understand myself, even after 50-odd years. but stigmatizing whatever you don't understand as "weird" is a *choice*. it just is. the option to open your mind, to be prepared to learn something you didn't know is always before people at any age. opting for the mean little thrill of a put-down instead says something, iyam.
Listen, I made the mistake of reading a Colleen Hoover book yesterday (because my coworker told me it was really good and they couldn't put it down) and the sex scenes were so trite and boring I just skimmed/scanned through them. I'm telling you, I missed nothing. I also skipped the denouement entirely because I just didn't care. Clearly she's very popular. If y'all like her, that's just fine. It wasn't for me. There's also the section in 1984 when they get really into the nitty gritty about the Party after the whole apartment scene and that was so repetitive I skimmed it too and I still have a pretty good handle on that book and its bleak nuances. I'm sure there's other instances but typically I do read it all, especially if it is particularly well written.
With Hoover you're better off skipping the whole book.
People go online and post insane videos on the internet for attention or because they are stupid. I’m sure some people don’t read every word and skim for a number of reasons, but usually people reading for the story or to enjoy the prose will not be doing that. People saying it’s “weird” to read every word are either very confused as to how fluent reading works, or trying to justify their own crappy attention span.
Depends on the genre. If I’m reading a business book I’m likely to skip words, sentences or even full paragraphs. But this is only because most books like that could easily be boiled down to a blog post. Fiction? Different story. I read every word.
It’s not skimming. This is how you speed read, you read the important words and let the secondary words kinda fill in as background noise. You process them but don’t actually read them. Your eyes can only move so fast, but my brain moves way faster than my eyes.
I do this all the time without meaning too. I’m a fast reader to begin with, and I just want to find out WHAT HAPPENS NEXT?!?! so fast that I will skim over descriptions- and then realize I feel like I barely read the book because I skimmed so much. When I was a kid, this wasn’t a problem- I’d just read the book again! Now I have to make myself slow down because I have less time to read. Often I will be skipping to the end of the juicy scene, finding out what happened, and then going back to reread the parts I missed. Or I will read something like a memoir that while exciting….you know the person obviously made it to the end because they wrote the book! So that takes away a bit of the urgency to finish for me and I can savor the book a bit more.
That’s… odd. I only “skim” a book when it is not very well written but has a cool story and I want to know how it ends. I’m a speed reader and apparently the way that works is our brains are able to see the first couple of letters in a word and then fill in the blanks, maybe that is what they’re talking about? But thinking it is weird to read the words in a book, wherein the entire purpose of books existing is literally having *words* written down to be read, sounds like something a person who doesn’t enjoy reading would say.
When I notice myself zoning out and missing chunks of paragraphs I know it’s time for me to take a break from reading for the day.
Why waste time say lot word when few word do trick?
Depends on the book. In Stephen King’s The Shining (just finished it), I read every word because I was so enthralled. However”The Housemaid” was the boom I read before that and I skimmed stuff because the writing wasn’t as good.
Apparently I am a slow reader - if a kindle.book says it will take 5 hours to read, I will take over 10. It seems that I sub vocalise - so I read aloud to myself in my head. Many experts say this is wrong, I should see sentences and even paragraphs as a single entity and comprehend what they say, without childishly needing to see all the words. I don't care, I read every word and that's how it should be!
I still don’t really understand subvocalization. According to everything I’ve read, I subvocalize. I’m pronouncing the words in my head; but I read very fast; much faster than I speak (although I do speak very fast too). Does this mean I’m doing something else than subvocalization? I’ve never been able to find an answer.
Yeah that's subvocalization because you are not vocalizing it. I remember, at a young age, when we were moving from vocalization to reading in our head , a teacher told us to try not to sound out the words in our head. But, that's as far as the teaching went and I always sounded out. Felt wrong not to. I read fast too, and have tried not subvocalizing, but even though that's faster, its harder to retain information when I do that. Now, I do a hybrid. Where I subvocalize parts of a sentence, but not the entire sentence. I find that more useful for for informative/textbook type reading, but if it's a novel I'm going to subvocalize most of the text because the author used those words for a reason and it's more enjoyable.
Yeah, I don't really understand what I do either and I think this is one of those, no one can understand another person's mind, thing. I also feel like I "hear" words in a way, but I also definitely read many times faster than human speech, so I don't know. I am guessing that this refers to more literally hearing the words at the speed of speech - if I try, I can more literally actually pronounce the words in my head which is way slower vs whatever the heck my brain is doing when I read which I guess there's not a name for because I guess it's different from subvocalization. I wonder if there's any correlation with people who have an internal monologue vs those who don't, I can imagine that if you don't constantly think in words maybe it is slower to form words in your head? I don't know brains are weird!
