On average, people read about 250 words a minute. The Chilcot report is 2.6m words long. That’s 10,400 minutes of reading, or about 173 hours. Assuming you spent eight hours on it every day, and took weekends off, that makes digesting the whole report about a month’s full-time work.
Or does it? Clearly many people won’t want to wait, and there is something called speed reading which, if you believe its fans, has near-miraculous powers. “I’d probably spend 20 minutes looking at the whole report to see how it’s structured,” says Jan Cisek, a speed reading teacher at Spd Rdng, and co-author of The Speed Reading Bible. “With the executive summary too, hopefully I’ll get that in 20 minutes. Then I’ll ask myself: ‘What do I want to know?’ Remember that speed reading is not just reading for the sake of reading; it is information extraction. Then I’ll start reading it from cover to cover. If it’s got nice headings, then I will read maybe 1,000 words per minute. I could do it in two days, if I had a lot of coffee.”
Even devotees agree that there is no one secret to reading at this speed. Cisek himself teaches a number of techniques, which include training your eyes to move more quickly, learning to pick out keywords based on what you’re interested in, and learning to make efficient notes. You can also cut down how much eye movement is required by training your peripheral vision, and by reading whole chunks of text at a time, rather than word by word. “You basically spend less time looking at each line, and you spend less time jumping from one word to another,” Cisek says. People dispute how much speed readers really understand, but he insists comprehension and memory actually improve, because you hold more meaning in your mind at once.
Another technique, called “downloading”, sounds frankly fantastical. With your book formatted electronically, you set it up to scroll double-page spreads on a big screen at a speed of roughly one spread a second. This does not replace reading but, apparently, if you do it beforehand it makes you faster when the time for reading comes. “You prime your brain with the information,” Cisek says, “kind of download the whole document into your subconscious mind. I can do probably a 500-page book in five minutes.”
So what if, say, a harassed political journalist wanted to learn to be able to read this fast? How long would it take? “Two days. We’d do two days’ training. I’d teach you everything I know, and I could get you up to speed in two days. And if we use that document to practice on, we could probably have read at least 10%.” And how about nailing Proust to impress my friends? Will the same techniques apply to literature? “That’s different. When I’m reading a beautiful novel, I will slow down. Literature is for pleasure.”
