Due to an injury I spent most of the third grade in bed. This was well before the digital age, so the only thing I could do to occupy my time was read books. My mother would go to the library to get them for me and eventually I was reading two or three a day. In graduate school I was required to take a speed reading course to help with the amount of reading required. On day one a reading speed test was administered and the instructor excused me from the course. Like others have posted, when I read fiction it is sort of like watching a movie. I don't really visualize the story, but everything happens in real time.

I hate the trend of things like on-line weather reports being available as video-only. I can read a written report so fast that I refuse to take the time to watch the video.

I've discovered that my reading is pattern matching. I don't see the letters, but the whole word. Once I had to read a report typed on a typewriter that had the defect of regularly inserting a space in the middle of the words. That destroyed the pattern and it was a struggle for me to read it. I am not a good speller, but when I misspell a word I usually know it because the pattern is wrong.

I believe reading speed really helped me during my computer coding days, since I could quickly review many lines of code to verify my logic was correct.

quote:

Originally posted by Ranger41:
Due to an injury I spent most of the third grade in bed.

I didn’t have that misfortune, but in some ways my young age was similar. Living in France where my father was stationed in the Army, and with our always being on a tight budget, reading library books became a major source of entertainment for me. Without even TV there were none of the modern distractions that parents tend to hand their children off to.

I am convinced to this day that children could be taught to want to read and to read well, but that would require effort and discipline by the adults, most of whom today never learned that either, so ….