The Right to Read Rapidly

by WILLIAM PERRY, JR., and CHARLES P. WHITLOCK

1

AND,” read Sammy, carefully forming each word after the manner teachers seemed to approve, “. . . and the big wolf was disdis—g—runt-ld.”

“The big gray wolf, Sammy.”

“The big gray wolf. What does—”

“Very good, Sammy, you only made one mistake on the whole page this time. And now, Margaret — ”

“But what does—”

“No questions now, Sammy, we have to go on. I want everybody to read one page today. Now, Margaret—

Perhaps your school days were old-fashioned enough for you to recognize this scene. Of course no modern teacher would let this happen except on her “bad days.” In any case we shall return to Sammy, hoping he will be somehow familiar.

What we want to talk about is the business ol reading faster. We shall not be talking about “remedial” reading, the treatment of severe reading disabilities, but about what the specialists now call “developmental” reading — the training of normally slow-to-moderate readers, such as you may feel yourself to be, in more advanced reading skill.

Nearly everyone is impatient with his reading rate. Our own impatience has given us a special interest in the field, and it is one of our diversions to teach a short course in the art of rapid reading to college students, with the dubious reward of seeing many of them outperform us on standard reading tests.

The demand for this kind of training is astonishing, not only in college, where even professors apply, but at the executive level in government bureaus, in industry, and in the armed services. You have probably read about these courses in “speed reading” and about the ingenious mechanical devices employed — the Rapid-o-Readers, the Flash-o-Scopes (we hope there are no such names), and our own Harvard Reading Films. Perhaps you hope some day to take such a course.

Some of these courses are modest, considered, and helpful. Others are neither modest nor considered; that even these seem often to be helpful should suggest much of interest about reading skills.

Let us examine one of the less considered. “The Ortho-Visual and Speed-Reading Institute” offers to train you out of your pedestrian ways (with due regard for comprehension) and the program is plausible in its simplicity. Everyone knows nowadays that a readers eye does not sweep across a line but jerks across in little stops, and that the seeing is done in the stops, which take time. The Institute’s machines, however, will train you to see more words at a glance, will broaden your “span” so that you may make fewer stops (as good readers do) and so increase your speed. The machines will also train you out of that awful habit of “regressing,” of looking back constantly at things you missed.

All this is sound in its way, and based on respectable studies of what good and poor readers actually do with their eyes. Furthermore, if you take the course you will be pleased at your improvement in seeing more letters and numbers at each flash of the machine, and you will probably improve your reading.

But if we should lest you before you take this course, you would find that when looking at ordinary meaningful phrases, you can already see three or four words at a time in a flash of one fiftieth of a second. This means that, with time allowed for movement from stop to stop, your eyes are already equipped to read at between 8000 and 10,000 words per minute. Even if we cut these figures in half, as an easy concession to plausibility, we can still ask you to explain why you are not reading this article at over 1000 words per minute, It is not your eyes that are holding you back. The chances are that you are not reading above 350 words per minute. Perhaps we should change the subject. Up until now we have been talking about reading as if it went on between the eye and the paper, and everyone could be enthusiastic about improving it. Now our attention is reaching back of the eyeball, and you are embarrassed, and we are embarrassed.

At this point there is no use pretending to be technical. When we get back of the eyeball in reading, the scientists present us with many intriguing problems and no answers. “Seeing,”"perceiving,” “comprehending,”"learning,”are words which apple to some continuous neural process at which we can only wonder. No one knows how meaning is constructed; no one even knows why some fast readers report that they can gather meaning directly from “seeing" the words while most of the rest of us feel that we have to “say" or “hear” the words to comprehend them. Nor do the scientists know anything about the neural determinants of mental speed. Perhaps the modern layman has been too ready to credit the scientific reading expert with knowing what he was talking about.

The nature of “comprehension" is of course the heart of the problem. The instructor in a speedreading course recently reported, in a solemn statistical paper, the extraordinary gains among his pupils. One prize student, call him Mr. Brown, was reported to have improved from 150 words per minute to 1500 words per minute in three weeks, with 80 per cent comprehension. We searched for the material Mr. Brown had read on his tests. This was omitted from the brochure— perhaps for lack of space. The report did, however, include the questions on which Mr. Brown’s comprehension score had been based, together with a key to the correct answers. We found that we too could score 80 per cent on these questions, without having read the test material at all. We have learned how most multiple-choice questions are made; so, apparently, has Mr. Brown.

We feel that Mr. Brown learned something much more important than this, and we shall return to it. We wish first to face some vital issues raised by this apparently disreputable incident.

