‘War and Peace’ in 15 Minutes? : Speed-Reading Cuts Time, and Comprehension

Back in the ‘60s, when speed-reading was the rage, comedian Woody Allen quipped: “I read ‘War and Peace’ in 15 minutes. It’s about Russia.”

That is overdrawn, but speed-readers do not comprehend more than the gist of a text unless it deals with familiar subjects, two researchers say.

“You don’t want your lawyer speed-reading,” said Marcel Just, a psychology professor at Pittsburgh’s Carnegie-Mellon University.

Speed-reading has its uses and “we don’t mean to debunk speed-reading,” Just said. “But some claims are not accurate.

“One hears, almost anecdotally, about people reading 2,000 words a minute or something fantastic like 10,000 words a minute. Yet, there’s seldom, perhaps never, a test of comprehension,” he said.

Some people do read fast--even really, really fast--to race through mounds of material, but there is nothing magical or supernatural about that, Just said.

‘Demystified’ by Analysis

“Many intellectual feats are like that,” he noted, citing championship chess as an example. Although they are still very impressive, “it’s when you analyze them that they get demystified.”

By monitoring eye movement with a computerized tracker, Just and Patricia Carpenter, his research partner and wife, have found that speed-readers pick out about every third word regardless of size or importance.

The result, they say, is a “grab bag” of information and a vague understanding, but within its limitations there is a time and place for speed-reading, depending on the reader’s purpose and material, the psychologists said.

The couple’s speed-reading study is one of the first of its kind dealing with that skill. It is reported in their new textbook, “The Psychology of Reading and Language Comprehension.”

Speed-reading was popularized through Evelyn Wood, a former Utah schoolteacher who opened her first Reading Dynamics Institute in 1959.

Groups of Words

She taught readers to guide their eyes down a page with a rhythmic hand movement and to take in groups of words at a time. She cautioned readers against “saying” the words in their heads, a habit that she said slowed them down.

“A person who speed-reads and does it correctly can read with better comprehension. I’m sure of it,” said Wood, now 78.

“We’ve had too many hundreds of thousands of people who could do it.”

Since 1959, more than 2 million people have passed through the Evelyn Wood Reading Dynamics program, now owned and operated by American Learning Corp., a subsidiary of Encyclopaedia Britannica Inc. The roll included the staff of former President John F. Kennedy and former President Jimmy Carter and his family.

In addition, 46 major U.S. corporations, such as IBM and General Motors, have offered the course for employees, said Claire Carlyle, director of speed-reading for American Learning Corp.

‘Clear the Paper Work’

“The average person who takes this course is usually a professional looking to improve his reading skills to try to clear the paper work off his desk or get through journals quicker,” Carlyle said.

Although still popular, speed-reading no longer attracts as much attention from educators as it did during the 1960s and 1970s, said Alan Farstrup, director of research and development for the International Reading Assn.

As to speed-reading, he said, “It allows you to plow through the material and find those places where you really need to read with care. You just have to be realistic about what it does for you.”

Long intrigued by the mental processes of reading and why some people are better readers than others, Just and Carpenter decided to study speed-reading when a subject in one of their adult reading tests proved to be an extraordinarily rapid reader.

Their opportunity came in late 1979, when an Evelyn Wood course was offered at Carnegie-Mellon.

11 in Experiment

Of the students and university staff members enrolled in the seven-week program, 11 agreed to take part in the professors’ experiment. Three were tested before and after the course, whereas others were studied immediately afterward.

“We studied people as they stepped out of the course,” as opposed to those with years of practice, Just said.

Just, Carpenter and research associate Michael Masson compared the 11 speed-readers, who clocked in at about 700 words a minute, to 25 university-affiliated people who had never studied speed-reading. Half the untrained readers were asked to read at a normal rate, or about 200 to 250 words a minute. The other half, instructed to skim, zipped along at about 600 words a minute.

The 36 subjects were given relatively easy excerpts from Reader’s Digest on familiar topics, such as the adventures of a 19th-Century American frontiersman, as well as technical articles from Scientific American.

Video Monitor Used

The texts, 1,500 to 2,000 words each, were presented on a video monitor. One by one, day by day for several weeks, the subjects read the articles as instructed, using a long pointer to pace themselves while moving through the text.

The computer recorded the duration of the readers’ gaze on each word, indicating exactly what was being looked at and what was being missed.

Just and Carpenter found that the normal readers looked at 64% of the words, contrasted with 33% for the Evelyn Wood students and 40% for the untrained skimmers.

In addition, the normal readers spent an average 330 milliseconds on each word, or about a third of a second, contrasted with 233 milliseconds for the Evelyn Wood students and 221 milliseconds for the untrained skimmers, the researchers said.

The researchers regularly questioned the subjects to test comprehension and asked them to summarize what they had read. In nearly every case the normal readers fared much better than their quicker counterparts. The three readers studied before and after the Evelyn Wood course comprehended more when they proceeded at a normal rate.

Main Ideas

Unsurprisingly, all readers comprehended more from Reader’s Digest than from Scientific American. They also responded more accurately to questions about main ideas rather than details.

The Evelyn Wood students were better at grasping simple, familiar passages than the untrained rapid readers, such as the Reader’s Digest text dealing with an Indian attack on a group of fur traders.

There was no evidence that the speed-readers forgot any more, or any less, than the untrained rapid readers.