THE CAUSES OF POOR READING

We vary in our speed of reading to an astonishing degree. The vice-president of a large textile company says, "It takes me a couple of weeks to read a book such as my boy of fourteen reads in an evening. Probably he could tell you the gist of it as well as I could, too." Contrast to him a woman I know who thinks nothing of reading three, four, or even five fat books in the course of a day, all of which she retains with considerable accuracy.

Even more widely do we vary in our speed of skimming. Every experienced newspaper editor races over hundreds of thousands of words every week and manages to hold in his memory quite enough to give him his bearings about a thousand and one news items for as long as these are of value to him in his business.

Where do you fall between these extremes? If near to this lady, my little book cannot be of any use to you. If, on the other hand, you find it hard to read, let us say, 65 to 75 pages of a fairly serious non-fiction book in about two hours, these exercises will almost certainly help you.

If they do nothing more, they will surely assist you in discovering the causes of your own slow or unsure reading. The exercises are planned to test each of the chief factors in reading singly. Some of these factors are beyond bettering through drill. For example, defective eyesight. Most of them fortunately may be improved. Your prob­lem is to ascertain which call for such treatment.

A simple outline may clear matters here. Suppose that at this very moment you pick up a book and say: "I must read Chapter VII in this work at once." What factors play in upon your act and the reading which ensues? They group as follows:

1. The interests that lead you to read the book.
2. The habits of body and mind that you use in the act of reading.
3. The momentary conditions under which your interests and habits of reading operate. These momentary con­ditions fall into three important rough classes:

a. Conditions of your surroundings, 6. Conditions of your physique, and c. Conditions of your mind.
1. YOUR INTERESTS IN READING

There are scores of possible interests, hundreds of habits, and an all but infinite variety of momentary conditions. Nothing short of minute self-analysis will reveal to you the source of your own short-comings as a reader. Look first at the interests that may be at work in moving you to select the particular chapter and book for reading now. Later we shall show how you may adjust your methods to your actual interests.

Your primary interests in reading that chapter of that book at this moment may be nothing more than self-protection. Your general sales manager may have called a conference for this afternoon and may have announced that everybody who attends it ought to check through the market statistics given in that particular passage. To save your face, you are going to glance at the pages; for it will be humiliating to be called upon to express an opinion on them and to admit lack of knowledge. Reading therefore is merely a means to the end of stand­ing in well with your sales manager.

Or you may read in order to refute the author, who has attacked some of your pet methods of managing men.

Or you may read solely to check up on a calculation you made yesterday which involved some of the reported statistics. Or you may read to find confirmation of one of your pet theories. Or you may read because, not knowing the statistics, you need them in your business and decide to master them.

Now, Your Interest in Reading Ought to Determine the Way You Read. It is wasteful, therefore foolish, to pursue one and only one reading method for all kinds of matter and all interests. Your school teachers never taught you this. They merely taught you to read and usually the interest they forced upon you was that of reading in order to pass a school examination on what you read. This forced you to cram on all the petty details of the text.

Is it any wonder that so many young people developed a dislike of literature? Or that they failed to become expert readers? America, I grieve to say, is full of pedants who drill the young to read the wonderful pages of Thacke­ray, Kipling, and Balzac as if these were population statis­tics compiled by the Census Bureau, and as if the young were reading them in the capacity of proofreaders and statisticians. They must be able to name all the characters, all the big scenes, the themes, plots, and what not. Other­wise they fail in the so-called Literature Course and are set down as poor students!

If you read novels slowly and have a vague feeling of hard work, it is more than likely that you are now paying the penalty of having been taught to read the classics by some educated imbecile who never understood that the one proper interest in reading Thackery, Kipling, and Balzac is intellectual and emotional entertainment. The manner of reading them must fit this interest; in short, you must read in an entertaining manner. And the author must first write in an entertaining manner.

We are here concerned solely with improving your serious reading. Though we shall not discuss the lighter varieties of pleasure reading, it is not amiss to warn you that you must not expect, in reading your engineers' reports and trade journals, to approach the speed at which you race through the novels of Zane Grey and the pages of the Saturday Evening Post.

