To knock out sentence context, they changed word order (e.g.
“Contribute others. The of Reading measured”). To knock out whole word
recognition, they alternated capital and lower case (e.g. “ThIs tExT
AlTeRnAtEs iN CaSe”). And to knock out letter-by-letter decoding, they
substituted letters in such a way that word shape was maintained (e.g.
“Reading” becomes “Pcedirg”).Letter decoding was found to
account for 62 per cent of reading speed; whole word recognition 16 per
cent; and sentence context 22 per cent.
I wasn’t there for the tests, but I believe that is measuring reading speed at margins other than what we find on the printed page. "Knowing what is coming" is in my view most important for reading fast. (I like to say "It took me 45 years to read that book." If you think you "just started" the book in your hands right now, you are failing to understand the proper marginal unit.)
I find that when I try to read graphic novels, I am not a very fast reader at all. My eyes get confused from not knowing where the next block of text will appear.
I am also struck by an incidental remark toward the end of the article; we are getting closer to the truth:
…among the faster readers, predicting words from sentence context made a
bigger contribution to reading speed than among the slower readers.
Addendum: Here is my previous post on reading speed.
That mixed-up word order sentence is especially devious since I can’t rearrange the words to make a coherent sentence at all. Clever!
Re: graphic novels — having been a regular comics reader from a young age, I find most graphic novels very quick to read. But every now and then I find a graphic novel which slows my reading pace to a crawl. I never gave much thought to it before, but I’d bet those books’ letterers didn’t come from a comics background, or don’t come from a professional lettering background at any rate, and are subtly missing some aspect of word-balloon positioning….
To Nelsonal.
I am a very fast reader. However when I proofread for spelling I scan instead of read. That way misspelled words jump out of the page. Used to drive a marketing director I worked with crazy. I would pick out misspelled words in less than a minute a page after she spent over a hour reviewing them.
Course you have to read normally to catch the misuse of words like “loose” for “lose” and “deer” for “dear” etc.
Try it and see if it works for you.
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