How to Read More Slowly
If you find yourself reading too quickly for comfort, try this.
The internet is full of advice on reading more quickly. Speed reading techniques are valuable for students and people in professions requiring a lot of reading. The art of skimming and scanning a complicated article is invaluable if you’re on a time limit. However, once you know how to take in large chunks of text quickly, skimming the first and last sentences of a paragraph and scanning the rest for important information, it’s hard to stop.
Rapidly reading a text makes sense if you’re reading it for information only. It’s perfect for technical articles and news stories, Facebook updates and text messages, how-to books and recipes. Blog posts, too. My feelings won’t be hurt if you skim this.
Many writers past and present have carefully chosen their words to convey beauty as well as information, and you cannot grasp the full meaning if you only look for the latter. Poets and philosophers use complicated language to force the reader to slow down and ponder.
You can pat yourself on the back for finishing Tennyson’s “Ulysses” in three minutes or Tolstoy’s War and Peace in three weeks, but you will have wasted your time. Don’t merely consume the text. Reflect on it. Pause and repeat a choice phrase. Let it change you. In her recent book On Reading Well: Finding the Good Life Through Great Books, Karen Swallow Prior writes, “Reading well is, in itself, an act of virtue, or excellence. It is also a habit that cultivates more virtue in return.”
To read well, you often have to read slowly.
I’m not an incredibly fast reader, but I still find myself reading faster than is enjoyable. The following tips have all helped me.
Choose something complicated.
Complicated works keep me honest. I can read rapidly through a book with simple vocabulary and pretend that I’ve gotten everything out of it that I was supposed to. If I try those tricks on Plato or Milton or even Lewis, I just don’t absorb the meaning. You’re probably smarter than me, but I need to read them slowly.
So choose a genre or style that’s a bit more challenging for you to kick your speed reading habit. If you like narrative, try poetry. If you read a lot of poetry, try philosophy.
Or just choose a really, really good book.
When a book is just a delight to read, you won’t want to finish it quickly. Jane Eyre is my current read, and I’ve been drawing it out as long as I can.
Reread a part whenever the mood strikes.
Want to reread that chapter you just finished? Go right ahead! Want to start the book over from the beginning as soon as you close it? No one is stopping you!
Read the book in an (internal) accent.
Speed reading experts will tell you to stop sub-vocalizing when you read. That is, stop pronouncing the word in your head as if you were speaking it; that slows you down. Instead, intentionally read faster than the voice in your head can say the words. This is a great tip; my reading speed in college doubled.
Now flip that around. Consciously use an accent in your head as you read. I tried this while reading Jane Eyre and found I could hear the dialogue more clearly. The description became more vivid, too.
Better yet, read it aloud.
A few years ago, my husband and I read the first Harry Potter book together. (I had persuaded him to watch the movies a few years before that, so this was his first time with the book.) It took us four months to read it, partly because we rarely had time to read more than one chapter every other week, but partly because it is slower and richer to read aloud. We used many different voices and had time to ask questions about the plot and characters. It was a great way to bond, and if you have a little bit of a performer’s flair, it will be a treat to read dramatically.
On that note, read it with someone else.
This may bring back bad memories of ninth grade English class when you all had to read Of Mice and Men at the same agonizing pace even though you want to skip ahead, but there’s a benefit to reading a book chapter by chapter to accommodate different paces and schedules. If you can’t resist skipping ahead, you’ll still be forced to go back to where everyone else is, and the book will stay with you for longer.
Keep a commonplace book.
A commonplace book is basically a journal filled with other people’s writing. You will read more slowly overall if you pause every chapter, or every few chapters, to write down the quotes that gripped you.
As you summarize and quote, feel free to interject your ideas and questions. It pays to see how your opinion of the work evolves as you read. As Susan Wise Bauer writes in The Well-Educated Mind, “Uninformed opinions are easy to come by….The good reader bases his opinion on intelligent analysis, not mere reaction” (47).
Rate and review it.
You’ve been reading with an eye to understand and assess. Now, as a reward for your effort and an incentive to do it again, write out a review. It can be brief or long, simple or detailed, posted online or saved for private use.
You don’t have to rate everything, but try to be even-handed. Don’t just review things you hate – even though ranting is fun to write and to read - or things you love – even though it’s exciting to share them with others. Some of the best reviews I’ve written or read are not the clear one-star or five-star reviews. I have to dig into a three-star book to explain why its pros and cons balance each other out.
DO YOU HAVE ANY TIPS?
I will probably be a recovering speed reader all my life, so if you have any tips for slowing down, let me know!