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Mt. Holz Science Fiction Society
Club Notice - 03/24/00 -- Vol. 18, No. 39
Chair/Librarian: Mark Leeper, 732-817-5619, mleeper@lucent.com
Factotum: Evelyn Leeper, 732-332-6218, eleeper@lucent.com
Distinguished Heinlein Apologist: Rob Mitchell, robmitchell@lucent.com
HO Chair Emeritus: John Jetzt, jetzt@lucent.com
HO Librarian Emeritus: Nick Sauer, njs@lucent.com
Back issues at http://www.geocities.com/evelynleeper
All material copyright by author unless otherwise noted.
The Science Fiction Association of Bergen County meets on the
second Saturday of every month in Upper Saddle River; call
201-447-3652 for details. The Denver Area Science Fiction
Association meets 7:30 PM on the third Saturday of every month at
Southwest State Bank, 1380 S. Federal Blvd.
===================================================================
1. I am really behind in some of my reading so I took about a half
an hour last night and quadrupled my reading speed. Oddly enough
what I was doing was really giving myself permission to read at a
much faster rate than I usually do. I am a semi-graduate of the
Evelyn Wood speed reading course. I say semi-graduate because I
never really took the course. What I took was not *the* speed-
reading course but *a* speed-reading course that borrowed many of
its ideas from the Evelyn Wood course. That sped up my reading
rate considerably. It slowed down again on its own. That's the
problem. Once you know how to speed read, you forget you know how.
Then I bought a copy of the book known either as REMEMBER
EVERYTHING YOU READ! or THE EVELYN WOOD SEVEN-DAY SPEED READING AND
LEARNING PROGRAM by Stanley Frank. I use this book as a refresher
course whenever I think I need it. Well I don't really read the
book, I read the first couple of chapters, I get excited about the
concept of speed reading and I give myself permission to speed read
again.
Curiously, that is 90% of what the Evelyn Wood course is all about.
And there is only one speed reading system. The heart of speed
reading is to skim the material and to concentrate. The Wood
system is to use your hand to pace yourself, to keep up your
skimming rate, and to think about what you are reading. That is
really what is there in the course. Oh, you may learn to use your
hand to pace yourself down the page to make sure you keep the pace
up. Your hand does not have the patience your eye does. From your
eye it is just a local call to your brain and it is too easy to
decide you didn't get something and should go back and reread. I
know it sounds nutty, but that is true. You are less likely to go
back and reread if you pace with your hand. But that is just
trimming. You could use a card or a beam of light or just about
anything to pace your reading. You would think that if you did not
understand something, you should go back, but experts claim what
was chop suey the first time through will be no better than chow
mein the second time around.
At least in the Wood company's myth it was Evelyn Wood who
discovered that if one really concentrates one can get as much from
a skimming as one would get from a less dedicated traditional
reading. In the myth she had thrown a copy of GREEN MANSIONS into
dirt because she was frustrated at her reading speed. Then she
rescued the book and started again. Brushing the dirt out of the
book and skimming as she went, she discovered she was still getting
the story but at a much higher rate. She had given herself
permission to skim and to compensate for it by concentrating.
Now being fair there is a little more than that too what is taught,
but a lot of it is just going deeper into the same theme. After
all, if the course were just two sentences nobody would pay for it
and the value of those two sentences would rarely be taught and in
the end would be overlooked. Where the real cleverness in the
Evelyn Wood course comes is in how they turn that technique into a
class of some length. That means people are willing to pay for it
and value it. So in the course you learn different paths that your
hand can take down a page and you build your peripheral vision up.
You practice seeing a bunch of words not necessarily in
chronological order and unscrambling them to figure what the
sentence must say. Most difficult of all you practice paying
attention to and remembering what you are reading. This is where
most people have problems. It is the basis of Woody Allen's
comment that with Evelyn Wood he was able to read all of WAR AND
PEACE in 55 minutes. He concludes, "It's about Russia."
Even the Wood people admit that there are limits to their own
system. If you try to read humor you will miss the joke. If you
try to read a physics explanation or a mathematical proof it will
make no sense without careful consideration. Do not read the fine
print on contracts at lightning fast speed. Even mysteries require
a little closer reading if you are trying to outguess the
detective. But if we are talking about most day-to-day reading, it
probably really is true that most of us do it at a slower rate than
we need to. Oddly non-fiction can often be read faster than
fiction because it is not so interconnected. This is particularly
true if it is reading for enjoyment or just personal edification.
But if you are reading a novel by someone like Dean R. Koontz that
you are not going to be tested on, it can be more enjoyable and
cinematic at higher speed. On the other hand, if you are reading
it for escape, maybe you want to make it last longer.
But the remarkable thing is that the biggest obstacle to overcome
in speed reading is your own belief that you are not a speed
reader. Once you get over that you can read much faster. Look, I
have nothing to gain by telling you this. I am usually a cynic in
these columns. I am mostly telling you this because I think that
most people can teach themselves to speed read without hiring a
charlatan to teach the basics. [-mrl]
Mark Leeper
HO 1K-644 732-817-5619
mleeper@lucent.com
Give a man a fish and you have fed him for a
day. Teach him how to fish and you have fed him
for life. Give a fish a vote and he will say to
give the man just the one fish, preferably one
that is already dead.
-- Mark Leeper
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