Thinking-related poll

[juliet]

Pete & I were discussing, among other things, reading this morning. So, a poll:

[Poll #330828]

I need a 'reading' icon.

Comments

[beingjdc.livejournal.com]

When I say slowly, I mean compared to how fast I imagine the rest of you lot to read. Obviously it's probably fairly quick compared to the national average.

[sbp.livejournal.com]

I think your questions are slightly ambiguous. Or something. I mean, how fast I read text does not necessarily translate into how quickly I complete a book. Plus initially I thought "do you vocalise" meant "do you mumble along out loud?" rather than "do the words make noises in your head?". But anyway.

[sashajwolf.livejournal.com]

how fast I read text does not necessarily translate into how quickly I complete a book.

*confused* But how could it not? I mean, if you say it doesn't I believe you, but I don't understand it - could you explain that a bit more?

[sbp.livejournal.com]

Easy - because I don't necessarily read a book all in one go. So my reading speed of text on the page might be high, but my rate-of-book-completion may be low.

So the question "how fast do you read?" looks like it's about text reading speed, but the answers look more like rate-of-book-completion.

[mzdt.livejournal.com]

agreed - I read quickly, but normally only when travelling or just before sleep. The average book takes weeks, sadly - what is this 'spare time' that people speak of?

[juliet]

Sorry - I was meaning that as an indication of text-reading speed, as in 'if I sat down & just read, I could get through a book in this time'. In order to give an indication of what 'fast' etc means, y'see.

[sashajwolf.livejournal.com]

Oh, I see. Yes, that makes sense.

[mstevens.livejournal.com]

Read pretty fast, but I skim more than I'm entirely happy with. Some of it's laziness, and some of it's being too impatient to find out what happens.

[infinitarian.livejournal.com]

I'm fairly sure I have two styles of reading, where "vocalising" either happens or doesn't. The vocalising approach happens when the prose style's complex or difficult, or when it's particularly rich and I want to get full enjoyment out of it. The non-vocalising approach I use for assimilating simple factual stuff or reading a book primarily for the story rather than the style, and it's considerably quicker.

The choice between the two would appear to be unconscious, and I'm fairly sure I slip from one to the other as I'm reading. (Is that more information than you needed yet?)

[juliet]

I suspect I have two as well, but I'm not sure it divides up like that. I *think* that I vocalise, to an extent, almost all of the time, but not 'properly', in that I don't hear things at normal speed. There just seems to be some sort of mental 'noise' going on that approximates to hearing the words.

I suspect I do this less for fiction, but that's because with (good) fiction the whole thing happens inside my head. So the dialogue makes noise, but the other stuff just happens. I noticed at a very young age that I never remembered reading the actual words of a story, but just remembered the things happening as mental images. This, obviously, doesn't apply to factual stuff, where I have a very strong impression of reading words (so I tend to remember that I saw such-&-such a piece of information on a right-hand page about halfway down, or whatever).

And right now, of course, I am hyper-aware of my reading and beginning to become confused...

[marnameow.livejournal.com]

How vocal the book is in my head depends on how distinctive the narrative voice is. It's absolutely IMPOSSIBLE to read the Lonely Londoners, say, without hearing voices. Something more recent that I found had a very distinctive voice is Notes on a Scandal - Zoe Heller. Obv, they're both first-person narratives, and that makes it a lot easier to 'hear the voices' because you're immersed right in it.

[dogrando.livejournal.com]

Is there any way of getting lj to show the correlation between the results of that poll? 'Cos that's the interesting thing, surely, rather than the number of people in each category.

[boyofbadgers.livejournal.com]

Hello dear boy! You appear to be under the impression that the poll facility is there to collect interesting data and present it in an illuminating fashion to ones readership. It isn't. It's what we in the land of ex-prime ministers like to call a 'nasty hack'. If you are in any doubt, just look at that zero length bar up there.

[barakta]

I did my final year dissertation on cognitive style, which is a random psychology thing which basically looks into whether people think in words or pictures, and how they organise information in their brain as it were.

I found that there was interesting correlations between people's reading speed and how they handled information as well as whether they thought in words or pictures. I am hoping to do more research into this area when I have money/experience and of course funding.

I don't think in pictures, I don't usually find pictures helpful and i have to decode diagrams to make sense of them. I am very much a verbal person and think in words. I don't really subvocalise ever, in fact I loathe reading aloud as a concept not least cos it fouls up my speech something chronic (I am partially deaf and start sounding deaf when I read aloud).

I know many people who can read non-fiction quickly, or on a screen quickly, but struggle more with fiction or 'real books'. Like someone said above a correlation of this data would be cool, especially if you could get more data about participants lifestyles, experiences and occupations.

Argh, must not talk about research, have to do jobhunting not research.

Natalya

[juliet]

Ooh. Dissertation sounds interesting - you don't have an electronic copy kicking around anywhere, do you, that I might read?

I think in words, although (as mentioned above somewhere) when reading (good) fiction it's more like seeing a play or film or similar going on in my head. But when I'm talking myself I can kind of 'see' the words in my head as I speak them.

On the other hand, I have a very visual memory - if getting directions to a place, for example, a map is best, written directions OK, and verbal directions utterly useless. I can't handle spoken stuff at all well - I find it very difficult to concentrate on and virtually impossible to remember (this doesn't apply to conversations so much, because of the activity of taking part - lectures were utterly useless, though).

[barakta]

Dissertation is available as an HTML document at http://www.barakta.org.uk/dissertation/html/.

If you want to download a copy there are PDF, PS and RTF versions which you can check out. Note the RTF was a horrible kludge and some of the formatting and referencing is broken, I only put it there as a crappy option. These are available at http://www.barakta.org.uk/dissertation/.

I find that knowing I don't find pictures helpful is useful to me as a person cos I will make sure I have time to translate picture data into sections of word data. When I read a map I have to work out the directions as a sequence of instructions, I cannot instinctively read a map and in the past have been laughed at for being very slow. I am making myself do it more and more so that I can improve my ability to translate pictorial data to words in real time.

Oh and be warned the dissertation is about 8000 words for the main section and a further 5000 for the appendices. I hope my writing style isn't too awful (I don't write well).

Natalya