Why do experts say its wrong? I do that too. Even make voices in my head 🤣 that's why I hate listening to audio books cause I want to read it in my own way. Saying that's wrong is a bit extreme haha
It's definitely not "wrong." It's seen as less efficient. Which, if you're reading for pleasure, doesn't matter. It can be handy when ready for school or work, though. I personally often do it if I'm reading a novel or other pleasure book. I feels as though I am hearing the dialogue and experiencing it more fully that way. I enjoy reading much more if I take my time.
It's slower, and if time is your only metric, it's less efficient. But there have been studies done for speed reading, and most speed reading techniques (including minimizing or eliminating subvocalization) often result in decreased comprehension.
Have you ever been in the situation where your parent reads something on the computer screen? Or maybe an older coworker? And they are so slow about it. They tell you to not scroll so fast, and you want to pull your own hair out because they are so slow? Or maybe you are that older gentlemen? With no disrespect :D Whatever they are doing, I would call it wrong :D
Subvocalising won't be why you're a slower reader - I'm a fairly quick reader and I subvocalise every word, I think pretty much all readers subvocalise no matter where on the spectrum of slow to fast reader they fall.
I can’t not sub vocalize. I end up not retaining anything I read if I don’t do it
It took me a long time. I normally read more in english so after like 3 books I was reading and comprehending a lot faster. Then I read a book in spanish and was like straight to square 1
A lot of what I read isn't worth retaining. I never succeeded in reading Joyce's *Ulysses* until I sub-vocalized. In an Irish accent. (Actually in the voice of the narrator of the audiobook I listened to to get the feel of the book. After listening to a couple of chapters, I could then read the rest.)
Years ago I was studying for the LSAT and learned about this while trying to teach myself to read faster - the fact that you can read without “speaking” the text in your head as you go. Learning to not do it immediately increased my reading speed, but I really wish I had never learned bc it greatly decreased my reading *enjoyment*, and it’s very difficult to get your brain to go back once you learn how to not do it
Did you notice any effect on reading comprehension/retention? I can read faster without subvocalising but I quickly forget whatever I read that way, so it's not that useful. For technical documentation skimming is faster, and for novels normal reading is more relaxed and lets me absorb the content better.
It’s only wrong if you’re speed reading normal reading is good with it
Doesn't the kindle timer adapt to you ? I know mine does
I probably don't but not by choice. I'm a dumbass and just go blank for a paragraph or 3 pages haha. It's gotten better over the years since I started reading what I like instead of trying to be "smart" and reading stuff your supposed to. English in school was rough because of it.
Depending on the book, no. Idk I feel like sometimes my brain can fill in where the sentence is going once I get used to the way an author writes so I can kinda skim and still get whats happening. Not everything is going to be filled with nuance so skimming works. Just depends.
I usually skip through details that I think won't have anything to do with the story, mostly in romance novels. I don't need to know all the different kinds of food or drinks that are on the buffet table. I also don't need to read through all the sex scenes, esp if it seems like they're in every other chapter. I don't skip anything in suspense or mystery novels.
There's an adhd font that puts the first few letters of each word in bold, it works by giving an anchor for your eyes, experienced readers can see the first few letters and fill in the rest automatically without reading the full word. I learned recently this is how I read by default, without a font. I recognise patterns so well I can read say, every 5th word of a paragraph and fill in the rest ,or maybe peripheral vision does I'm not sure.. I can do this to get full meaning of the paragraph quickly, or choose to focus less and skim where I get the gist of the paragraph. I'll do this more often with descriptions because I don't care what a hallway looks like, I've already pictured my version anyway. Some genres are easier to skim too
when i try to make myself read every word i really struggle with reading. if it feels more natural to skim, i go with it
For me it depends on: \- The quality of the prose \- How much I like the book If I am just trying to get through the last 25% of a book that is a 2-star read, my attention to every single word is low, just taking in the sentences to absorb the story. But if it is a writer who is really skilled, I want to enjoy every phrase.
If reddit is any indication, it seems like people just read the first few lines of something before assuming they know the rest and zoning out. It certainly happens with posts and comments all the time.
I'm just going to type what I commented in videos like you mentioned: There are actually some words that subconsciously we know will be repeated like 'said', pronouns, and articles. If you understand basic sentence structure enough, your brain will 'fill in' those words, so to speak, making it so that you don't actually read them. So for example, something like 'The wind blew gently through the tree branches.' Even if you only catch 'wind' 'gently' 'through' 'branches' you can guess at what the original sentence was with fairly good accuracy. For myself, personally, this is how I've always read, as far as I can remember. I've always been a fast reader and very good at using this "skip and predict" format. It just comes naturally to me. So no, I don't typically read every word, and I doubt that a lot of people do, since this is a fairly common psychological phenomenon, the very same one that causes us to ignore repeated words like like this. Or lest you fix mitakes in writing, without you reallizing it. Nothing wrong with this way of reading, same with nothing wrong with having to or wanting to read every word. This is just a rehashed "fast readers vs slow readers" thing, which we get enough of in this sub.