Short stories, novels, and popular magazine articles are written for relaxation. They are cast into the easiest of all forms for reading. As far as possible they are told in dramatic narrative and in episodes. The words they use are usually familiar and colorful. The characters and situations described have an elemental human interest.

Even poorly educated readers can read such material at the rate of 12,000 words per hour. This, by the way, is the average velocity indicated for the short articles and stories published by Liberty, which, as you know, used to announce at the opening of each the reading time required. A well-educated reader who has drilled himself thoroughly can, with no effort whatsoever, read this sort of matter at the rate of 18,000 or 20,000 words per hour. And a seasoned manuscript editor will flash through 25,000 words per hour.

The material a business or professional man has to read, however, rarely can be cast into such a simple mould. Com­plex affairs have to be reported and analyzed. Technical language must be used. And easy reading must always be sacrificed for the sake of accuracy.

The reader's attitude increases the difference. He picks up a novel in the spirit of adventure and a good time. He will not be bored. Nor will he toil. Woe to the fiction that doesn't please him! He lays it aside and finds something better suited to his mood.

That free and easy manner doesn't go, though, when he enters his office keyed up to the morning's work. How changed his purpose! How much firmer the will to achieve! No complaint over difficulties! No shirking of details! Business is business! And that tells the whole story.

Later I shall talk about the art of skimming. Then you will learn, in some detail, that Each Interest Moving You to Read Causes You to Select and to Stress Certain Features of the Reading Matter. And for Many Legitimate Interests the Best of All Methods is to Skim the Text Very Lightly but with a Sure Feel for Whatever Happens to Be Relevant to Your Interest. This Art of Skimming is the Highest and Finest of All the Arts of Reading. Pedants Imagine It is the Opposite. But Professional Workers Who Do Much Reading Know that Intelligent Skimming is Hard and Immensely Profitable.

Just now I am suggesting only that part of your difficulty in fast, sure reading may be due to a maladjustment between your interests and your manner of reading. You may be interested in nothing beyond one specific fact in the chapter book; yet you may pore over every word as if you had to thresh all the chaff for the sake of one kernel of wheat. Again, your interest may be to ascertain the underlying argument of the author; but you center your attention erroneously upon many of his specific facts which do not belong to that argument at all. Or, what is perhaps more probable, you read only a general interest in the subject at hand, hence grope around as you read in search of a more definite interest.

What is the cure for such a maladjustment? Simply a clear understanding of the manner of reading which best fits your interest in reading the particular page. As you go on in these exercises you will pick up this trick. Mean­while ask yourself quite seriously, as you open a magazine or book: " Just why am I going to read now? Just what do I want to get out of it?"

Also, please take me quite seriously when I say that for some interests it is quite enough to read the table of contents of a book, for other interests it is better to read the index and follow up two or three references in it, while for still others it is best to read the summary chapter at the end of the volume. Sometimes you ought to skim as lightly as a summer swallow. Sometimes you ought to swallow everything in sight.

Your Aim Determines Your Method.

The worst of all possible ways to read is in the passive manner. You will get little or nothing from the printed page if you bring to it nothing but your eye. You will get the most from it if you approach it with some definite interest and purpose. Strange as it may sound, it is none the less literally true that a man will gain a great deal more than a passive reader can if he approaches the page with a trivial or silly purpose. To say to yourself as you open the book, "Well, I wonder how many fool remarks this idiot will foist on me" is vastly more useful than to say or think nothing.

2. YOUR HABITS

Habits of body count no less than habits of mind in reading. Posture and activity must be carefully analyzed.

A. PostuRe

For convenience, rather than as a matter of logic, I shall here class together three kinds of position:

1. The actual bodily position.
2. This position relative to the printed page.
3. This position relative to the illumination.

1. Posture, in the narrower sense, is the body's own position; that is, the position of its members relative to one another.
So far as reading is concerned, posture is important in so far as it affects (a) The circulation of your blood, and (&) The tension of your muscles.

