INTRODUCTION

The art of communication has three grand divisions. The first involves mastery of the subject The second involves mastery of its presentation, which is usually in written form. The third involves mastery of its reception, which is listening to a spoken presentation and reading of a written presentation.

Our schools and colleges originally devoted themselves chiefly to teaching subjects. Many years ago business and professional men began to discover that they were unable to present the subjects they knew in an effective form. Then began the education of writers. Courses in Business English multiplied. Scientific bodies and tech­nical corporations undertook to instruct their staffs in the art of speaking and writing. Today, in the United States at least, it is fair to say that we have advanced far in making practical writers of engineers, executives, and editors and reporters of trade and technical journals. No country in the world produces nearly so much as ours in the way of clearly written reports, articles, and textbooks dealing with the affairs of business, industry, and the techniques.

But this very success brings to light our deficiencies in the third and last of the arts of communication. We have plenty of people who know their subjects. We have an astonishing number of excellent writers among those who know their subjects. And they are writing far more than their public can read. Can we not train this public to keep up in its reading?
I am sure that we can—at least to a very considerable degree.

This book is strictly for the busy adult who is dissatisfied with the amount of reading he does in the course of a year. It will be of little or no value to school children. Eminent specialists have written excellent books for them. Their problems are very different from those with which we are going to wrestle here. So far as I know, nobody has given the poor adult a serious thought.

And yet all of the world's important reading is done by this same poor adult. The fate of nations hangs on what he reads. So does the trend in the stock markets. So does the march of industry and business. So does the progress of education and every larger aspect of social welfare. Abolish reading matter. Abolish readers. And what have you left? A world of talkers. How much business could they do, as compared with the readers who also talk?

Surely not one-tenth as much. Or, if as much as that in bulk, then surely of inferior quality. For men misunder­stand one another far more in conversation than in the printed word. Why so? Because a word once spoken has vanished; and, unless you have correctly grasped its relation to all else that is being said, you become confused.

Did you ever suffer from having your talk reported? Did you ever give an address of which you failed to prepare a summary for the newspapers? Then you know what I mean. We complain bitterly of the blunders the reporters commit when digesting our talk. But we fail to consider that everybody tends to misinterpret what we say, and mainly because the ear does not retain large masses of speech in a form that can be reviewed later as easily as you review a printed page. When you fail to grasp a printed statement, you run your eye back and look the words over afresh. That can't be done with sounds.

So, if you wish to persuade a man quickly, talk to him; for your personality will impress him more intensely than the precise content of your remarks. But if you wish to inform a man, give him your ideas to study with care, in some permanent form.

Talk is the salesman's proper medium. But print is the best one for the buyer, for the manager, and for the junior executive. Talk excites and moves to action. But the printed word conveys truth, instructs, and commands. Salesmen always dislike doing business through the printed word (and this includes the typed letter, of course). Natu­rally! And when salesmen are promoted into executive posts where their primary duty is not selling but managing men and affairs, they tend to carry over this prejudice. They incline to do everything by conversation and harangue. And, without realizing it, they cramp their style badly. Talk, used where print serves better, is a contagious disease in American business.

In 1917, I dropped in on a business man who was then engaged in large-scale international administration and listened to the growls of many subordinates over a strict order which he had issued. The order assumed the visible form of a card propped up on everybody's desk, in all too plain sight. It read: "Verbal Orders Do Not Go Here."

I heard how dreadfully this rule was slowing down work and causing profound spiritual unrest. And yet—and yet! The boss managed to transact several billion dollars of business under this anti-talk law. His name, by the way, was Herbert Hoover; and he was feeding the world.

Talk has two other weaknesses. It must be uttered in the presence of your audience, and its rate of delivery is between one-quarter and one-third that of reading matter. This allows, of course, for the inevitable breaks, silences, minor interruptions, hemming and hawing, and sundry oratorical effects which always creep into sustained con­versation and speeches. Business men seldom average better than 80 words a minute in their talk; but, if properly drilled, they can easily read between 200 and 300 words of serious matter per minute.

In business dealings, all of us tend to talk too much and read too little. This cannot be charged wholly against the salesman's habits and preferences. It is surely caused in no small measure by imperfect early training in school. I am forced to this conclusion by many personal observations. I have seen many distinguished business executives who have graduated from good colleges without attaining the speed or the accuracy in reading which we should expect of a high-school boy. Let me cite a case or two. The matter is important enough to be thus emphasized.

