What’s the straight dope on speed reading? Evelyn Wood commercials in the late 70s showed people casually zipping through impressive-looking tomes, apparently having benefited from one of Evy’s speed-reading courses. The concept, as I recall it, was that one learned to read not word-by-word but line-by-line and eventually paragraph-by-paragraph. It was claimed that in spite of the breakneck speeds you would “achieve a higher level of comprehension.” It all seemed a bit implausible at the time. Anyway, speed reading seemed to disappear until recently, when it was reintroduced on those late night mail order “infomercials.” What’s the scoop? –John Ashborne, Chicago
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It’s not a complete scam, if that’s what you’re thinking. But the benefits have been exaggerated. Speed reading is what you might call the Ronald Reagan approach to reading–you get the text’s general drift while remaining largely innocent of the details, sometimes embarrassingly so. Several trained speed readers were once asked to read a doctored text in which the even-numbered lines came from one source and the odd-numbered lines from another. The speed readers read the material three times (average speed: 1,700 words per minute) and claimed to understand it–but never noticed it consisted of two separate passages mixed together.
The researchers found that the speed readers read a little faster than the skimmers (700 wpm versus 600 wpm) and much faster than the normal readers (240 wpm). But the speed readers’ comprehension was invariably worse, often a lot worse, than that of the normal readers. What’s more, the speed readers outcomprehended the skimmers only when asked general questions about easy material. When asked about details or difficult material, the skimmers and speed readers tested equally poorly.
That’s the family-newspaper version. A less respectable view has it that funk is “the pungent odor given off by the sexually aroused female” (The Dictionary of the Teenage Revolution and Its Aftermath, 1983). Believe what you will. I take no sides.
