Speed reader or ‘Scan Artist’?
CONNECTICUT NATIVE’S NEW BOOK EXAMINES EVELYN WOOD’S FAMOUS EMPIRE
“PEOPLE ARE SO WILLING TO BELIEVE WOMEN, AND WE CAN BE AS CRIMINAL AS THE GUYS.”
When Marcia Biederman was a 19yearold college student in the 1960s, she found herself fighting a notuncommon battle.
“I was, like many college students, overwhelmed by my reading load,” says Biederman, 70, a Bridgeport native who now lives in Brooklyn, N.Y.
She longed for a way to lighten her academic burden. Around this time she began hearing about a program, run by a woman named Evelyn Wood, that taught speed reading. Wood claiming that she could boost reading speeds past 10,000 words a minute, and the program had been endorsed by several wellknown politicians.
Biederman thought the program was the answer to her prayers and begged her parents to enroll her in an Evelyn Wood course. They eventually gave in, but Biederman quickly realized the program wasn’t going to solve her problems.
“I saw it was of no value pretty fast,” Biederman recalls.
Yet she also wondered if it was somehow her fault that she wasn’t getting the desired results. She did find the studying involved in the program tedious. Was she not working hard enough?
“There was always kind of this seed of doubt sown that maybe this was working for other people,” Biederman says. “I felt kind of ashamed of it.”
But Biederman wasn’t the only person who called Wood’s speed reading empire into questions. Biederman’s new book “Scan Artist: How Evelyn Wood Convinced the World That Speed Reading Worked,” examines Wood’s life and work, and how her speedreading business was eventually called out as a hoax by academics, disgruntled customers and others.
Biederman says it wasn’t a grudge that inspired her decision to write about
Wood, but a simple desire to learn more about the woman. Biederman’s previous book, “Popovers and Candlelight: Patricia Murphy and the Rise and Fall of a Restaurant Empire,” was about a female restaurateur, and sparked her interest in telling more stories about women.
“So many 20th century women are overlooked,” Biederman explains. When she searched for another possible subject, a familiar name entered her mind: Evelyn Wood.
“I wasn’t out to debunk her,” Biederman says. “It was initially just a biography.”
But, as she dug, Biederman found that many shared her doubts about Wood’s method, and confronted her with them over the years.
The book opens with Wood, a demurelooking Mormon, demonstrating her speed reading program at the 1961 National Education Association convention in Atlantic City. Wood made a splash at the event, introducing two high school students that she had trained in her “dynamic reading” method.
One of them, 17yearold Robert Darling, wowed the crowd as they watched him zoom through 120 pages of a book in three minutes, running his fingers down each page. When time was up, he closed the book and gave a 15minute summary of what he had read. Another 17yearold, Louise Mahru, also demonstrated her speed reading skills — in French, a language she claimed to have only studied for one year.
The demonstration wowed journalists attending the conference, and Wood was a compelling presence. Then 52 and petite, she was described as a schoolteacher, but, Biederman writes, the title wasn’t technically true.
“A Utah school district had allowed her to pilot her method on its students, but as dean of girls, she normally worked outside the classroom,” Biederman says in the book.
Shady credentials aside, people latched onto Wood’s course. Evenlyn Wood institutes popped up all over the country, including Connecticut. Four U.S. senators demonstrated and endorsed Wood’s method on national television. It was the latter gambit that convinced Biederman and her family that the Wood program was legit. Biederman says her family was interested in politics, which gave weight to these endorsements.
“I couldn’t believe these people would lie,” Biederman says.
Actually, Biederman states in her book, Wood’s program was linked to modest gains in reading speed. But experts — including George W. Gibson, Harvard Business School’s director of audiovisual education — repeatedly alleged that one couldn’t read thousands of words a minute without a dip in comprehension.
Yet every time someone stepped up to call Wood’s methods into question, one of her acolytes would jump to her defense, often threatening legal action.
Biederman says Wood was likely given cover by that era’s stereotypical preconceptions of women as delicate and harmless. People didn’t seem to think that a “schoolteacher” was capable of such a scheme, Biederman says. And when academics (most of whom were male) challenged her “it looked like they were bullying her.”
In this, Biederman likens Wood to another controversial woman — Elizabeth Holmes, former CEO of Theranos, a nowdefunct company that claimed to have revolutionized blood testing. That claim turned out to be false, and Holmes will face fraud charges in a federal court next year.
“People are so willing to believe women,” Biederman says. “And we can be as criminal as the guys.”