Speed (of reading)

Incremental readers can beat speed readers in the speed of reading! This is true even for relative beginners with little or no speed-reading training. The caveat: all that is possible at the cost of delayed comprehension. In speed-reading, you always need to worry about the comprehension level. High comprehension is where speed-reading skills are vital. However, in incremental reading, you can quickly skim through less important portions of the text without worrying you will miss a detail. The skimmed fragment will be scheduled for later review. You can optionally determine when the review will happen and at what priority (low priority review may be delayed further, often automatically). You can quickly jump from paragraph to paragraph, get the overall picture, mark fragments for later reading, mark fragments for detailed study, etc. This speed-reading method, with a bit of training, is stress free. You will eliminate the greatest bottleneck of speed-reading: fear of missing important pieces of information. When you come back to the skimmed fragments in the future, they may have already become irrelevant or less important. That is one of a savings in time generated by incremental reading. You always focus on top priority material and you spend little time worrying about things that are left for later reading. Incremental reading is speed-reading without the loss of comprehension. Once you speed-read the entire article, you can slowly digest it again from the very beginning in the incremental reading process. Needless to say, speed-reading does not come close to incremental reading when it comes to long-term retention. Memories are always subject to forgetting. All valuable information that you collect while reading may be forgotten at any time. Pieces that would be retained without SuperMemo (e.g. through regular use) produce minimum workload. Other pieces will allow you to never need to come back to the article in question. In conclusion, all knowledge that you need in the long-run, should be best acquired via incremental reading. Traditional reading can still be used for entertainment, temporary knowledge (e.g. how to install a sound board), curiosity (e.g. news), etc. This is not to say that speed-reading skills are not useful in incremental reading. If you are already a solid speed-reader, you can add to your speed and comprehension with the help of incremental reading. In the process, you will hone your skills further and become even a faster reader.

See also: Speed-reading on steroids, which also explains the bell-shaped curve of changes in the cost of topic review.