Speed reading courses claim to teach you to read... well really fast! But it would seem the trade-off is a drop in comprehension. For me it is intuitively obvious. I tried myself to focus on speed, just for the fun of it, and I could instantly tell how less information I was able to retain. Arguably, there are strategies out there that develop the skill of retaining information better while reading fast, or should we call that skimming? Because what speed reading essentially entails is skipping bits and chunks of a text.

In fact, one of my friends in Moscow has taken speed reading courses and he argues that this is a valuable skill to have under one's belt. Well, is that really so? What do you think people?