These twin perceptions have led to a wave of businesses and apps that once again aim to “revolutionise your reading speed” (at the cost of $4.99, or whatever, a month).
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The second factor is the belief that since text can now be presented more dynamically on screens we are not “restricted” by the rigidity of printed sentences on a page: surely there is a better way? With Rapid Serial Visual Presentation, individual words, or blocks of two or three, appear one after the other on screen The first is the persuasive perception that we are living in times of information overload, that we are daily presented with more words than we can possibly cope with, and that new tactics are called for to enable us to make sense of it all. Recently, the attractions of speed reading have been revived and promoted, for a couple of reasons. The science of Wood’s method was never remotely proven, however, and by the time of her death in 1995, her ideas had fallen out of fashion. Presidents Nixon and Carter, under mountains of briefings, followed suit. President Kennedy, who believed himself to be a gifted speed reader (and who colleagues observed “reading” the New York Times and the Washington Post each morning in 10 minutes flat, scanning and turning the pages), sent a dozen of his staff to the Evelyn Wood Reading Dynamics Institute in Washington. By the end of a course in Reading Dynamics, breathless students were “reading” Orwell’s Animal Farm at the rate of 1,400 words a minute, and telling tales of revolution. To achieve this, Wood promoted a technique of running a finger down the middle of a page to “activate peripheral vision”. Print should be consumed in blocks rather than words and sentences. We had to stop “subvocalising” – “saying” words out loud in our heads as our eyes moved across the page – as well as learning to outlaw the pauses and detours that led to us reread phrases when our minds drifted or our understanding snagged. The way in which we read, she professed, in the managerial spirit of the moment, was inefficient in terms of time and motion. With Doug, her husband, Wood opened her Reading Dynamics institutes across the US and beyond in the 1950s and 60s, and her methods became a self-help craze.
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