A magazine once published a brief and clearly organ­ized summary of a survey I made of openings in various professional fields. The article, as I recall, did not run above 1,500 words. Many business men commented on it variously; among them, a high official in one of our finest manufacturing corporations. He enumerated, in his criti­cism of my argument, six statements which he attributed to me. All of these he found in the article. But, oddly enough, not one of them appeared there, nor anywhere else. He had read the text so inaccurately that he completely reversed its meaning. Result? He attacked me for holding views which I myself had attacked, and he cham­pioned every view I held!

Here is a worse one. Some years ago I wrote a report of trade conditions for a certain concern. It was, to be sure, somewhat technical and not easy reading; but it was made as clear as the subject permitted. And it was designed to be read only by a few people who were familiar with the subject. When the president of the company studied it, he wrote a series of comments on it which revealed that he had quite missed the main points. No other reader missed them. I asked him, therefore, to point out where he had found basis for his interpretations. He waded laboriously through the pages, wasted two or three hours of his time and mine, and finally admitted that he must have read too fast. Truth was he had read poorly.

Lest you conclude that I am picking meanly on the business man, I close this sad tale with the worst case of all, which reveals that workers in other fields are quite as poor readers. Last year I checked up on the accuracy with which the reviewers of some important books had stated the facts about the contents of the books. Matters of opinion were ignored; only such things as were indisput­able were counted. It appeared that about half of the book reviews were childishly inaccurate. And yet here we have to do with people who presumably are fast and accurate readers. Why otherwise should they be reviewing books?

So, you see, we have a large job on our hands! We must help most adults make up for the deficiencies in their early training.

THE THREE ARTS OF READING

There are three distinct arts of reading. Each art has its own purpose. Each deals with more or less different material. And each develops quite distinct methods. Unfortunately, teachers have not made this clear to learners; hence much bad reading.

The three purposes determine the three arts. For they first of all determine both the material to be read and the way in which it is to be read. So we must look at them first of all.

When we are very young, we first read in order to learn things; and, as we grow up, some of us lose interest in self-development, while others of us pursue our favorite studies ever more intensively.

Early in life most of us also read for the fun of it. Story books open the door to delightful realms of fancy. We escape the matter-of-fact world and roam whither the creative imagination of novelists and dramatists leads us. As the world of bread and butter makes sterner demands upon our time and efforts, most of us have to restrict such pleasure reading considerably. Before the thirtieth year, most men and women have reduced it to a mere fraction of what it was during their 'teens. But, as leisure becomes more general, pleasure reading claims more time.

Finally, most of us develop an interest in reading for current information. To some extent, this overlaps with the first purpose of reading for self-improvement. But it is in the main a distinct enterprise. We scan the daily newspaper merely to see what's going on in the big world and in our neighborhood. We want to know whether our railroad stock has gone up or down since yesterday. We wonder how our college football team came out in its big game with its ancient rival. And did Mrs. Murphy sail for Paris with her daughter, or are they going to Palm Beach for the winter?

Keeping in touch with events that concern us—that is the third purpose of reading. And, in modern America, it has become a huge task. So many things are happening! So many people are busily making them happen! Further­more, news in one's field of business now flows, a mighty stream. There is more going on in the realm of the auto­mobile trade than was happening in all Europe a generation ago. Events in the women's wear trade are numerous enough and important enough to be reported in a special daily newspaper. So with Wall Street events. And virtually every industry in America has its own weeklies or monthlies whose chief aim is to give news of special interest.

Now it is a well-known fact that each day has only twenty-four hours, and day follows day in relentless pro­cession. The reader must move with the calendar, or else fall behind in his grasp of events. The sales manager who fails to survey the morning's report of affairs that touch his field will soon make a ghastly mistake. The investor who is contemplating purchase of copper stocks becomes a mere gambler if he ignores the latest news about the copper industry and every trade that affects it. Thus throughout the entire range of business, finance, politics, and manufacturing.

Here, then, we see the necessity of a third art of reading. Here we come upon material and problems which differ profoundly from those we encounter when we read merely to educate ourselves or for personal delight. In studying cultural subjects, we master everything as we go. We analyze, we make notes perhaps, we stop to ponder over the whole range of facts from time to time. Our speed is set almost wholly by the intricacy and strangeness of the subject matter and by our wish to master it through and through. When, on the other hand, we read for sheer pleasure, we set our own pace. Whatever speed gives us the most pleasure is the right speed. And nobody can lay down rules for us here. Some of us enjoy novels best when we skim them lightly, while others choose to linger over colorful phrases and to go lost in revery suggested by the tale. Some of us must read the book straight through at a sitting, while others like to sip at it at intervals.

