Ever try using a sheet of paper to force yourself to slow down while reading a book? You use the sheet of paper to cover the unread portion of the page (aside from the current line, obviously) to prevent your eyes from skimming ahead.
I remember seeing kids with reading problems doing this in grade school.
Much to my chagrin (and amusement!) I now find it very useful for myself. Prevents me from reading so quickly that I absorb nothing.
I used to be like that.
Then I started to cover the lines I had already read with a sliding sheet of paper. That immediately increased my concentration and reading speed since I didn't get lost in the page as often as before.
Everyone reads differently and looks for different things in a reading experience (if you couldn't already tell by the comments). I remember once when I was in elementary school, a teacher suggested to kids that were having trouble focusing or who were losing their place that they should use a piece of paper to obscure everything below the line they were reading and slide it down the page as they went. For reading on a screen, reflowing and resizable text can helped greatly with focus and "losing place" problems (I love Readability), but the "scroll line" concept you've got here has the potential to maybe go a bit further.
I think that if you blanked out everything below the scroll line, or everything below a good-sized margin of it (so as to preserve some of the text from the previous "page", to enable a bit of bouncing back and forth), you'd have a pretty good, functional recreation of that, and some people might find it pretty useful.
This is the one tip that I often see and can actually understand/agree would work.
I've just not been able to do it though. I think I've managed bursts of it when skimming something super quickly - which as OP mentions is not how I enjoy reading.
One approach that I learned was to use your fingers to underline the current line that you're reading, going at a "normal" speed when you're tired and then trying to "drag" your eyesight along when you want to push yourself.
The reason given is that it prevents you from accidentally rereading a line or skipping over one or changing lines midsentence.
This seems like one of those gimmicky approaches, and I remember being sold on this approach rather than being entirely convinced. Have you seen this before?
When I read a text that is either an unfamiliar topic or otherwise difficult I write it down by hand, word for word, into a spiral notebook as I read through it. I find that really helps to prevent me from skipping over passages without first understanding them.
I find the extraneous load helpful as it forces my attention. But this only works in cases when I can control the pace, such as when reading (as opposed to listening.)
If I am learning something new then I find it helpful to copy down on paper what I read out of the book, word for word, as I read it. That slows down my reading and prevents me from spacing out.
Yes! Very true. I found that I get distracted easily when reading, stopping at an unfamiliar term/concept, looking it up, possibly taking notes, annnddd then not really getting back to what I was reading.
Now, I read differently, where I _read to finish_; I try to minimize the time-to-big-picture.
Ive found reading with a pen or pencil to be helpful. I also sometimes prematurely seek out an answer to some piece of text that’s expounded on a few lines later. So my recipe now is, open book (or whatever), write the date and time, read the table of contents, read through and annotate, write questions and answers in the margins, and get to the other cover quickly; each time I pick up the text I read over something I previously noted (in fifo order). These second passes are slow, the first pass continues at the same speed.
I sometimes do it when fast-reading through something and click on some sections (single or multiple words) which got my attention. And then I read on.
It helps me to keep things in my short-term memory or to actually extend my short-term memory.
Have you tried picking a page or two and reading them a few times a day every day? When learning to read sheet music you do this, and as your brain begins to remember and anticipate what comes next your eyes get used to moving quicker. Just a thought, as I don't have issues with reading text, but might be worth trying.
Seems like this article makes quite a leap from the study results to their suggestion that everyone reads paper books. Study results:
1. People reading on a screen are more likely to skim
2. Skimming reduces comprehension of the material
3. Reading on paper correlates with better reconstruction of plot
It seems like 1 and 2 taken together are as good an explanation as any for 3. Given that, I feel like it would be at least worth an experiment to see if making a conscious effort to avoid skimming would be just as effective as switching to reading on paper. If so, I think that would be a cheaper and easier solution to the issue.
I remember seeing kids with reading problems doing this in grade school.
Much to my chagrin (and amusement!) I now find it very useful for myself. Prevents me from reading so quickly that I absorb nothing.
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