AN OBJECTIVE VIEW

John Murdoch, a bank executive, found that speed reading enabled him to read more for business and pleasure and taught him good study habits.

"I would say it was well worth learning it," Murdoch said, explaining that he could now read a professional magazine in an hour instead of a week, study effectively and has more time for his work and to read novels.

However, some of the people who take speed reading classes hoping speed reading will aid their studies find that it actually hurt their grades.

The cause of failure is usually that many companies teach you to go faster through the text, but the speed reading techniques don't allow you to pick up the fine details you need to comprehend and remember what you read.

Speed reading was first popularized in the late 1950s by Evelyn Wood, a schoolteacher in Salt Lake City who was inspired to begin offering classes after seeing one of her graduate school professors read through a paper at breathtaking speed. Her company, Evelyn Wood Reading Dynamics, was one of the most known speed reading organizations during its heydays in the 60s and 70s. Evelyn Wood died in 1995, at age 86.

But does speed reading work? Some experts say there is no one answer to the question: "Should I take a speed reading course?" They say that how much - if anything - one gains from the course depends almost as much upon one's expectations and personal needs as it does on the course content. They might not even need a commercial course.

For individuals with no basic skills deficiency, almost any technique that gives them practice in trying to read a little faster, if systematically applied over a period of time, will make them read faster and feel more comfortable doing it.

Most speed reading courses teach similar strategies to develop what is known as reading flexibility. This means that the reader can vary his reading rate and style to suit the complexity of the material, his purpose in reading it and his background knowl­edge of the subject.

A student may choose to read a bio­chemistry text slowly to study for an exam, but a biochemist might scan that same book quickly for some specific in­formation and comprehend just as much without reading all the words.

The first step for increasing flexibility is to preview all selections to get a feel for the author's style, main ideas and structure by reading subtitles, chapter headings, opening and closing para­graphs or chapters, and noting any illus­trations or graphs. Based on preview­ing, students set a purpose for reading. In some cases one needs only to skim or scan in order to grasp main concepts or locate specific facts. Most courses teach these techniques as well as simple note-taking methods to help students quickly recall what they have read.

Most courses feel that a student's speed is hampered by bad habits like re­gressing on the line, reading word by word and hearing the words in one's head, or sub-vocalizing.

Evelyn Wood Reading Dynamics In­stitute, for example, which popularized the hand-pacing technique, thus teaches students to set a steady reading rhythm and break their bad habits by following the hand across the page, first linearly left to right and later on in zigzag pat­terns. By the end of the course, a student can run his hand down the center of the page and supposedly take in a whole page of print at a time.

Questions of reading speed can be misleading. The average person reads about 250 to 300 words a minute. Some reading specialists contend that it is not possible to read beyond 600 or 800 words a minute with good comprehension, while some speed reading advocates say that one can read at rates soaring into the thousands.

A good speed read­ing course should teach students to slow their speeds when necessary, improve their organizational strategies and make active choices when reading. For example, skimming is often useful when reading through repetitious material on the same subject.

Experts caution that before taking a course, a client should be prepared to spend at least an hour daily practicing skills taught in class. Once a course is completed, the high reading rate should drop somewhat. A person should not ex­pect to retain the skills indefinitely, without continued disciplined practice.

A graduate student in anthropology, who declined to be identified, took the Evelyn Wood course right before college but stopped practicing and soon re­verted to her old reading style. "It takes a lot of practice. I'd have to set two or three hours aside every day and just practice those techniques," she said.