Is it possible to improve reading speed and visual comprehension by doing exercises? Background

I'm trying to capture detailed information from the images in my visual memory, mainly text.  My daily life requires reading many documents on varying topics. I want to increase my reading speed and comprehension so that I can see text blocks as a whole; that is I see them not as meaningful text, but an image to be processed later. Perhaps then I would be able to iterate over the images in memory faster than I can with my eyes. 

However, when I need to remember the details of a topic, I can visually remember the location of the text in the document, but I can't recall details such as whole sentences.

I'm trying to improve my visual memory by this simple exercise: 


chose a random image from flickr 
have a look at it for a few seconds 
eyes closed, try to rebuild the image from memory 


but normally I can not remember many of the details from the image, even if it's not very detailed.

When I try this exercise with text blocks, I mostly end up "reading the block". It's hard to treat a text block as an image without reading it. So I normally fail at visualizing it in my memory.

Questions


Is it possible to improve reading speed, reading comprehension, and visual comprehension through visualisation exercises like those above?
If not with the above exercises, are there other exercises that can improve such skills?
There's a general discussion of speed reading methods on Wikipedia, but let's look at some specific articles and see what they say about reading speed and comprehension.

Bell's review of the reading speed and comprehension literature

In Bell's (2001) review of the empirical literature, he makes a number of points, which seem reasonable to me:


A few studies have shown that you can increase reading speed with various "speed reading techniques" (e.g., Hill, 1981, Richard, 1982).
However, "techniques ... employed on speed reading courses ... tend to cause readers to suffer lower levels of reading comprehension..." This is a within-person phenomena. People who read particularly slowly often have low comprehension, but this is not relevant to the question of whether an individual should increase or slow down their reading speed.
Several authors recommend reading at the right speed, neither too fast nor too slow (e.g., Coady, 1979).
Part of being a skilled reader is about adapting reading strategies, particularly with regards to the speed / comprehension trade-off, to the nature of the text and the reading goals in the situation.


Discussion of reading expertise

There is a massive literature on reading comprehension.
For example, take Pearson et al's (1992) list that states that expert readers:


  
  Search for connections between what they know and the new information they encounter
  Monitor the adequacy of their models of text meaning
  Take steps to repair faulty comprehension once they realize they have failed to understand something
  Learn early on to distinguish important from less important ideas in text they read
  Are adept at synthesising information within and across texts and reading experiences
  Draw inferences during and after reading to achieve a full, integrated understanding of what they read
  Sometimes consciously, and almost always unconsciously, ask questions of themselves, the authors they encounter, and the texts
  they read.
  


The key feature of this list is that expert readers employ strategies related to constructing meaning. They don't pertain to exact strategies for moving the eyes over the page and the process of visualising text, and so on.

Implications for increasing reading speed

On the basis of the above, I don't think trying to integrate whole blocks of text visually would be a useful training exercise for helping a person achieve his or her reading goals.

When it comes to reading, I think it's more important to think about your goals than to focus on reading speed. Why do you need to read the text? What are you hoping to get out of the text? How will this information be used?

References


Bell, T. (2001). Extensive reading: Speed and comprehension. The Reading
Matrix, 1(1). PDF
Coady, J. (1979). A psycholinguistic model of the ESL reader. In R. Mackay, B. Barkman, &amp; R.R.
Jordon (Eds), Reading in a second language (pp 5-12). Rowley, MA: Newbury House.
Hill, J.K. (1981). Effective reading in a foreign language. English Language Teaching Journal, 35,
(pp 270-281).
Pearson, P., Roehler, L., Dole, J., and Duffy, G. (1992). Developing
expertise in reading comprehension. What research has to say about
reading instruction, 2:145-199. PDF
Richard, W. (1982). Improving Reading Speed in Readers of English as a Second Language. JALT Journal, 4, (pp 89-95).