How different the procedure when we read in order to keep in touch with affairs in our profession, our art, our trade, or our business! Here Father Time sets the pace, and Competition is the referee. We must cover ground or lose out. We must pick and choose material that specially touches our practical interests and fortunes. We dare not let our private taste and pleasure rule us. Nor can we be studious and thorough in the manner of the cultural reader. Hence, we must work out a third art of reading. And this is the subject of the book now in your hands.

Whoever reads it, thinking it a guide in school work or in pleasure reading, will make a sorry mess of it. Here and there he will find something that serves well in the first and second arts. But the technique as a whole does not.

WHAT WILL YOU GAIN?

Now let us see what you stand to gain by pursuing the exercises that follow in this book. Naturally, I can offer only a general answer applicable to most readers. Some will far exceed my estimate, while a few will fall far below it.

First of all, how long must you work at them in order to get useful results? Tests on adults made at the University of Chicago, Columbia, and elsewhere show that fairly persistent self-drill for 30 or 60 days will yield marked improvement in one's reading, both as to speed and as to comprehension.

Three to four months of drill will bring you to the peak of improvement, as a rule. What does this mean as to your velocity and grasp?

Here are a few simple comparisons. Apply them to your own case and find your own answer. Obviously, we cannot set up a universal standard to which all men must conform; for the material you have to read in your business differs considerably from the material I must read, and so, too, do circumstances differ under which we read.

Here are four fairly typical levels of reading. I omit skimming, as it falls in a class by itself*

Light Reading.

Ordinary newspaper items and the simpler varieties of fiction are usually read at the rate of five or six words per second. This speed can be maintained for an hour or two, without strain.

Suppose you spend two hours daily throughout the year on such light reading. Your annual coverage would then amount to 13,000,000 words more or less (5 words per second equals 18,000 words per hour or 1,080,000 per month of two hours daily reading).
This Would Equal 130 Books of 100,000 Words Each.

Average Reading.

The longer newspaper articles on serious subjects and most ordinary news articles in business and trade papers in your own special fields can be read at four words a second, up to a total of two hours daily.
If you devote two hours daily to such reading matter, you can cover in a year between 10,000,000 and 10,500,000 words (4 words per second equal 14,400 per hour).
This Would Equal 100 Books of 105,000 Words Each.

Solid Reading.

Technical discussions of fairly difficult matters more or less unfamiliar to you will slow your speed down to 3 words per second. At this rate your annual coverage would run around 7,000,000 or 8,000,000 words, which would equal some 70 or 80 volumes of standard size.

Heavy Reading.

Technical dicussions of subjects almost wholly new to you and important enough to require thorough under­standing of them must be studied, rather than read. Here you will be doing well if you average 6,000 words per hour. And it is unlikely that you will be able to devote two hours daily to such intensive perusal throughout the year.

Suppose, however, that you do this. Then you ought to cover between 4,000,000 and 4,500,000 words annually; or the equivalent of 40 to 50 books of standard length.

Nobody spends all his time on any one of these four reading levels. We have to spread our efforts over all in some combination. Suppose that you were to divide your daily time in the following more or less typical manner:
Minutes
To light reading, including some news­
paper skimming.......................... 15
To average reading.................... 45
To solid reading......................... ,     30
To heavy reading (study)............ 30
On this basis you would read, in the course of one year:
Of light reading         1,600,000 words, or 16 books of standard length.
Of average reading   3,900,000 words, or 39 books of standard length.
Of solid reading        2,000,000 words, or 20 books of standard length.
Of heavy reading      1,000,000 words, or 10 books of standard length.

On a gross average, this would mean that you would finish the equivalent of a book every four and one-half days, year in, year out!

Perhaps you can find only one hour daily for reading. Even so, see what you can accomplish! On this modest basis you can read:
8 books of the light type. 17 books of average difficulty. 10 books of solid reading. 5 books requiring close study. Or a total of 40 books a year.

Now, Virtually Every American Business Man Whose Eyes are Moderately Good Can Equal This Rate, Not One in a Thousand is Unable to Find Seven Hours Weekly for Reading.