Evidently “comprehension" in this case was what the testmaker thought it was when he made up the questions. The point we wish to make is that this is always so. It is so whether someone else is testing you or whether you are judging for yourself “what you got out of" reading something. What, “comprehension" is, then, depends on the assumptions you make about the value of reading something at all. How shall we test your comprehension of the Gettysburg Address? Shall we ask you for the meaning of the word “dedicated”? Shall we ask you to state the “main idea” in “your own" words? Or shall we measure your pulse rate?

You will object that there must surely be respectable tests of just plain reading. Possibly, and yet in the best of them, “comprehension” is defined by the questions the tester chooses to ask. A useful reading test is supposed to distinguish “good” readers from “poor" readers, but we wager that we could construct an alternate set of questions, demonstrably accurate, which the “good” readers on the original test would answer incorrectly and the “poor" readers correctly. For example, Sammy in our opening paragraphs received a lesson in reading such that if he were asked to fill in the blank in 1 he sentence “The wolf was-” he would answer “gray,”whereas a “good” reader might answer “disgruntled.”

We are not saying that there are no standards. Though it is possible that Sammy’s book might be read for the purpose of finding out the color of the wolf, most educated people would probably agree that for ordinary reading purposes it would be more important to know that the wolf was disgruntled. And despite a wide disagreement about what constitutes “comprehension” of a book like Moby Dick, educated men can probably agree about the meaning of most expository prose. This leads inevitably to the question: “Are testmakers educated?” That many of. them are is no reason for relaxing a skeptical vigilance, for the educated man is now being defined by the tests, and soon education will appear in the tester’s own image, just as “intelligence” does now.

We are saying that your reading habits tend to form around the image of what you expect to do with what you read—or that more likely they formed long ago around the image of what you felt you were expected to do. Unfortunately, once a habit is formed, let us say at Sammy’s age, it tends to persist as a kind of assumption about one’s relation to the printed page, instead of giving way to new methods for new purposes.

Now, if “comprehension” of, say, the Bible is defined differently, according to one’s purposes, in a Sunday School, in a history course, in a literary discussion, in a religious crisis, or in an idle evening, what shall be said of reading “rate"? Obviously, the best of readers would vary his rate in these different contexts — possibly quite radically. In fact, this would be one of his distinguishing qualities as a good reader. In other words, “rate” cannot be reliably described, much less evaluated, in words-per-minute. The only real question is, “How rapidly are you getting what you want?” It is pretty hard to phrase an answer to this one, even when you know what you want.

We suspect that when many people complain about their rate, they mean that they usually spend more time with a book than the results are worth to them, or that they suspect that they are quite capable of getting the same results in half the time. Of course full capacity itself varies from person to person, and those of us whose best reading is less rapid than some others’ best have reason for envy. But even the “lightning” reader cannot read all he “ought” to read, and even he must select and worry.

If both rate and comprehension are so relative to person, purpose, and materials, then a poet reading a poem, a chemist reading a professional paper, and a housewife reading a detective story are all quite properly engaged in radically different pursuits. In fact, you may have begun to wonder what is meant by the word “reading.”Here you are in excellent company. Listen to Dr. Arthur E. Traxler, of the Educational Records Bureau, an expert among experts: “Specialists in the reading field think of ‘reading’ as anything from a set of more or less mechanical habits to something akin to the ’thinking’ process itself. No one has yet been able to identify the components of reading comprehension. . . . Without a knowledge of these factors our tests of reading skill are mere shots in the dark.” Now if the tests are shots in the dark, what about the “improvement” which is popularly demonstrated by them?

2

IF we have succeeded in sharing with you our confusion on these technical problems, perhaps you will be willing to return with us to Sammy. There is something of Sammy in most of us. We picture him as a small child, bright and inquisitive. His parents had striven successfully to imbue him with the feeling that he was a “good” boy, and he had somehow deduced in the process that this was the only safe kind of boy to be. This notion, however, very quickly ran into conflict with his curiosity. His “whys” and “whats” irritated his elders, who sometimes even startled him by saying sharply, “Now stop it, Sammy, and don’t ask questions about things like that.” It was very clear that a good boy did not “find out,” that he should wait until he was told.

When he went to school his teacher clinched this conviction by saying, “Now Sammy, if you’ll just wait quietly I’ll explain everything.” When he learned to read he found that books were written by parenty-teachers who told one things. And we have seen him learning the golden rule of “good boy” reading: “Never skip any words and don’t ask questions.”

