“Her decision was in perfect sync with the times,” writes Biederman. When she started taking her ideas on tour in 1959, with live demonstrations of her speed-reading method in action, Wood served as emcee for a cast of eager adolescents. Wood knew how to put on a show.ĭuring the ’40s, she wrote and directed several elaborate pageants in Salt Lake City’s Mormon Tabernacle, including one with special effects and a cast of thousands. The key to Reading Dynamics’ success wasn’t just its (supposed) effectiveness. That’s 68 pages, or 32,627 words, every minute. One satisfied customer claimed in a Reading Dynamics ad that he could now read Leo Tolstoy’s “War and Peace,” all 1,225 pages, in just 18 minutes. “I say, which would you rather do: eat a dish of rice kernel by kernel or take a spoonful to get a good taste?” “So many people are dubious about trying my method because they think they’re liable to miss a lot,” Wood once said in an interview. This activated what Wood called “peripheral vision,” where you take in chunks of text rather than individual words. All you needed was your finger, retrained to sweep down the middle of a page rather than left to right. Classes had been around since the 1930s, and by the ’50s devices like the Rate-O-Meter and Mahal Pacer were being marketed as speed-reading aids.īut Wood’s methods didn’t require fancy gear. Speed-reading was by no means new at the time. Despite no evidence, Wood’s claimed JFK was a student of hers. Wood became determined to unlock his secrets and put out a call for “preternaturally fast readers.” She spent the next few years working with a group that ranged from teenagers to housewives to a sheep herder and used her research to develop Reading Dynamics. “He knew the total content and was able to tell me not only what was in it, but also what was missing,” Wood once recalled. But in 1947, as a graduate student in speech therapy at the University of Utah, she stumbled upon “her life’s work,” writes Biederman.Īfter submitting an 80-page term paper to her professor, Wood watched in amazement as he read it all in under 10 minutes. A Texas newspaper warned at the time, “If you can’t read and understand 3,000 to 4,000 words a minute, you’re definitely ‘out’ of the New Frontier.”īut was the “New Frontier” everything it promised? Wood refused all scientific scrutiny, believing that the testimonials of her satisfied customers counted as “subjective evidence.”īiederman suggests that the way Wood peddled speed-reading was “eerily similar to themes in the Broadway show ‘The Music Man,’ ” where a traveling con man convinced parents that “their children can learn to play an instrument by ‘thinking’ the notes.”Īccording to Biederman, Wood was making the same smoke-and-mirrors sales pitch.īorn and raised in Logan, Utah, Wood at first seemed destined for a modest life as the wife of a Mormon missionary. Her speed-reading revolution is remembered for converting three presidents - Kennedy, Nixon and Carter - and wowing everyone from Steve Allen to Burt Lancaster to Johnny Carson.īy 1961, Reading Dynamics classes - priced at around $150 for 30 class hours - were offered in 56 cities and brought in annual revenues of over $2.5 million. This isn’t the story that’s usually told of Evelyn Wood, once dubbed “the most famous reading teacher in the world” during the ’60s and ’70s. Wood declined and according to a letter written by a graduate student in attendance, Spache responded with “snide remarks” and “suggested quite openly that she was obviously afraid to let them test the boys.” “Spache clearly intended to photograph her demonstrators’ eye movements as they read and test them on comprehension.” Evelyn Wood Denver Post via Getty Images “He pointed to an adjoining room where a device used to test eye movements was set up,” Marcia Biederman writes in her new biography, “ Scan Artist: How Evelyn Wood Convinced the World That Speed-Reading Worked” (Chicago Review Press), out now. In front of an audience of 200, Spache demanded proof. But in December 1961, during a demonstration with two of her prize students at a reading conference in Fort Worth, Texas, she was ambushed by George Spache, a professor at the University of Florida and director of the university’s reading clinic. Wood had grown accustomed to unquestioning praise. “A Woodman,” Time wrote, “can mop up ‘Dr. The media gushed, with Time magazine even nicknaming her followers in 1960 “Woodmen.” It had captured the nation’s imagination since 1958, when Wood launched the first of her speed-reading institutes in Washington, DC. Her method, which she called “Reading Dynamics,” could purportedly help anybody read thousands of words per minute. The last thing Evelyn Wood, the matriarch of speed-reading, expected in 1961 was for somebody to call her a fraud.
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