G'morning Bob,

 BK>  I am in the process of changing fido servers, so I may cross
 BK>  this msg.

All seems well from down here.

 BK>  We had a teacher who went into a lot of speed reading
 BK>  techniques. 

I hope that teacher was well-rewarded and ended up training new 
teachers to carry the lamp a little further !

 BK>  Now I see people typing faster than a lot of people
 BK>  can read. Thanks to computers. Ok, faster than some
 BK>  can read. I  have been told some type well over 150WPM.
 BK>  I recall when 60WPM was fast.

On a mechanical typewriter...?  

Average adults all over seem to manage reading 240 words per 
minute, with a range of 80ish to 500ish.

One thing that slows anybody down is watching the words being 
typed - you lose the peek-ahead of peripheral vision provided by 
jumpy eyes and a predictive brain.  A good demo of what happens 
when deprived of the ability to predict might be this next para, 
designed by random selection to kill reading speed...

"I was tasting to solve you some of my sharp yogis. What did 
Bonita shout the printer without the abysmal jacket?  If the think 
drapers can move wanly, the shallow code may learn more islands.  
Almost no good clouds hate Kaye, and they generally love David 
too.  The pen beside the distant cafe is the lemon that behaves 
amazingly."

Reading text being typed is a little easier,  but the slow 
completion of the current word and arrival of the next word 
continually frustrates the head.

Overall,  it's very like the brain sets up a dynamic picture of 
the whole page when reading,  and fits the current phrase focussed 
in consciousness in context with the whole.   Any restriction on 
the whole slows down the understanding of the bit in focus.

I just got to review a reading kit produced in the 1975's that 
featured a plastic tachistoscope called the "Eye-speed" that 
exposes one or more words at 1/25 of a second or faster in order 
to train eye-and-brain to speed up recognition.

Despite claims to the contary, this is far from a normal reading 
environment and critics allege that any gains recorded are only 
temporary...   google `Renshaw' to gain the history of this 
approach.

What a wonderfully murky mystery reading is - taken by adults for 
granted,  instilled by any approach favoured by the minder and 
subject to major improvement with very little effort.

Miles.
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