Sammy was intelligent . As he went on in school he perceived another principle. He saw, without ever having to put it into words, that more moral value was put on whether reading was “done” than upon its outcome. He saw that diligent readers were never scolded even when they didn’t know the answers, whereas Aleck, who always seemed to know the answers without having “done the reading,” was constantly scolded for not making the best use of his talents. Reading was clearly not a means to an end but a problem of conscience.

Now, since “good” reading required an obedient respect for the dictates of teachers and print, there was no place for his assertive and analytical impulses to go except into sports and gasoline engines. He was therefore much troubled by difficulties of concentration when reading anything but comics. He bewildered himself by periods of academic “laziness.” Indeed, he had lo drive himself to get through increasingly long assignments, and near his hist year of school was discovered to be a “slow reader” with “short eye span.”This was less of a surprise than a relief to him, because it explained so much.

We shall not pause to describe Sammy’s eye movements. They are, of course, restricted by his assumptions about reading. He therefore cannot directly change them. When he tries to speed up, he becomes terrified of “missing something.” Sammy feels that if he looks carefully at every word and misses the whole meaning he is somehow not to blame, but if he should miss some small thing by brazenly skipping it, the burden of responsibility would be overwhelming. He sometimes tries to read fast, and confirms his worst fears; since he is thinking of reading fast, not of getting meaning fast, he does in fact miss the meaning entirely.

When he then returns to looking at every word, to “absorbing” and “being told” rather than finding out, the slow drudgery challenges less than one half of his very good mind, and there is nothing for the other half to do but to go woolgathering. Of course it soon picks up a charming piece of wool and entices the first half into joining the fun. The sudden realization that he has “read” two whole pages without any comprehension at all is an experience common to the Sammy in each one of us.

There are other kinds of slowish readers besides Sammy; at another extreme the arguer, who battles every word and statement. He labors in the fear that through merely understanding the author’s views he may involve himself unaware in some modification of his own. Perhaps he is fighting some long lost battle of early school years when one is not only required to learn something but is under constraint to believe it. Beyond these tendencies there are also more dramatic “disabilities” and “blocks,” but this article is not about them. In our experience it is Sammy who is ubiquitous, with his assumption that Knowledge is to be passively absorbed, not found out and mastered. For him to judge, to select, and to discard (in short, to think) is to contend impiously with the gods of the printed Word — to “cut and slash" in a way which makes him feel exceedingly uncomfortable. As one sludent put it, “I wish I could read fast without feeling nasty — or — I mean nervous.”

But even the “great ” books are not gods; they are tools. Often they are dull tools. Certainly they can never be any sharper than the wits with which we use them. Authors are often dry and discoursive; they cannot see our nod of recognition, or catch the signs that would tell them we have guessed the direction of their argument. Instead they must go boorishly on with their monologue, justifying a point we are willing to concede, as no civilized man would do in conversation. If we could remember this, perhaps the Sammy in us would take heart.

Yet to read well we need not bolster our nerve. In bold reading a legitimate contempt is more discriminating than a false courage. What we need is not patience, either, but impatience the impatience that forces us to consider what we are reading for and to read for it. Only in impatience with wasted time will we invest the initial effort to establish the center of energy in our own heads rather than leave it somewhere in the book with the hope that the author will somehow be “stimulating.” Interest in most informational reading is born from our own commitment to our purpose, and it is a rare author whose art we can rely on to tease us from page to page. Concentration is not achieved by nobly renouncing a tendency to think of other things, by “keeping thoughts out ”; it is a by-produet of having a goal that challenges the whole mind. If our goal be knowledge, it is good to remember that knowledge is ours only when we can think it for ourselves, not when we have merely “understood" while someone else thought it. Knowledge is not something we absorb; it is something we do.

3

THE job, then, is to help Sammy change his mind so that he may change his ways. This is usually quite feasible. One can do it for oneself, once one gets the idea, or one can get some concentrated practice in a good reading course.

The advantage of a good course is not that it does the job for you, which it cannot, but only that it presents useful materials and those constant checks which assist in the growth of confidence. Such a course focuses not on the reading of good literature, which is a separate problem, but on general informational reading. It provides exercises in analysis and opportunities for radical self-assertion — binges of skimming, gambles in guessing whole paragraphs from their opening words, and scandalous revelations of the long-winded hypocrisy of most conventional prose. Probably the course will offer enough really difficult passages to reassure you that you are not being led down a primrose path.

Our students often rise in wrath midway through our course and accuse us. One cried, “I see what you’re doing! You’re trying to get us to think while we read! But suppose we think something the author doesn’t think, or something the teacher doesn’t think. What will happen to us then?”

