I‘m a speed reader—a certified speed reader, certified ever since I was in junior high school and passed a genuine speed-reading course. An Evelyn Wood Reading Dynamics speed-reading course, no less.
Yep, the grande dame of speed reading herself told me I read well over a thousand words a minute. Well, no, actually it was just someone in her Reading Dynamics company who told me so, back when I was a teenager, as he shook my hand and gave me a flimsy diploma with my name misspelled on it. Still, whenever I get a little down, whenever storm clouds gather round, I remember my speed-reading certificate, and the bounce comes back to my step. How could I stay sad, knowing that I can read the half-million words of War and Peace in less than a day—and still be able to tell you what the book is about? (War, mostly, and a little peace. In Russia.)
I’m still not sure why, exactly, my parents enrolled me in that evening course. But I know they were worried that I spent too much time reading instead of, you know, doing the dishes and mowing the lawn. So maybe their notion was that if I could speed read, I’d need fewer hours to finish the books I was reading—and so would have time for, you know, doing the dishes and mowing the lawn. What they forgot is that text is endless, a well that never runs dry, and finishing one book at high speed just means that readers are quicker to pick up the next.
I’m also not sure why I went along with the idea. I was a cynical child, suspicious of grand schemes, and if ever anything looked like hooey, it was the Evelyn Wood Reading Dynamics program. Just by learning how to slide your finger down the page, you can double your reading speed! Triple it! Average college-level readers get through 200 to 300 words a minute with reasonable comprehension. But through the wonders of speed reading, you can manage 700. Easy.
Except you can’t. I was always a pretty fast reader, and Wood’s introductory test showed me reading around 400 words a minute. When I finished the Evelyn Wood Reading Dynamics course, I could whip through books at the rate of 1,200 words a minute—but “whip through” isn’t the same as “read,” and it took me two or three years to discover how to read again. Actually read, instead of speed-skimming.
Poetry turned out to be the key for letting go of the mad desire to skim. All speed-reading courses aim at eliminating both vocalizing (the slowest form of reading, where you speak the words to yourself as you read) and auditizing (a slightly faster form, where you hear the words in your head as you move your eyes along the text). But I’d become fascinated with the work of Robert Lowell—convinced, in my adolescent certainty, that Lord Weary’s Castle was the only true way to write American verse—and the trouble with poetry is that it reads like bad prose if you don’t speak it or hear it. Lowell’s poetry maybe most of all.
For that matter, we can’t speed read the philosophy of Plato, the theology of St. Augustine, or the fiction of James Joyce—anything where the higher-order concepts or the arrangement of the words needs attention. Speed reading necessarily involves a kind of subtraction: a reduction of attention to nothing but the main track of the words as they barrel on toward the conclusion. It’s like the bullet train to Tokyo: a reasonable way to travel, if you aren’t much interested in the scenery.
Still, these days, I find myself surprisingly grateful to Evelyn Wood. Her Reading Dynamics course ruined a few years of reading, but eventually I learned to have different speeds, like the different gears of a car, as I read. There’s a low gear for poetry, a medium gear for serious prose, and a high gear for running through most genre fiction. Plus, of course, the highest gear, still maybe at 1,200 words a minute, for most committee reports, blog posts, and New York Times stories: anything where the way things are phrased isn’t particularly significant.
And maybe that’s the best way to think of the skimming technique that speed-reading courses offer: It’s a great way to get through text—if all you want to do is get through text. A great way to read words if, you know, the words don’t actually matter.
