Almost anyone can benefit from a developmental reading course. For most people, unless they have taken a reading course, training in how to read ends with elementary school. This is unfortunate because as the student advances in school, textbooks become increasingly difficult, vocabulary more complex, and reading assignments longer. The student needs training in the vocabulary of each subject area, in recognizing the format and content of his various textbooks, in adjusting his reading rate for different purposes, and in recognizing different areas of comprehension such as author’s theme and purpose, inferences, humor, irony and other literary devices. Just learning to read words faster does not help develop these specific areas of reading.

You can learn to read faster by first learning something about the reading process and by then comparing your way of reading with the proper way of reading. Once you’ve done this, better and faster reading is just a matter of consistent practice.

Here are four areas of the reading process that will help you develop:

 

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   1. The visual process. Since the reading process needs the eyes, it is necessary to make certain that you have no visual problems. Sometimes very poor readers need eye muscle exercises to correct an imbalance of eye movement. If you have difficulty, consult your instructor or see an eye doctor for professional diagnosis. However, if you have no physical visual problems, your eyes work in the following way. As you move your eyes from left to right on a line of print, they make very short stops called fixations. Usually you make from three to five eye movements per second. You normally are unaware of these movements because these slight pauses or fixations are too quick. Sometimes your eyes regress, that is, your eyes move in reverse. While regression is not abnormal, too many regressions, especially if there is no need to read backwards on a line, will cause you to have a slower reading rate.
   
   
   
   

 
Eye movement photography shows that the average reader makes about four eye stops per second. Poor readers require more pauses; good readers require fewer.

 

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   2. Word knowledge and experience. A good vocabulary is necessary for fast reading. The longer it takes for you to recognize and interpret the definition of a word, the longer it will take you to apply it to the tot1 meaning of the phrase, sentence or paragraph you are reading. Often it is your vocabulary that determines your reading speed. If you have a good vocabulary in the social studies area, you will read material in the subject much faster than an area such as science, where you may have a weaker vocabulary. A very rapid reader responds to the meanings of words by their sight or contextual use rather than by their sound. A slow reader must see the words and think the sounds in his mind before the words have any meaning to him. One of the best ways to develop your reading power is to develop your vocabulary.
   
   
   
   

 

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   2. Establishing a purpose for reading. Having a predetermined purpose before actually beginning to read helps you control your speed and focuses your attention for more efficient comprehension. When you know why you are reading and what you want to learn from your reading, you can adjust your rate to fit your needs. Unfortunately too many readers have the idea that good comprehension is a result of trying to remember everything they read. They generally read everything, no matter what type of material, the same way — slowly and carefully. A good reader plans ahead. He attempts to establish a purpose or goal for reading. This he does in several ways, depending on the material. Sometimes he previews or looks over the material to be read to see how much he may know about the subject and then decides how carefully he may need to read. Sometimes he first reads the questions found in the text, if there are any, and then uses them as a guide. Sometimes he simply asks himself, “Why am I reading this material and what do I think I’ll need to remember?” In school, of course, purpose in reading is often determined by the instructor and his demands. But you must learn to establish a purpose for reading which helps you, whether it be reading in school or out.
   
   
   
   

 

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   2. Comprehension fundamentals. Just as you have more than one type of vocabulary (science, math, social studies), so you have more than one type of comprehension. There is a literal understanding which is basic to good recall of what you read. This type is used when you need to remember facts, dates, places, events, and main ideas presented. Then there is a critical understanding which is needed to judge what you read, to compare and contrast the main ideas being presented with what you know and feel about the subject. This type also requires that you recognize bias and propaganda and distinguish fact from opinion. Still another type of comprehension is aesthetic understanding or being able to appreciate the style and technique of an author, to recognize satire, irony, humor, and the author’s ability to stimulate the senses. It is important that you develop all levels of your comprehension powers if you want to read faster.
   