Any posture that disturbs blood circulation is bad. So is any posture that causes any muscles to become tense.

Fig. 1.—Bad position of body. The back is curved, and the head is dropped. Circulation of the blood is disturbed. The eyes fatigue rapidly and reading becomes drudgery in short order. Neither speed nor high comprehension can be maintained.

The two commonest bad postures are bending low over the printed page, and lying flat and looking up at the printed page.

These are by no means equally bad for all persons. Some of us find that we read fairly well while lying flat, at least for a little while; and we get a special satisfaction from it because in this position we relax those muscles which have been tense in the course of the day's work. People who are on their feet all day often find the recumbent position excellent for reading. Sedentary workers are less likely to. In any case, however, check up on yourself.

Fig. 2.—Body position of doubtful value. People differ considerably in their ability to read while lying down. Some of us are deceived into thinking that we read well thus, when as a matter of fact, we are simply comfortable in our bones and muscles. As a relief from standing or sitting all day long, lying down is excellent. And for some readers it is a fairly good position. For others it is exceedingly bad. Find out, by actual tests, how well you read, when flat on your back. Then act accordingly.

Do you do much reading when lying down? How fast can you read in this position? As fast as when you are sitting up? As fast as when standing?

While some of us read pretty well thus, nobody ever reads effectively in the bent-over posture. It cannot be defended. Yet many business men fall into it.

There are other less frequently used bad postures. Slumping in one's chair, especially sidewise slumping, almost inevitably causes circulation difficulties and muscle tensions which lead to eye strain and headaches.
2. Your position relative to the printed page may be wrong in any of three ways :
a.Your eyes may be too close to the type, or
b.Too far from it, or
c.The page may be tilted so that parts of it lie much farther from your eyes than other parts, hence you have to shift your eye adjustment from word to word, thus causing needless strain.

Usually you tend to hold your reading matter at nearly the correct distance. But some people fall into a habit of muscle adjustment which is not in complete harmony with the needs of their eyes. This is particularly true of persons suffering from very slight eye troubles.

And unfortunately it is the very slight imperfection of eyesight, particularly in astigmatism, that upsets the reader most violently. Frightful headaches and even melancholias and indigestion are caused by trifling astigmatism that can scarcely be corrected with glasses.

Now I cannot advise you as to your particular eye habits. Leave that to your oculist. And do not go ahead with these exercises unless you are reasonably sure of your eyes.

As for the faulty position of a tilted page, it is most likely to develop when you read very large-paged or very heavy books. The dictionary, encyclopedias, atlas volumes, and many other references books have excessively large pages or else are very heavy. They cause most trouble of this sort.

Be sure to avoid holding them as you hold small books. A tilted rest is best; and best of all is a reading stand or pulpit with a tilted top.

As a rule we do not read such works long enough to cause much trouble. But some people do, and must have a care.

Fig. 3.—Bad position as to source of light. Here is positively the worst of all positions with respect to the light. Notice that the young man directly faces a strong light which causes him to squint. Notice also that the page he is reading is wholly in shadow, while the back of the book gets all the light. His eyes adjust so as to read in a very bright light, but what he reads is in the dark. Most of us have been trained to avoid this dangerous habit. But not all of us avoid it as rigorously as we should.

3. Your bodily position relative to the light presents two aspects: (a) the way the light strikes the type, and (fc) the way the light strikes your eyes.
a. There are three wrong ways of illumining the type: (1) With too intense a light.

1. With too faint a light.
2. With very uneven light, so that parts of the page are bright and parts dark.

Fig. 4.—Bad position as to source of light. While we usually avoid facing a bright light while we read, we are not so careful in shunning this almost equally harmful position, in which a bright light strikes one eye, while the other eye is in shadow. As you here see the young man, the page ho is reading is moderately well illuminated with a bright but slanting light. His eye that is nearer the light source is directly illuminated, hence the pupil contracts by way of adjusting to vision in bright light. But his other eye is wholly shaded, hence its pupil expands for reading in weak illumination. The page he reads is neither very bright nor very dark. So neither eye is correctly adjusted to it. Eye strain, headaches, and poor comprehension will almost certainly result, if he reads much in this position.

