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.