Unfortunately there is much reason in this extraordinary wail. A college professor, like any human being, has his bias, and a wise student respects it. Even in the most liberal colleges a few still reject the slightest deviation from the wording of the book. The student’s error lay not so much in his cynicism, which was not our business at the moment, but in his assumption that mastering an author’s reasoning demanded a total suspension of his own. What he had to learn was that only by direct comparison with his own reasoning, prejudices, or guesswork could he perceive what the author was saying at all.

We almost forgot: the course may also include practice with machines. We seem to be in a poor way, after all this talk, to justify the use of machines. They would seem only to confirm Sammy in his delusion that reading goes on “out there,” and that he is simply to follow along, or that if he could only get the right eye-movements. . . . But this distortion need follow only if the teacher is himself deluded, or is so insecure that he sets the machine in the center of his course. In its proper place a really good reading gadget can be very useful, especially those which stretch the pace of the reader on regular consecutive reading and then let him discover by a rigorous check that he can do better than he had thought. Such games as this can be great fun and a useful antidote to the tradition that good reading, like all good things, can be learned only in pain.

The best of these devices may also provide some training in the more mechanical processes of reading. Once Sammy is liberated at heart, they may help him work up undeveloped skills in visual selection and in the coördination of eye and brain. We have said only that to start with such training is as useless as to suggest to someone who labors under the necessity of touching every picket in a picket fence that he let one touch stand for three.

We have talked so much about selection and skipping that we must face up to the charge of recommending superficiality. We are really against it. But we do not believe it can be avoided by Sammy’s efforts at thoroughness. Instead we believe the gains reported for “Mr. Brown” are the first essential step out of the quagmire of Sammy’s own superficiality. We like to think of Mr. Brown with his tongue in his check and a conviction of having got his money’s worth. We tell our students about him at the outset of our course, and as they laugh we ask them to stop and consider. May he not have discovered the foundation of all reading skill: the confidence to dismiss the trivial? The questions used in the tests of his reading suggest that the material itself was not worth reading, just as the questions were not worth answering. Let us concede that Mr. Brown was getting nothing whatever out of such reading whether he read slowly or fast. His gains were therefore great. He learned how to get nothing out of such reading in one-tenth the time it previously took him to get nothing out of it.

The capacity to get nothing out of useless material without exhausting one’s time and attentive energy in the process is a prerequisite, in these days, to the attentive and energetic comprehension of passages which really matter. It takes a bit of practice for Sammy to develop this capacity, which includes the capacity to determine which passage is which. Selection is fundamental to thoroughness, and selection requires some fast and independent thinking.

For students who have attained this capacity we hope some day to develop an advanced course in rapid reading (measured in important ideas per hour) in which we tackle only a single paragraph per day. At present we refer such students to Professor I. A. Richards’ book How to Read a Page. Of course the understanding of great literature is still another problem, and for this we refer our students to life, to books, and to their courses in literary criticism.

We have not meant to imply that all reading must be energetic. Surely there is a value in lolling, in immersing, and in reverie. Much of what we learn from a good book happens we know not how. Yet when we select our companions for lolling, there is still reason for standards and room for indignation.

This brings us to end with a heartening anecdote. We find it heartening, and feel it sums up what we have tried to say. Perhaps it shows that schools are better than they were, or perhaps simply that whatever problems its young heroine may meet in later life they will not be those of reading comprehension. If it says more, it must speak for itself.

We were once called upon to advise a parentteacher association of an up-and-coming school on the matter of training good readers for college. We emphasized the skills of judgment and selection, and argued that one must give students not just preselected good books but also bad books so that they may have something to discard. We knew this was quixotic advice, practicable only in the last year of school if at all, for it is hard enough to keep children supplied with one book on a subject, to say nothing of six. But the school was way ahead of us, as so many schools are way ahead of experts. We received shortly a letter from the principal. It ran like this: —

DEAR SIRS:
We were glad to have you make the points you made before the association. We have been trying to persuade our parent group of these matters for years and it is very helpful to receive support from outside.
We think you may value an account of an incident which occurred since your visit. The fourth-graders happened to be studying the ancient Hebrew civilization, using the Old Testament as source material. In keeping with the principles you so ably described, the teacher also supplied other books, among them some of those watered-down children’s rewrites of the Bible stories. One nine-year-old girl, who seems to have read her Old Testament stories understandingly, perused one of these books and promptly requested to be given back the Bible. The teacher inquired into the pupil’s reasons.
“Well,”said the girl indignantly, “this book is no good. It says here that Delilah was Samson’s wife, and Delilah was not Samson’s wife, she was just his very good friend.”