You're not a slow reader

May 25, 2024

Everybody wants to read more

Reading is one of those things that just about everybody wishes they did more of. While reading a little each day is a great strategy, there's only so much time you can set aside for reading. We're limited not only by how much time we can dedicate to reading, but also by how quickly we can read.

For a long time, I was frustrated with myself for being a "slow reader." I know I'm not alone in this feeling. Personally, I always figured it was just something I wasn't good at, and that the ability to speed read was mostly a gift and not a skill. However, I recently discovered not only that I was wrong about these assumptions, but also that the trick to reading quickly is in fact very simple.

Reading without subvocalization

When most people read, myself included, we essentially talk to ourselves in our mind, saying each word one by one with our "inner monologue." This is called subvocalization. Naturally, when we subvocalize, we tend to read at around the same speed that we talk. This is fine for things like fiction books that you're reading purely for enjoyment, but when it comes to non fiction, this can severely slow you down.

Thankfully, subvocalization isn't a necessary feature of reading. It's completely possible to read without using your inner monologue, and it's actually much faster. When I first came about this concept in this blog post by Benedict Neo, a fellow Machine Learning Engineer, I was honestly blown away. I felt like this simple idea had answered a long standing question I've had as to how other people were able to read so quickly, and why I could not.

In retrospect, I knew that speed readers were not reading every word of every sentence in their entirety, however, I hadn't even considered that the trick was to simply "turn off your inner monologue." It takes some getting used to if you've never done it before, but after a little while you'll be reading faster than ever. Without having to wait for your inner monologue to finish pronouncing each word, you can drastically increase the number of words you read per minute.

I think it's important to draw the distinction between this method of "reading without your inner monologue" and the concept of "skimming." Skimming is more analogous to "skipping through" some text to get a general idea what it's about, or to try and search for some topic within it. When skimming, you may skip over entire sentences or even paragraphs. However, when "reading without subvocalization", you should still be reading every word (more-or-less), but without stopping to pronounce each word in your head. I think it's important to differentiate between the two methods, as they provide radically different levels of reading comprehension.