![]() Some quick math suggests that the absolute fastest any of us can read-and actually read each word-is 500 words per minute. We have tricked ourselves into seeing a smooth flow of sentences when we’re really getting a choppy surge of words and half-words. But we have learned to “mask” the saccade, to fill in this brief period of blindness with perceptual information from before and after it. Given that fixations average 200 to 300 milliseconds, and saccades 20 to 30, we spend about 10 percent of our time blind to what we’re reading. Should some meddling experimenter briefly alter the text we are reading-change “sense” to “sensibility” and then change it back, for instance-we will never be the wiser. But before we’ve finished, before we consciously know we’ve read the words fonts and capitalization and have added these to the other words swimming around most prominently in memory, we have already started to plan our next fixation.ĭuring a hop, known as a saccade, we are unable to perceive any letters at all. The shape of the letter string as a whole-not just its constituent letters-assists us in our endeavor, so odd fonts or cApiTAlizAtiOn patterns slow us down. Generally, to decode what’s in front of us, we must fixate every eight letters.ĭecoding begins quickly, within 60 milliseconds of landing. ![]() We may learn only that one letter is capitalized or another contains a curve-information that will help us identify that letter on our next fixation but isn’t going to do the trick on this one. ![]() We can’t necessarily identify all 20 letters: the outermost are relegated to our fuzzy peripheral vision. Thus, with each fixation we glean information from about 20 letters. Were we readers of Hebrew, which is written from right to left, our perceptual spans would take in more letters to the left than to the right. We’ve trained our perceptual span-the range of text we can effectively discern during a fixation-to be asymmetrical in this way because English words are printed from left to right and it’s more advantageous to see where we’re going than where we’ve been. Psychologists who study reading call these landings “fixations.” Each time we fixate, we are able to take in approximately four letters to the left of our fixation point and some 15 letters to the right. They seem to glide, but in actuality they hop in a volatile way, landing here and here and sometimes here. Reading a sentence, our eyes seem to glide across the page, stopping each long, fluid sweep only at the margin. So exactly what happens when we read at a gallop? When we read at a trot? It behooves us to understand the reading mind, because the manner in which we read has real consequences.īut first, the mechanics. But according to psychologist Victor Nell, the heaviest readers-those who presumably derive the most pleasure in the act-are in fact marked by the variability in their reading speed: they skim a text and hurry along just as much as they linger and contemplate. In his essay “Reading in a Digital Age” (published in the Scholar in Spring 2010), Sven Birkerts cautions, “The reader who reads without directed concentration, who skims, or even just steps hurriedly across the surface, is missing much of the real point of the work.” This is, I believe, absolutely true. According to Miedema, “Slow reading means exercising choice about how one reads rather than being forced to read as fast as possible.” The movement is not primarily about speed, but about freedom: the freedom, at least on occasion and when the text demands it, to read as though we care about something other than being done reading. Should we be surprised that a Slow Reading movement has emerged as well? Though its advocates are a motley crew, refusing to converge on a single leader or even a single name (a Slow Books movement is also in the works), John Miedema’s 2009 book, Slow Reading, is as good a place as any to turn for an official rallying cry. Taken as a whole, the movement is a reaction against those aspects of modern Western life that sacrifice quality and connectedness at the altar of convenience and efficiency-which is to say, much of modern Western life. ![]() We have proponents of Slow Gardening, Slow Parenting, Slow Travel, Slow Fashion, Slow Media, Slow Art, Slow Money (which urges investment in local food enterprises and organic farms), and Slow Software Development (favoring careful, superior design). These days, it isn’t just food that’s slow. The Slow Food movement spread across the West, with adherents championing all things local and artisanal-promoting the humanely raised, sustainably fed, ethically killed, home-cooked chicken, say, over a 10-piece order of McNuggets. In 1986, an Italian journalist named Carlo Petrini became so outraged by the sight of a fast-food restaurant near Rome’s Spanish Steps that he ended up spawning a movement. Amy Carter and Jimmy Carter taking a speed reading course at the White House
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