More speed, less understanding.

Guardian has an excellent report of a survey of speed reading techniques, showing a loss of understanding when people try to read more quickly than their brains can process the information. I've never believed in speed reading, or skimming and scanning, except when something is not really worth reading properly - typically, the morass of policy documents produced under New Labour's strategies. What is worth reading is worth reading either at the pace of the human voice, or at the pace of our own inner speech, which is faster, but takes shortcuts we can control.