RE: How do we read?

["Mike Hiatt" <mhiatt -at- vocaldata -dot- com>]

Couple of comments. I have a hard time proofing long texts because I tend to read them and don't even see lots of really minor errors, especially the occasional missing or transposed letters.

In relateion to Chuck's mention of seeing word shapes and looking to spots on the page, I took the Evelyn Woods Dynamic Speed Reading Course following high school graduation as preparation for college. The first thing they had us doing was either using a foreign language book or turning an English (I'm in the U.S.) book upside down and then doing various drills. It totally frustrated me. Once we moved to reading actual English text, boom, I was at the top of the class for both speed and comprehension.

Turns out that what they were trying to teach us was to see groups of words and thoughts or ideas instead of reading single words. I discovered that my younger sister and I had both been doing this naturally for years. We both were and are voracious readers and both read ahead of grade level. This leads me, I believe, to see very visual images of the stories as I read them. To the point that I once argued that I had seen the movie version of some book only to have the other person tell me I couldn't have because the book was never made into a movie. Yet at the time I could vividly recall scenes from the non-existent movie.

I find that this capability increase and diminishes with the amount of pleasure reading I do. Also, it doesn't work well with scientific or factual material I'm trying to learn.

I've also had to learn to turn off reading texts I'm trying to type into the computer so I can just enter them. Once I learned that little trick, my data entry speed improved immeasurably.

Mike Hiatt
Manager, Tech Pubs
VocalData, Inc.
Dallas, TX (yep, that one)
mailto:mhiatt -at- vocaldata -dot- com
www.vocaldata.com

-----Original Message-----
From: Chuck Martin [mailto:cm -at- writeforyou -dot- com]
Sent: Friday, September 12, 2003 1:52 PM
To: TECHWR-L
Subject: Re: How do we read?



"Sean Brierley" <seanb_us -at- yahoo -dot- com> wrote in message
news:212856 -at- techwr-l -dot-  -dot-  -dot- 
>
> Instructions: Just read the sentence straight through
> without really
> thinking about it.
>
>snipped

It'd be interesting to see just how that study was laid out. One thing I
learned was that reading doesn't take in a word at a time, but phrases. Your
eye jumps to discrete points on the page. And one thing that's very
important in recognizing words is word shape (which is one reason why all
caps is harder to read).

About halfway through reading that paragraph, I realized that I was
recognizing words, but that I was stopping on many of them to figure out
what they said. To me, it was an increase in cognitive load.

One of the problems of rearranging internal letters is that it can change
the word shape. For me, while I could anagram all the words as written on
the fly, it certainly took me longer. From this study of one, I'd say that
while I can agree with the English university study conclusion that the
words can be read, the effort to do so, on both a conscious and an
unconscious level seems to be increased.