Reading a book real fast-like
I just practice-read Stephen King's The Gunslinger. Practice-reading is when you try to read faster than you can actually handle. You get pretty bad comprehension, but it helps increase your reading rate. It took me 57 minutes to get through its roughly 300 pages. The first time through I went a page a second (this is to just pick up character names, a rough chronology and a bit of the novel's structure) and the second time I was going at around 1500 WPM.
This is actually a full 50% faster than my original goal for this whole speed-reading thing. w00t!
Also: it's about 4 times the speed I read at going in. Hooray!
It's hard to keep going at breakneck pace - having my computer yell at me every minute and louder every 5th minute helped a lot. I'd end up picking up the pace every time the 5th beep came along as I kept on falling about a minute slow. I ended about 3 minutes slow so I guess it was a bit shy of 1500WPM. Sadly, I don't actually have many books that are short and easy enough for me to read in one sitting like this...
It looks like a trip to the library is in order.
:-D
PS - The gunslinger series is pretty awesome. Not my all-time favortie but certainly in the top 10 and maybe in the top 5.
5 comments:
Dude. WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU?!?!!?!? Seriously, there is no point in reading a book if all you get is a few character names and general plot points. This is like putting a huge dinner into a piece of gum. You know what happens when you do that. YOU TURN INTO A GIGANTIC BLUEBERRY. Actually, you probably wouldn't have gotten that out of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory because you READ TOO DAMN FAST. Let that be a lesson to you.
-mollicus
I'm not sure if you were picking up what I was putting down.
Going at 1500 WPM is too fast. It's used for getting faster and not for actually reading stuff. I did a similar thing for the last two-thirds of Ship of Gold, but I did that one at 800 WPM. That way I could understand it all. And about 3 times faster than when I started.
BTW - If the numbers don't seem to work out it's b/c I had two starting speeds. One's for easy books (360WPM) and the other's for somewhat harder books like SoG (240WPM)
haha, okay. I just felt like leaving a ridiculous comment :)
-mollicus
What do you use to measure your WPM?
I do it two ways actually. For short bits, I set up a timer for say 3 minutes or whatever. Then I read.
I estimate the number of words on a page by counting around five lines and multiplying appropriately. Then I multiply by the number of pages I read. Then I divide words by minutes and that's it.
For big chunks I do the opposite. I'll say I'm reading 300 pages. Then I look at the time and read. Then I look at the time when I stop. Then I do the word estimate again and divide words by minutes.
Sadly, nothing super tricky.
For a slightly different purpose, however, I did make a python script that I can set to beep every time I should turn a page when I give it inputs of words per page and desired wpm.
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