   
   
   

 
Reading Tastes and Habits

It seems to me possible to name four kinds of reading, each with a characteristic manner and purpose. The first is reading for information — reading to learn about a trade, or politics, or how to accomplish something. We read a newspaper this way, or most textbooks, or directions on how to assemble a bicycle. With most of this sort of material, the reader can learn to scan the page quickly, coming up with what he needs and ignoring what is irrelevant to him, like the rhythm of the sentence, or the play of metaphor. Courses in speed reading can help us read for this purpose, training the eye to jump quickly across the page. If we read Times with the attention we should give to a novel or a poem, we will have time for nothing else. Quick eye-reading is a necessity to anyone who wants to keep up with what’s happening, or learn much of what has happened in the past. The amount of reflection, which interrupts and slows down the reading, depends on the material.

But it is not the same activity as reading literature. There ought to be another word. If we read a work of literature properly, we read slowly, and we hear all the words. If our lips do not actually move, it’s only laziness. The muscles in our throats move, and come together when we see the word “squeeze.” We hear the sounds so accurately that if a syllable is missing in a line of poetry we hear the lack, though we may not know what we are lacking. In prose we accept the rhythms, and hear the sounds too. We also register a track of feeling through the metaphors and associations of words. Careless writing prevents this sort of attention, and becomes offensive. But the great writers reward this attention. Only by the full exercise of our powers to receive language can we absorb their intelligence and their imagination. This kind of reading goes through the ear — though the eye takes in the print, and decodes it into sound — to the throat and the understanding, and it can never be quick. It is slow and sensual, a deep pleasure that begins with touch and ends with the sort of comprehension that we associate with dream.

Too many intellectuals read in order to reduce images to abstractions. With a philosopher one reads slowly, as if it were literature, but much time must be spent with the eyes turned away from the pages, reflecting on the text. To read literature this way is to turn it into something else. I think that most literary intellectuals read this way, with the result that they miss literature completely, and concern themselves with a minor discipline called the history of ideas. I remember a course in Chaucer at my University in which the final exam required the identification of a hundred or more fragments of Chaucer, none as long as a line. If you liked poetry, and read Chaucer through a couple of times slowly, you found yourself knowing them all. If you were a literary intellectual, well-informed about this poem, you had a difficult time. To read literature is to be intimately involved with the words on the page, and never to think of them as the ideas which can be expressed in other terms. On the other hand, intellectual writing requires intellectual reading, which is slow because it is reflective and because the reader must pause to evaluate concepts.

But most of the reading which is praised for itself is neither literary nor intellectual. It is narcotic, taking away the pains in real life. This reading is the automated daydream, the mild trip of the housewife and the tired businessman, interested not in experience and feeling but in turning off the possibilities of experience and feeling. Great literature, if we read it well, opens us up to the world, and makes us more sensitive to it, as if we acquired eyes that could see through things and ears that could hear smaller sounds.

I think that everyone reads for narcosis occasionally, and perhaps most consistently in late adolescence. I remember reading to shut the world out, away at a school where I did not want to be. But after a while the books became a window on the world, and not a screen against it. This change doesn’t always happen. I think that late adolescent narcotic reading accounts for some of the badness of English departments. As a college student, the boy loves reading and majors in English because he would be reading anyway. Deciding on a career, he takes up English teaching for the same reason. Then in graduate school he is trained to be a scholar, which is painful and irrelevant, and finds he must write papers and publish them to be a professor — and at about this time he no longer requires reading for narcosis, and he is left with nothing but a Ph.D. and the prospect of fifty years of teaching literature; and he does not even like literature.

Narcotic reading survives the impact of television, because this type of reading has even less reality than TV plays, that is, the reader is in control: once the characters reach into the reader’s feelings, he is able to stop reading, or glance away, or have more of his own daydream. Literature is often valued precisely because of its distance from the reality. Some readers prefer looking into the text of a play to seeing it performed. Reading a play, it is possible to stage it oneself by an imaginative act but it is also possible to remove it from real people. Here is Virginia Woolf who was generous in her praise of the act of reading, talking about reading a play rather than seeing it: “Certainly there is a good deal to be said for reading Twelfth Night in the book if the book can be read in a garden, with no sound but the thud of an apple falling to the earth, or of the wind ruffling the branches of the trees.” She sets her own stage; the play is called Virginia Woolf Reads Twelfth Night in a Garden.