Speed-reading revisited still again

I recently learned speed-reading, and after the training I read Tolstoy's "War and Peace" in ten minutes. It's about Russia, I think.

Why would I do that when I savor words and the order they are in, words and the way they sound, words becoming poetry, words and their power?
To me, speed reading is like scything a field of just blooming daffodils.

I took an organized course in it decades ago in Navy flight training. The techniques included concentration, scanning whole sentences - i.e. reading the sentence, paragraph & page, not the individual words. We used machines that covered the page at a fixed rate to force these actions. Initially thee was a significant loss of retention and comprehension of the material. However, after several days of it both returned and our reading rates were up by at least 50%. A lot of that faded over time, but there was some residual benefit and i can still summon the scanning techniques when necessary.

You've absolutely made my entire day

But see, I remembered not to abbr as "Tes." So is "T." okay

When yardwork calls


Osso you too have helped make my day

Geo thanks so much for your pertienent reply

That's a common technique but there are a number of variations and I wonder which ones you found most successful. Some catch one line at a time (depending on dims of para), some in zigzag; some scan for the verb, a few for the noun; and I'm wondering whether anyone has mastered an entire (newspaper column) para at a single glance

That's almost astounding, encouraging anyhow

Thanks Geo again most kindly

Oh yes, then there's downward spiral, maybe when we're expert

So Geo are there just two of us

Maybe 3 with T

Perhaps so. The course I took was a standard part of the classroom training just before we started flying at Pensacola Fla in the 1960s. I still vividly remember the book I read during the exercises. It was "A Crossbowman's Story" based on the the histoty of a small group of Spanish soldiers, from Gonsalves Pizarro's expidition into Eastern Peruand became isolated on the east slopes of the Andes near the headwaters of the Amazon. UNder Orellana's leadership the group made their way down the entire length of the river to the Atlantic, fighting several battles along the way with cultured native peoples later wiped out by epidemic smallpox. They build dsome ships and made their way around to Spanish settlements on Trinidad and what is now Venezuela. I t all happened in 1542 as I recall.

I read a gread deal, but that one has stuck with me far more than most others.

Thanks Geo for that report

I hardly remember anything I speed-read