In days of old, before cheap electricity, the tendency was to read in too faint lights. Today the trend is opposite; most of us who work in large city offices are in constant danger of overbright lights. Recent studies reveal that ordinary work and reading can be done as efficiently in lights much fainter than those generally used in offices and factories. The bright lights have a psychological value, however, in that they seem to stimulate many workers.

Fig. 5.—Correct reading position. Here the young man's back is straight, his head 8lightly inclined but not drooping, and the book page at his own best distance. The light is coming from behind and somewhat above his shoulder, so that it falls on the page evenly. Both of his eyes are in the same degree of shadow. Some people would hold the book a little higher, others would hold it closer, still others further away. But all should hold it in this same general relation to light and eyes.

It is no figure of speech to say that the "Bright Lights" are jazzy. Men do speed up when under bright lights and slow down under dim ones.

Probably you have no need of being sped up, however. So spare your eyes. Find out by tests at which degree of brightness you read easily. And then make a practice of shunning brighter lights.

Fig. 6.—Wrong angle between page and eye. In this reading position, the top line on the page is about twice as far from the eyes as is the bottom lino; and every line between top and bottom is at a different distance from the eyes. Hence the eye has to readjust in order to read each line. This is hard, too hard indeed. Perhaps you can read fairly well thus. But why throw a needless load on your eyes? Think of your eyes as a priceless machine which must be utilized to the utmost.

Experiment on yourself. Try sitting at various dis­tances from a light of known intensity. Also try reading with bulbs of various wattage at a given distance. When I tried this on myself some years ago, I was amazed to find how little light I needed, in order to keep up the immense reading I do. Many people exclaim at the darkness of my library, and I have to explain that I am not trying to save forty cents a year on my electric current bills.

Fig. 7.—Mixed light and shade. This book is on a table under a pergola through whose overhead leaves the sunlight filters down on the reading matter. The contrast between the bright sunlight and the shadow of the leaves is much stronger in reality than in this photograph. You doubtless know from experi­ence how hard it is to read under these conditions.

No two people are alike in this sensitivity. All the more reason for your checking up on yourself with care. Bear in mind that excessive brightness is more likely to prove troublesome than excessive dimness, though at the moment of reading the latter may seem worse.

As for uneven illumination, this can be grave indeed. There are two varieties of it:
 (1)   Continuously uneven illumination, as when the light falls on the page from far at one side of the reader.
(2)    Broken or mottled light, which in turn may be (a) stationary, or (b) moving, with respect to the page.

The first sort is not likely to prove very serious unless at the same time the light happens to strike one eye and not the other. This will be discussed in a moment.

The second sort is always serious, whether light strikes the eyes unequally or not. The stationary mottling of the page caused by a bright light throwing the shadow of a window frame or a lattice or the leaves of a tree on the page so that bright and dark spots or lines alternate across it is most harmful. Why? Because the eye must readjust the pupil several times as it crosses the page; and, as the eye will outrun the pupil in these adjustments, the result is that the retina receives too much and too little light from the spots in quick succession.

One degree worse is the moving figure of light and shadow. You get this whenever you sit under a wind­blown tree in the good old summer time and strive to read with the light that filters through the fluttering leaves. You get it still more obnoxiously whenever you sit on the sunny side of a train and read, holding your book so that the sunlight strikes it, flinging across the page the swiftly moving shadows of telegraph poles and wires, trees, tower houses, and other passing trains.

Though I cannot prove it beyond my own personal experience, I am quite convinced that many business men impair their reading ability for the day by trying to peruse their morning newspapers in this manner. Only a few minutes of such a terrific strain on the eyes is needed to set up tensions and accompanying irritations which will make later reading in the course of the day's work highly uncomfortable, if not slow and inaccurate.

b. There are two importantly wrong ways in which the light may strike the eyes:
(1)    It may shine directly into both eyes from a position back of the page you are reading.
(2)    It may shine into one eye but not into the other, as it comes from a side position.

