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Does any know of a study or personally witnessed any change, or lack of change, in technical reading skills after spending a good deal of time reading fiction?

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No no no. You got it wrong. It's TV that rots your mind ;) – System Down Oct 5 '12 at 22:18
I wonder what you're after: an excuse for non-technical people to claim technical impairedness? – ZJR Oct 5 '12 at 22:23
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Simpsons made me code smrter. – Demian Brecht Oct 5 '12 at 22:24
I think you over-estimate the quality of detail in these technical books you speak of. – Steve Evers Oct 5 '12 at 22:27
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I find the opposite: excessive technical reading has ruined my ability to read fiction. Non-technical books have too little information per page for my tastes. – Jimmy Hoffa Oct 5 '12 at 22:37
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closed as off topic by Walter, Loki Astari, Thomas Owens♦ Oct 6 '12 at 0:33

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1 Answer

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All my life I have been an avid reader. Since I've read both fiction and technical for as long as I can remember, I can't particularly report on a change caused by switching from one to the other.

However, I believe that reading is a skill and that practice of a skill helps you improve it. Doing lots of reading of any kind (within reason) should help you read faster, increase comprehension, improve vocabulary, etc. It should be easy to find studies that support this.

You can view it as training your neural network to quickly recognize words and phrases. The more training, the more accurate/fast it will be.

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