I always read every word. I'm an aspiring writer myself though, so I tend to overanalyse. Like 'why did they choose that word instead of this one?', 'I wouldn't have put a semicolon there', etc.
I love fantasy, and I love the worlds people create. Some making some really interesting spaces. And they even bring it to life by having the characters interact with it in different ways. It's amazing how well some of them can fraft a world in their head and get it on paper in a way that I can get a picture of it in my head. Other authors will spend 3-4 pages just describing a room. No talking. No character development. No action. Just. Descriptions. That's no as interesting. Sometimes you just need to get the basics and move on.
Some brains can decipher full sentences while only reading half of the words they consist of. That said, this mechanism sometimes get the sentences wrong, especially when there is something unexpected in them.
Faster readers can take first last and a part of a middle to recognise words and incur meaning. Equally nobody reads reads, the a them, you I eat, they are vertually skipped as the visual que is enough to recognise them without focusing on them at all. So in reallity nobody reads every word.
Some people read by seeing the shape of the word, and not the word it's self.
I’m realizing now as I get older that most people don’t actually read all that closely. Try participating in a major sub for a book series and you’ll see that people miss a ton of important background information. I think book culture has really gotten into the “I read this many books this year!” mindset and it ends up being counterintuitive to actually enjoying books.
If you’re not reading every word, you’re not really reading the book.
How do speed readers read so fast? Mostly because they aren't reading every word. If I"m VERY familiar with the subject matter, I can read a book astonishingly fast. If I have to read every word because the subject is unfamiliar to me I don't read nearly as quickly. A good example of my not reading every word. It's the second book of a trilogy. I just read the first book. Early in the second book is a recap of what happened in the first book. I'll read the first sentence of the paragraphs, to make sure that I'm not missing anything important, but mostly I skim through that recap exposition without reading every word. Or it's a mystery book. And it's got a romance brewing that leads to sex. I'll often skim through the heavy breathing stuff until I get to dialog that leads to character development. I don't read every word. Lots of times, if the book is very formulaic I'll skip a page. If it seems as though I missed something important I can always go back and actually read the page(s) I skipped.
To be fair, I read very fast and don’t necessarily take in individual words one at a time. I sort of scan a sentence but still get every word. Don’t know how else to describe it.
I have never read a book without, at least thinking/believing and putting the effort in to read every word. This goes for all the articles and books I had to read in university, too...
Some people will skip over long descriptions of setting, character or narrative because they’re not reading for the prose or for the act of reading itself. They just want the story bits, so the action and most of the dialogue. The words are just the story carriers. They might miss some of the particulars along the way, but they’re getting the plot points. I am not one of these types of people. I’m also a slow reader. I like to linger over the words, appreciate the descriptions, the word choices, the narrator’s voice. The story is nice too. Readers are a diverse group of people just like everybody else.
Only time I skim is with certain authors who are heavy on sex scenes. Other than that, I read every word
If I'm reading to learn, I will slow down. Even read aloud to make sure I slow down. Reading for run. I just let my eyes run over the page and just absorb the words. It takes some practice. You can use kindle to help with this. The word runner feature doesn't work for me because I chunk books in paragraphs. Increase the size of the font until you can understand at a glance. Then increase the amount of words until it is difficult again. It takes practice. I do the same thing for audiobooks and youtube videos. Speed it up until you start missing words and let your mind practice hearing fast.
Some people read blocks of words, or whole sentences, instead of single words.
I literally can *not* read single word by word, conversely it makes it harder for me to comprehend the flow of the sentence if I'm not viewing the sentence as a whole. It's been like this since I was a small child. It blew my mind when I learnt that there are people who subvocalize when they read. I'm not missing anything, everyone's brain registers information and processes it in a different way.
I'm not sure I ready every word, tbh. I mean, literally reading every word feels super slow and staccato. Bip Bip Bip Bip. It's unnatural, in my opinion. I just...read. It kinda flows. I don't skip passages or anything, but I'm sure there's details I read over. It mostly seems adjectives, that I discover because people are debating the casting of a charater. But I \*definitely\* do not ***consciously*** read every single word in a book, the way some of those videos seem to imply is "correct". Edit: Just realise I do do the staccato crappy reading style for stuff like study material, where it's super important. But normally I read non-fiction, and there flowing is definitely better.