Of these two, the former is by all odds the more injurious. Why? Because it causes an adjustment of the pupils which is the reverse of correct. Being exposed to direct light, the pupils contract and are then adjusted for seeing objects in bright light. But the page lies in shadow. To read it, the pupils ought to be more or less dilated. Too little light from the type reaches the retina. You might as well be reading in the late dusk. The eyestrain is grave indeed.

The worst of all conceivable relations between body, page, and light would be one in which the illumination shone directly into the eyes and consisted of very bright lights alternating with swiftly moving, irregular shadows such as you might get were you to read a book in an open automobile while driving on a sunny day along a road overhung with shade trees through which the direct sunlight broke.
B. Action Habits
It is hard to generalize about these. The best I can do is to suggest. Some people move rapidly, others slowly, others jerkily. As a result, some do not keep sufficiently still when they read, while others are too still and still others simply fidget.
I once knew a man who read serious matter only when pacing up and down the office, running one hand through his hair while he held the book or paper in a hit-and-miss fashion with the other hand. Naturally he was a slow, as well as an inaccurate, reader.

I also know a woman whose profession requires of her a vast deal of reading. She sits at her desk as motionless as a statue. And then wonders, at the day's end, why she is fairly paralyzed and all pallid around the gills.

Between these extremes you will find your own happy medium of action habits. And that is about all that can be said.

Then too we have the action habits of the eye itself. A man whose business involves a great deal of long-range vision need not marvel at his slow or uncomfortable reading. A civil engineer who spends his day outdoors looking across valleys and up long roads gets his eyes into long-focus habits and also into slow, lateral-motion habits which inter­fere with the short-focus and fast back-and-forth shift of the eye that reads print.

At the other extreme we find the chronic reader of trash, the person who, usually in childhood, has formed the habit of wading through the funny columns of newspapers and endless cheap fiction. So far, so good. But when such a trash reader grows up and gets into serious business, he finds himself handicapped in reading serious material which must not be so lightly skimmed.

I know a clever man of this type. He is the envy of his friends because of the immense amount of reading he does. He has a large library and regularly sails through all kinds of books, about which he will talk with you glibly. But, alas and alack! whenever I talk with him about some book we have both read, I find that his notions about it are so hazy that he might better never have dipped into its pages. For ignorance is safer than misinformation. When you know nothing, you are at least free to use your own wits in forming some idea; but when you know with profound certainty something that isn't so, you are chained to an error.

This man has the unbreakable habit of moving his eyes faster than he can move his mind. He has a pretty good mind, on the whole, but his eyes are marvelous. He is a very bad reader—one of the worst varieties—simply because he has never been able to drive eyes and brain at the same speed, relative to some given subject matter. He is not even a reliable skimmer, though he thinks himself a marvel. For a good skimmer's mind outruns his eye, as a rule, and grasps large implications of things read, even when the details of the latter have not been taken in through the eye.

Eye skimming is one thing. Content skimming is another. If you wish merely to know what a book or article is about, eye skimming is useful. If you wish to know what the words say, you must skim content.

Is it clear that habits of body and eye can make you a poor reader? And that such a habit that suits one kind of reading may unfit you for other kinds?

Strictly speaking, nobody is a good universal reader. We all specialize more or less as we read more and more of certain sorts of material. One man becomes an adept at reading statistics—which most of us cannot take in fast because we have not drilled ourselves so to do. Another man absorbs the clumsy, bad writing of lawyers and legal documents but is quite unable to attain speed and precision in reading popular scientific articles.

We all know why this is so. The lawyer is familiar with the ideas and terms and manners of the law but not with those of physics and chemistry. The statistician knows his mathematics. Our habits of work form the foundation of our reading habits. And this reveals itself in the make-up of our working vocabulary and in our grasp of technical styles.

