What is more important, her major contributions: using a pacer to guide our eyes, chunking strategies, and the use of peripheral-vision in reading, are accepted internationally as "obvious", and not-subject-to-questioning.
1. "Was it all peaches-and-cream", she just announced her revolution and all the professionals in reading said, "Sure, she's right, hooray!"?" It sure seems that way in hind sight, but the reality was that 95% of colleges professors including the deans of the Teaching Schools, thought she was a fraud, out to grab as much loot as possible, and slide out of town before the tar-and-feathers. The head of Columbia University School of Education, Ruth Strang, told us that she would like to "cast-the-first-stone", or in the alternative, have *Evelyn Wood run out of town on the proverbial "rail". Educators did not react kindly to someone who told them in the kindest of tones, that they were directly responsible for kids and adults hating-to-read, and for the abysmally low test scores in reading by students in the U.S.
2. "Did Evelyn Wood present the evidence to prove her system was best?" Have you ever tried to offer logic and reason to a burning-fire? It's best to just do your thing and ignore the sarcasm and skepticism by people who have been "emotionally (amygdala) hijacked". We went directly to parents of kids in private schools, and they said, " Yes, help our kids to stop hating school." Next, we traveled to colleges and professional schools nationally, and got the students to sit for Evelyn's speed reading course because they just couldn't keep up with their class assignments. Many of them admitted studying till 3 AM, popping pills to stay awake, and were still on the verge of "dropping-out" because they just read too slowly for university level study. Thousands graduated from her Evelyn Wood reading program learning three-times faster, with the same comprehension or better. Students from Harvard, Yale, and Princeton, and fifty more of the most prestigious universities in the U. S. took money out of their own pockets to enjoy benefits their schools would not offer - reading three books, articles or reports in the time others could only hope to read and remember - a single one.
3. "What about adults?" We trained lawyers, doctors and engineers in Evelyn Wood's strategies at their own offices (in groups of 25), and soon had graduated thousands of professionals who were using speed reading in their practices. Sure, they were frightened about missing a "word", or even a comma in a contract, but it became evident that this was not SKIMMING, but detailed SCANNING, taking in each and every word like a computer.
4. "The keys to her success were in the details or in the advertising?" We covered the U.S. in newsprint and public relations; she inundated us with students after appearing on the Johnny Carson show, and we became the General Motors of private education. What delighted us was Evelyn Wood continued to research the sciences, first for evidence that her course was the "real-deal", even though the public was already convinced, and second, for improvements in how we read, concentration, comprehension, and long-term memory. She was always prepared to change her ideas if it would add to the student's ability to process-information better. She was not a "saint", just proud of being the best in the field.
5. "What did she add?" She learned from ophthalmologists how she could improve speed reading by training our peripheral vision; so she introduced "warm-up" exercises to excite our "soft-vision", and eliminate "tunnel-vision", reading one-word-at-a-time. That change added another 10% to how effectively our students ace their classes. Evelyn tested the recommendations of vision specialists who claimed "Overlining" was an improvement over her standard "Underlining". We tested the change and found it added 5% to the student's learning process, shorted their "learning- curve" because our retinas do best with exposures that enter as a SWEEPING ARC, and "overlining" fit the bill.
6. "I'm convinced that the program worked, was she personally successful?" Evelyn Wood was happily married to "Doug", a native of Salt Lake City, they had a daughter, Carol, who gave Evelyn four grandchildren. Yes, she did very well when the company was sold in 1967 to Famous Artists Schools, then a New York Stock Exchange company.
7. "And that was it? Well, tough-stuff happens, and Evelyn was incapacitated by a stroke in 1976, though she continued to work on remedial-reading for kids for years. Her husband Doug, passed on in 1987, and she moved to Tucson, Arizona. They had created a family business in 1958 that became international, London, Paris, Mexico City, and left an educational legacy that has never been surpassed in the niche of speed reading. The New York Times offered a major obituary, as did every major paper in the U.S. Here how it started, as written by Lawrence Van Gelder. "Evelyn Wood, whose search for a way to help troubled girls led to the development of speed reading techniques prescribed by Presidents and endorsed by multitudes, died on Saturday, in Hospice Family Care in Tucson, Arizona."
8. "What was Evelyn Wood's background?" She was born in Logan, Utah, received her bachelor's degree in 1929 and in 1958 her Master's at the University of Utah. She was a soft-spoken school teacher who started a reading revolution that continues today. She taught at Jordan High School in Utah, and was a guidance counselor to girls who were not only bad learners, and were failing, but were underachievers with serious "personality" difficulties. She created a special remedial reading program for them, and like a dumb tv show, they changed their stripes and became geniuses! Well not really, but they learned to love reading the Evelyn Wood way, and aced their classes, and became better "adjusted" too.
9. "Nice "soap-opera", but so what?" What Evelyn Wood learned from the girls was that the "faster" she got them to read, the more they remembered. Now that was weird when the entire U.S. education system believed and taught that comprehension improves only when you read S-L-O-W-L-Y, and one word at a time. She decided four things about learning: a) When the girls read VERTICALLY down the page, instead of linearly left-to-right, they had rock-hard concentration, better comprehension, and improved their long-term memory. Why? Because they were reading with a "context", and an "overview" of the text. b) The girls were reading "groups" of words at a time (with each eye fixation pause), and not how the world read - one multi-syllable word at a time. They were reading three words at a time. c) The class of personality-challenged girls was enjoying and remembering what they read and were not "regressing" like the average U.S. college graduate, twenty-times per page. They were speed reading and loving it. d) Lastly, they could read three times faster with improved comprehension not just in "baby-stuff" (Reader's Digest level of difficulty), but in non-fiction books and their texts.
10. "And she took those ideas and built her empire on it, right?" Not so faster, she went back to the University of Utah for more research, got her Master's in Speech, and her Dean asked her to teach SPEED READING to the college students. They called her class - Speech 21, no fancy titles. In all our dealings with Evelyn she was modest about her accomplishments. "My reading technique required a receptive mind, a student who wants to change, In fact the program is "auto-didactic", self-taught through practice or it is a bunch of junk. These techniques are actually "Comprehension by Accumulation", the faster they read the more they get "it". Speed is not most important, but only through speed do you get the high level of comprehension and long-term memory." She wrote a book called "Reading Skills" to help young students adopt her techniques, and the book was a commercial success, adopted by many U.S. school districts. It was her mentor at the university, Dr. C. Lowell Lees, who said, "Evelyn, get this speed reading out to the public, and you will be making yourself useful to the world."
11. "How fast did she read?" She perused text at 2,700 words per minute with 85% comprehension, and once she read something it was hers for life. She never took herself seriously or thought she was a celebrity - Evelyn Wood was always a school-teacher from Salt Lake City, and a life-long learner. The last time we spoke to her she asked if we had come up with an improvement over using the hand as a pacer. The SpeedLearning Institute, which has its seeds in the teaching of Evelyn Wood, is the home of the 20 minute hour, and the RASTER MASTER, a neon-helium laser PACER, that uses a hand-held tachistoscope in a pen form to have our "eyes-follow-a-moving object". It is the "beam" that is the advancement over the "hand", thanks to Evelyn Wood.
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