Suppose that three-quarters of all your average and solid reading matter were in business magazines and trade or technical journals. And suppose that you were spend­ing, all told, only one hour daily on all kinds of reading, as above described. How much ground would you be covering in a year in such periodicals alone?

About 3,750,000 words. Or 750 articles of 5,000 words each. Suppose you concentrated on magazines; you would be reading 10 such articles monthly in six periodicals throughout the year.

All These Estimates Are Based on the Average Speed of Reading by Adults Who Have Not Specially Trained Them­selves to Cover Ground Fast and Thoroughly.

It has been demonstrated that fairly intelligent people can improve their speed and comprehension fully 50 per cent above the rates I have been using in these hypothet­ical cases.

Were You to Make the Effort, You Could Probably Cover, in One Hour Daily throughout the Year:
12 books of the light type,
25 books of average difficulty,
15 books of solid reading, and 8 books requiring close study.
Or a total of 60 books yearly. Better than a book a week!

A man will gladly sweat two hours a day for years, in order to excel at tennis. And, having achieved this excellence, all he can do is to beat his friends in the innocent art of swatting a rubber ball over a net.

Suppose he spent half as much energy mastering the much harder game of language. What would he have to show for his efforts afterward? Well, he would be able to keep in touch with world affairs far faster and more accurately than most other people. He would almost certainly have mastered some subject that interested him; for, in the course of sustained and intensive reading, normally he would have been reading serious books and magazines whose content interested him. Finally, it would be odd if incidentally he had not improved his own conversational abilities. And this would improve him as a social creature.

I do not deem it an exaggeration to say that " reading maketh a full man" in business quite as much as in culture; or that a man who can and does read along serious lines related to his life work in the volume we have just been indicating must acquire immense advantages, in the long run, over his rivals who are less well read. After all, success depends essentially upon two things, knowing the markets and dealing in the markets. And most knowl­edge comes through the printed word.

Time spent on these reading exercises ought to aid one's business quite as much as time spent on designing more efficient machines in the factory. For man's mind is the most marvelous of all machines. To improve it is to improve all the things it moves and creates.

This is not an inspirational book. It is a sweat shop. You, gentle reader, are to do all the work, while I sit back and sing out "One-two! One-two!" like those Kings of Calisthenics who warble at you every morning over the radio when you tune in on your bedside exercises.

You want to improve your reading. Very well! You must read and read and read. All I shall do is to give you sundry useful tips as to your procedure.

For every word I write here, you will have to read a thousand or more.
Does the book seem very short? Well, think it over after you have finished all the exercises! If you take our instructions in the proper spirit, the book will keep you on the jump for the remainder of your life. For one of its most earnest contentions is that, once you have attained a new high level of ability, you will have to go on using this ability if you wish to possess it.

All skill depends on exercise. Continued skill depends on continued exercise. Paderweski said something on this which deserves to be quoted again.

If I go one day without practising at the piano, I notice it in my playing. If I go two days, my friends notice it. If I go three days, the audience notices it.

You cannot be a fast and efficient reader unless you read and read and read. Practice makes perfect. And perfection, once attained, is retained only through con­tinued practice. So I am now trying not only to improve your reading but to make of you a chronic and voluminous reader.

ON THE RELATIVE IMPORTANCE OF THINGS

You will never become a skilful reader unless you first cultivate a fairly keen sense of the relative importance of things. And this, alas, is something I cannot teach you in any wee volume like this one. It is, as a matter of fact, the quintessence of genuine education and culture.

I know a jolly professor of philosophy who reads his Sunday newspaper straight through, line by line, skipping only some of the advertisements. Usually he finishes the j ob around Tuesday evening. Now a metaphysician may read thus, for to him all things are of almost equal importance. But nobody else dares to do so. We must pick and choose. We must budget our interests, as well as our time and our money. Otherwise we accomplish nothing.

The first stage in reading is to select what we ought to read and to discard everything else. To learn what is worth our while is a large part of the Art of Life. And here I must assume that you, as adults in a busy world, have mastered this task. What you may not have mas­tered as yet is the special application of your wants and needs to the printed page; that is, to the actual job of running your eye along the lines of type and picking out the useful.

To make your eye the servant of your will is the partic­ular aim of the present exercise in reading. You must come to the task with a clear will. Otherwise you will profit little.

