Speed

Chad the Elder from Fraters Libertas wants to be able to read more - or, to be fully accurate, to be able to read more in the limited time he has for reading:

These days (actually for some time now) there seems to be so much that I want to read and so little time to do it. I'm always reading at least one book (usually two or three) but I never make much of a dent in my "to be read" backlog, to say nothing of my wish list of books waiting to be acquired. Throw in magazines and the Internet and my scarce time for reading is swamped with potential material. Unless there's a nuclear holocaust tomorrow and I'm the last man on earth suddenly blessed with all the time I need for reading (reason #156 that I'm glad I had that laser eye surgery ), I will never come anywhere near close to catching up.

I feel his pain. Crazy job, blog, radio show, a couple of kids - it's no accident that all the books I'm actually reading are in the bathroom.

Elder's solution? Learn speed reading (about which he asks for information in his post).

I have an approach. Maybe I should market it.

It was May of 1985, the Wednesday of the last week of the last semester of my senior year of college. It was also finals week.

I had pretty much all my work done - with the exception of one last paper for my American Literature class. Not a big deal - a seven page paper on "Big Two-Hearted River" by Hemingway. It was Wednesday, graduation was Saturday - I figured I had some time yet - until Friday. I had not, of course, started reading.

It was 1PM. I went in to take my American Lit final. The professor - who also happened to be my major advisor - asked me "So, do you have that paper done?"

"Er, almost", I responded, waiting for him to tell me that I'd better have it in by Friday.

"Well, you need to get it to me. Senior grades are due at 7PM tonight.

[ SCREEEEEEEEEEEEEEEECH ]

"Um, sure. It'll be in later this afternoon".

"OK. Don't miss it..."

No kidding, I thought.

I dashed through the final - which was mostly non-trival essay questions - in near record time, an hour, and then dashed over to my dorm room on the way to the college's computer lab. This was in the days before ubiquitous personal computers; I did most of my term papers on a UNIX terminal which printed to a daisy-wheel printer (using "Roff", an dot-inset text formatting program; if you learned computers any time after 1987, you have no idea what I'm talking about). I sat down, and opened the book.

I had five hours to read the story and write seven coherent pages for the final class in my major.

So I taught myself speed reading, on the fly. I started flipping through the book, looking for parts that looked like they were important, taking notes on the fly. I allotted a fairly absurd, short time for this process; an hour, I think.

But somehow as I continued, my notes began to resemble an interesting story, something I could sink my paper-writing teeth into.

Then I turned to writing. I typed like mad, working from three bullet points that I'd discerned while "speed reading" through the key points of the story (as I saw them as I sprinted by), composing in my head as I typed, silently thanking G-d that I'd taken typing in high school, and that I'd done as much news writing as I had and developed the capacity to compose on the fly.

Long story short; I had eight pages done, edited, re-written, and spell-checked (the system did have that, at least) by 5:45PM. Then I spent half an hour wrestling with the balky daisy-wheel printer and the funky formatting that Roff turned out - followed by a mad sprint to my professor's office, where it was on his desk precisely 40 minutes before deadline.

Oh, yeah - the paper and final both got "A"s, and I aced the class.

Self-preservation is the best speed-reading teacher.

Since that motivates little of my reading these days, though, I may just ping Elder and see what he's come up with...

Posted by Mitch at February 23, 2005 05:26 AM | TrackBack