How To Read A Book- A Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading - Mortimer J. Adler, Charles Van Doren [20]
That working definition, however, inevitably raises the question, What about speed reading? What is the relation between the levels of reading and the many speed reading courses, both academic and commercial, that are offered at the present day?
We have already suggested that such courses are basically remedial-that is, that they provide instruction mainly, if not exclusively, in reading on the elementary level. But more needs to be said.
Let it be understood at once that we are wholly in favor of the proposition that most people ought to be able to read faster than they do. Too often, there are things we have to read The Second Level of Reading: lnspectional Reading 39
that are not really worth spending a lot of time reading; if we cannot read them quickly, it will be a terrible waste of time.
It is true enough that many people read some things too slowly, and that they ought to read them faster. But many people also read some things too fast, and they ought to read those things more slowly. A good speed reading course should therefore teach you to read at many different speeds, not just one speed that is faster than anything you can manage now. It should enable you to vary your rate of reading in accordance with the nature and complexity of the material.
Our point is really very simple. Many books are hardly worth even skimming; some should be read quickly; and a few should be read at a rate, usually quite slow, that allows for complete comprehension. It is wasteful to read a book slowly that deserves only a fast reading; speed reading skills can help you solve that problem. But this is only one reading problem. The obstacles that stand in the way of comprehension of a difficult book are not ordinarily, and perhaps never primarily, physiological or psychological. They arise because the reader simply does not know what to do when approaching a difficult
-and rewarding-book. He does not know the rules of reading; he does not know how to marshal his intellectual resources for the task. No matter how quickly he reads, he will be no better off if, as is too often true, he does not know what he is looking for and does not know when he has found it.
With regard to rates of reading, then, the ideal is not merely to be able to read faster, but to be able to read at different speeds-and to know when the different speeds are appropriate. Inspectional reading is accomplished quickly, but that is not only because you read faster, although in fact you do; it is also because you read less of a book when you give it an inspectional reading, and because you read it in a different way, with different goals in mind. Analytical reading is ordinarily much slower than inspectional reading, but even when you are giving a book an analytical reading, you should not read all of it at the same rate of speed. Every book, no matter 40 HOW TO READ A BOOK
how difficult, contains interstitial material that can be and should be read quickly; and every good book also contains matter that is difficult and should be read very slowly.
Fixations and Regressions
Speed reading courses properly make much of the discovery-we have known it for half a century or more-that most people continue to sub-vocalize for years after they are first taught to read. Films of eye movements, furthermore, show that the eyes of young or untrained readers "fixate" as many as five or six times in the course of each line that is read. ( The eye is blind while it moves; it can only see when it stops. ) Thus single words or at the most two-word or three-word phrases are being read at a time, in jumps across the line. Even worse than that, the eyes of incompetent readers regress as often as once every two or three lines-that