by Michael Finley
Copyright © 1996 by Michael Finley

I first heard of speed reading during the Kennedy administration. John F. Kennedy was regarded as the last word on human attainment, and it was revealed that he had learned how to read a book in 15 minutes, using techniques developed by Evelyn Wood. My 15-year-old brother went gaga over the concept, and for several weeks he read an entire play by Shakespeare before going to sleep at night. Which was admirable, unless you slept in the same bed as him.

Thirty-five years later, speed reading and its cousin enhanced memory are still being hawked as the answer to intellectual inefficiency. Late night infomercials, featuring people with high foreheads who can blast through books with 100% retention, extol the beauty of zipping through books, magazines, and newspapers. Software products like Ultimate Speed Reader, from Davidson, the educational software company, add to the stampede.

Ultimate Speed Reader duplicates the approach of classroom programs, gradually extending the "word cluster" your eyes move through. The advantage of being on CD-ROM is that you can schedule your own sessions and chart your progress. The first time you take it, you may be dismayed at your reading and comprehension levels. I was only a moderately quick reader, with a comprehension level I would not want my debating opponents to be aware of. But the program trains you to use your vision better, to glance at larger blocks of thought on the page, while keeping a good grip on understanding.

Ultimate Speed Reader is a good, no-nonsense regimen that should be especially attractive to high school and college students, who need a quick boost of reading steam. You can test yourself using the on-disk textiles, which are timely and interesting -- the first stories are about Tiger Woods and the Vienna Philharmonic -- or you can import your own textfiles and work from them.

It works simultaneously to improve your eye movement and ability to remember what you read. In a single afternoon I was able to raise my skill from OK (400 words per minute) to quick (700 wpm) -- but nothing like the JFK standard, reading a book in the time it takes to shuffle a deck of cards. And my comprehension actually improved, from 62% to 75% -- isn't it galling to realize you forget nearly half of what the read the instant you read it?

Still, I have my doubts about the practice. For one thing, I found the process vaguely uncomfortable. Taking the tests, you have a real sense of being in a "reading race," either against your own personal best score or against the ghost of JFK. The competitive environment made me realize that even informational reading is still something I do as much for pleasure as for the data. In that sense speed reading is about as desirable as speed eating.

The analogy I come up with is mining. The individual reader is like a lone prospector, examining the contents of a pan for the occasional fleck of gold. Whereas speed reading reminds me of strip mining -- hose away an entire hill, pop the obvious nuggets into your pocket, and look out below.

The fact that we live in an information-driven, 250-megahertz age doesn't necessarily mean we have to ratchet up our personal processing speeds as well. True, a speed reader would read everything on the Web in only a million years, whereas an average reader would take three million years. But that's a lot of reading either way, especially when 95% of it is servo sludge -- the ubiquitous glop that the canny surfer saves more time avoiding than synopsizing.

In any event, the Web is not really about reading. Increasingly, material is offered in non-text form. And even when it is offered as text, it gets the USA Today treatment: articles that run 1500 words in a magazine are shortened to 500 words at most sites. Editors are doing our speed reading for us. Which is good, since the delays of switching from link to link quickly absorb whatever time savings you achieve through sped-up eye movement.

I realized, too, that this was what bothered me about my brother's headlong dash through Shakespeare, beside having the light on till midnight during a school night, and that infernal flipping sound. Speed reading is not the way to go when you have material that is supposed to be fun. Indeed, the wisdom of much of literature seems to be the opposite of Evelyn Wood's -- slow down, and think.

To visit Mike, bring your handwritten invitation to http://www.mfinley.com, and knock three times. Or write him directly at mfinley@mfinley.com.