When you pick up a newspaper or a magazine, you ought to glance through it in much the same spirit as you look over the immense display on large newsstands. Here you see printed matter about aviation, physical culture, engineering, retail merchandising, golf, tennis, interior decoration, and heaven knows what not. Does it ever occur to you to buy all these periodicals? Not if you are sane. You select from the mass a few which have some special interest to you.

So with the articles inside of any one of them. You must carry your selecting through to a finish here. In the first instance, you buy selectively in order to save your money. In the second instance, you ought to read selec­tively in order to save your time.

Time is far more important than money. Time is life. In the career of any well-regulated human being, one hour ought to be worth a good many dollars. Whenever you dawdle over printed words which neither enlighten nor amuse you, you are partly committing suicide.

Many people are dead from the ears up because they are dying by the hour. And when you die, you die from the top down.
HOW TO READ FOR RELATIVE IMPORTANCES

The first law of skilful reading is merely an application of the Law of Relative Importance. You must perceive, first of all, the total offerings of the printed matter; then you must appraise these. Get the larger picture first; see the whole exhibit, then go to details.

Read Wholes, Not Parts. Read Sentences, Not Words.
Read for the Broadest Meanings First, Then for Details Later if Necessary.

This is no fad. It is the sound teaching of psychology. We all learn things most rapidly and most thoroughly when we tackle them in their entirety.

If you wish to learn to play the piano, you progress best in the long run by playing the pieces as written. You waste time and probably confuse yourself if you plunge through one-finger exercises, attempting to learn the parts of the composition separately.

Children learn to talk in this same manner. They seldom learn words first. They talk sentences, even though the latter may not conform to adult grammar and style.

The Normal Human Being First Experiences Things in Masses. Later He Analyzes Them into Their Parts.
Reading is a Mode of Learning. It Should, Therefore, Follow The Laws of Learning. And This is the First of Those Laws.

Of the two wrong ways to read, namely reading word by word and skimming, the latter is by far the better. It is closer to nature, Beware of taking elaborate notes while you read. There is no less efficient habit.
Read first, then reflect; and, if you do not retain clearly the gist of what you have read, go back over the material and take notes on things you have failed to remember.

This rule applies to such things as statistics and formulas. When you run across valuable material of this sort, it is best not to stop reading for the sake of copying it. Make a mark in the book or magazine and come back to it after you have finished reading. Then copy.

Why do thus? Because here as everywhere else, Do One Thing at a Time and Do That Well. Note taking is not reading. Comprehending the chief meanings is not the same as making a permanent record of some detail.

Much time is lost, and even more content is blurred, by the misguided attempt to alternate between reading and notes.

Read straight ahead. Do not stop unless you lose the main line of thought. Never mind the obscurity of details.

GRASPING THE ESSENTIALS

In many instances, you need to gather only the main fact from what you read. The art of finding this differs considerably from the art of perceiving masses of detail.

If all authors wrote well, it would be an easy art to teach. For then you would find the central thought clearly stated in the opening lines of the article. You would also find the major subdivisions indicated in a clear visual form throughout the text.

Fortunately, most of our scientific and technical jour­nals are approaching this ideal—though some have still a long mile to travel. They adapt newspaper technique to their own special purposes.

A newspaper will outline a news item in three or four stages of completeness. The top headline will indicate the main event in the briefest possible phrase. The lower headlines will amplify this within 40 or 50 words. Then the lead paragraph will carry the story one degree further along. After that will come all the lesser details.

The technical and scientific journal will do likewise, but in a more formal fashion. Here is a typical arrangement.
1.     The subject of the paper:
Usually stated in a short paragraph.

1. Details.
2. Summary of facts.
3. Conclusions reached from facts.
4. Bibliography, if any.

One of the surest ways for you to improve your reading is to do what you can by way of persuading editors and book publishers to cast important material into some such readily comprehended form. This will save you hours in the course of every month. And it may even add more to your effective span of life than all the golf and motoring you do.

USE THE TABLE OF CONTENTS AND THE PREFACE

You will usually save much time and come with greater ease to the essentials of a book, if you make it a practice to study its table of contents and preface with some care. Unfortunately some authors of serious books do not take their table of contents seriously enough. They do not aid their readers as they should in getting a bird's-eye view at the outset.

Naturally you need make such a survey only when you are plunging into the entire book. When reading for a special topic, whose relation to the larger subject you know in advance, this method is needless

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