PSYCH236 Lecture 3: Unit 03_summary
Document Summary
Students often wish they could read more quickly, and, in fact, it"s easy to teach people how to speed-read. It"s important to understand, however, how speed-reading works, because this will help you see when speed-reading is a good idea and when it"s a terrible strategy. In normal reading, there"s no need to look at every word on the page. Printed material (like language in general) follows predictable patterns, and so, having read a few words, you"re often able to guess what the next words will be. And without realizing you"re doing it, you routinely exploit this predictability: you ordinarily skip over many of the words on the page, relying on rapid inference to fill in what you"ve skipped. Courses that teach you how to speed-read actually rely on simple strategies that help you to skip more, as you move down the page, and, with this, to increase your use of inference.
