A Free Speed-Reading Machine! December 30, 1998March 25, 2012 So the whole deal about reading faster is to learn to read a whole line at a time, not word by word. The reading courses I used to take (they never helped) started me out with these little narrow width lines, and you were basically supposed to read DOWN, line after line. And then they’d give you wider lines. So you know what just occurred to me? YOU HAVE A SUPER-DUPER READING-TRAINING MACHINE on your desk right now. Just click the edge of this window and move the edge to narrow it and my column to look like this. And then once you’ve got this width pretty well mastered — moving your eyes DOWN the page — just make it a little wider and start reading at this width until you can go straight DOWN the page this wide … and then move the margin even more to the right and spend a week or two reading DOWN the screen this way, and then, when you think you really have it mastered, you can get to newspaper-column width — and beyond. Eventually — if the speed-reading crowd are right about this — you’ll be reading wider and wider widths, moving your eye DOWN the page instead of left to right, just as easily as, at first, you read those itty-bitty baby widths. There are tens of thousands of people who are living proof it works. I, meanwhile, am living proof it does not work for everyone. Wish it had. Oh, well. Nuts.