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Count the number of F's in the following text as fast as you can:
FINISHED FILES ARE THE
RESULT OF YEARS OF SCIENTIFIC
STUDY COMBINED WITH THE
EXPERIENCE OF YEARS
Someone posted this on the Philosophy message board last year. The answer is six, but most people count three. It's because most people don’t count to Fs in “of”, and I have a theory as to why.
As a student, at school, you’re taught to read as fast as possible to absorb as much information as you can, as fast as you can. This means you learn to pick up the important words and skip all the common words. That way you pick up on the information without stopping to read every single little irrelevant word, and you only use those words to bridge the context for you. So no one really sees the word “of” anymore when they read quickly.
It’s the same principle as Italo Calvino uses in If On A Winter’s Night A Traveller. He talks about the character, Lotaria, and how she reads. She reads by putting books into a computer and counting the number of times words appear in the book. All she does is examine the frequency of words (not including words such as “and”, “the”, “of”… etc which occur all the time), and she can see what the book is about. For example, for one book, the list of words occurring 19 times: “blood, cartridge belt, commander, do, have, immediately, it, life, seen, sentry, shots, spider, teeth, together, your…”
And words that appear 18 times: "boys, cap, come, dead, eat, enough, evening, French, go, handsome, new, passes, period, potatoes, those, until..."
Looking at that list, you clearly get the idea that the book is a war novel.
Most people learn to read like that to a lesser extent. We pick up on the important words in order to understand what we’re reading is about. It simply saves time. We decode a text quickly that way, absorb it quickly, no wasting time.
So that's how we are taught to read fast at school, to take in as much information as possible in as little time as possible. You just pick up on the important words.
Conversely, there are some subjects at uni (like Philosophy and Cultural Studies) where you have to learn to read slowly. It’s not easy to learn to do, especially when you have so much to read that you’d much rather read fast as get it over with. But for those two subjects I found that you have to read slowly, think about what you read rather than just absorb information, and then critique what you read. Deconstruction, such as in Cultural Studies and Philosophy, requires this.
It’s not easy to do, especially since I did these subjects at the same time as doing English, where I had to continue learning speed-reading just to keep up with the course.
Just different styles of reading for different purposes.
FINISHED FILES ARE THE
RESULT OF YEARS OF SCIENTIFIC
STUDY COMBINED WITH THE
EXPERIENCE OF YEARS
Someone posted this on the Philosophy message board last year. The answer is six, but most people count three. It's because most people don’t count to Fs in “of”, and I have a theory as to why.
As a student, at school, you’re taught to read as fast as possible to absorb as much information as you can, as fast as you can. This means you learn to pick up the important words and skip all the common words. That way you pick up on the information without stopping to read every single little irrelevant word, and you only use those words to bridge the context for you. So no one really sees the word “of” anymore when they read quickly.
It’s the same principle as Italo Calvino uses in If On A Winter’s Night A Traveller. He talks about the character, Lotaria, and how she reads. She reads by putting books into a computer and counting the number of times words appear in the book. All she does is examine the frequency of words (not including words such as “and”, “the”, “of”… etc which occur all the time), and she can see what the book is about. For example, for one book, the list of words occurring 19 times: “blood, cartridge belt, commander, do, have, immediately, it, life, seen, sentry, shots, spider, teeth, together, your…”
And words that appear 18 times: "boys, cap, come, dead, eat, enough, evening, French, go, handsome, new, passes, period, potatoes, those, until..."
Looking at that list, you clearly get the idea that the book is a war novel.
Most people learn to read like that to a lesser extent. We pick up on the important words in order to understand what we’re reading is about. It simply saves time. We decode a text quickly that way, absorb it quickly, no wasting time.
So that's how we are taught to read fast at school, to take in as much information as possible in as little time as possible. You just pick up on the important words.
Conversely, there are some subjects at uni (like Philosophy and Cultural Studies) where you have to learn to read slowly. It’s not easy to learn to do, especially when you have so much to read that you’d much rather read fast as get it over with. But for those two subjects I found that you have to read slowly, think about what you read rather than just absorb information, and then critique what you read. Deconstruction, such as in Cultural Studies and Philosophy, requires this.
It’s not easy to do, especially since I did these subjects at the same time as doing English, where I had to continue learning speed-reading just to keep up with the course.
Just different styles of reading for different purposes.
