Education: Read Faster & Better

To read 2,500 words a minute—ten times the average American’s reading rate —is almost to qualify someone as a freak or a genius. Last week, at the new Reading Dynamics Institute in Washington, D.C., one pert college girl chewed up a sociology textbook at the rate of 14,000 w.p.m. Other students, from lawyers to Senators, mined such lodes of logorrhea as Anthony Adverse in less than two hours. What’s more, they developed almost total recall: the whole point was comprehension. Washington has seen nothing like it since the days when Teddy Roosevelt read three books a day and ran the country at the same time.

Founder of the institute is slim, earnest Schoolteacher Evelyn Nielsen Wood, 51, who first caught the fast-reading bug 15 years ago when she handed a master’s-degree term paper to her speech professor at the University of Utah. He flipped the 80 pages once—and marked the paper without missing a detail. His untrained speed: 6,000 w.p.m. Teacher Wood found 50 other such prodigies, including housewives and a sheepherder. All had common characteristics: they read whole paragraphs at a time, remembered everything. Concluded Teacher Wood: “Speed is not most important, but only through speed do you get good comprehension.”

Whirlaway. Analyzing the prodigies’ habits, Teacher Wood slowly evolved a new technique, practiced it for years on high school and college students in Utah. She calls it “a process of reading rapidly down the page, allowing the eyes to trigger the mind directly and eliminating the necessity of saying, hearing or thinking the sound of words.” Mrs. Wood thinks most people are “sub-vocalizers” or inward lip-readers. Just as a pilot is aware of many things at once, her students learn to steep themselves in a book’s total mood and meaning. “You see more than a single detail in a picture,” she explains. “You see the whole thing.”

The eyes of easily distracted average readers regress eight to eleven times per 100 words. Teacher Wood’s beginning students curb this tendency by running their fingers under each line, then every other line, until they learn the “whirlaway motion”—a series of circular sweeps down the middle of the page. In 2½-hour sessions (plus one hour of daily practice), they read faster and faster against a clock, get constant quizzes on comprehension.

Total Impact. Then comes a key technique: how to “organize” a book before reading it. For example, a reader outlines a textbook as if he were writing it, always knows what comes next. A novel is skimmed first to get the characters straight, then read, then reviewed. In this way, a Woodman can mop up Dr. Zhivago in one hour. “You don’t see the words as words,” says Teacher Wood. “The story rolls in to you. You get the total impact.”

Launched last fall, the 30-hour course ($1.50) is so successful that Teacher Wood plans to open branches this fall in Atlanta, Minneapolis and New York City. Last week, having already taught some 1,250 students in Washington, she had a long list of glowing testimonials. A Wilmington librarian actually hit 20,000 w.p.m. Georgia’s Senator Herman Talmadge calls his improvement “fantastic,” says that setting up the technique in all Georgia schools “would be worth a $1,000,000-a-year appropriation.” Predicts one of five fascinated General Electric engineers, who are now analyzing the method to see if it can help computer operations: “A storm will come up when this breaks.”