Thus we come to the most important of all habits, namely words. Words are habits. I do not mean, of course, the printed mark, "Cat." I mean this mark as a bearer of meanings. So long as it carries no meaning it is not a word. It becomes a word, as soon as your mind acquires the habit of letting it stand for a small feline that purrs, laps milk, scratches when annoyed, and meows when the spirit moves. The ink on the page simply touches off this habit of meaning in you.
A German forms the habit of being touched off thus when he sees the mark, "Katze." A Frenchman when he sees "Chat."

Any old mark will do. It all depends on what habit you form toward it. We might all agree to substitute for the mark, " Cat," a new mark, " Ubdub." And in the course of time, as fast as we formed a new habit of mental response toward "Ubdub," it would be a genuine word.

Our scientists are doing this all the time. They are finding new substances and processes in physics and chem­istry and medicine and bacteriology for which no word has ever existed in any language. They know they will have to form a habit of dealing with these new things, so they must form a habit of referring to them by means of con­ventional marks, signs, and sounds. To you, who never deal with the things, this often sounds foolish and affected. But it is not.

Physicans today deal with "Klieg eyes," which did not exist until the motion pictures were commercialized some ten or fifteen years ago. They talk about "auriculoven­tricular extrasystole " simply because somebody happened to discover this particular kind of premature contraction of the heart. Chemists create "dimethylaminobenzaldehyde" in the form of colorless crystalline plates; and then they have to create the word to describe and mean the stuff. Business men are doing the same thing all the time, but they do not sense it so keenly because they usually combine old words into new combinations and give them novel connotations. We talk about "mergers," "the monthly index," "cash registers," "Automats," "a soft market," and a million other things utterly meaningless to people outside of American business.

And when you listen to a radio expert, to an aviator, to an automobile specialist!

Don't they speak a language foreign to you? Yes, of course! Is it English? Only in a peculiar sense. It is the language of men whose habits are built around certain kinds of things and kinds of work. They build this language out of old word-marks used by English-speaking people, while others build theirs out of old word marks used by Germans, French, or Japanese. When an aviator talks about " dollies," he doesn't mean what your little girl does when she uses the same mark. Aviator and girl speak two languages, in reality.
Now, what has all this to do with aiding you to read better?

Simply this. Fast and Sure Reading is Simply the Act of Grasping the Intended Meanings of Marks on the Printed Page in a Fast and Sure Manner. To Grasp the Meanings, You Must First Have Developed the Habit of Linking Them with the Printed Marks: and to Do This, You Must Know All the Important Meanings Which a Given Mark Can Carry in Different Contexts.

Most marks carry many meanings. This is the aim of language, to simplify communication by letting one thing stand for many things. When you learn, you usually learn only one or two of its commonest meanings. As you widen your range of experience and reading, you add new meanings.

Which meanings do you select, as you read? Suppose you have learned the common meaning of the little mark, "of." This indicates possession. Thus: "The house of my friend, Jones." Later you learn that the same mark also means, in other contexts, the constitution or quality of the prepositional antecedent. Thus: "Jones built his house of stone." Still later you find that the mark sometimes indicates origin. Thus: "A woman of Paris."

Is it not clear that the only way you can tell which meaning must be selected is first to catch the drift of the whole passage? Or, if this cannot be done, to proceed by eliminating the least likely meanings, one by one, until you hit upon the correct interpretation?
In a sense, then, all reading is a guessing game. If you guess the general subject matter and the drift of the writer's remarks, you readily fit the right meanings to the right marks on the page. And if you cannot guess it, then you are lost.

If you are not versed in industrial chemistry, for example, what can you do with a passage like this?

Eucasin, manufactured by passing ammonia gas over casein, is marketed in technical grades.

Ethylene glycol derives from heating ethylene chloride with sodium formate in methyl alcohol solution.
Or, if you are not a student of aviation, how about this?

This biplane has a strutless design. Its center of gravity is such that high variability in pay load necessitates very slight readjustments in maneuvering. The stabilizer is adjustable from the rear cockpit. All exposed lugs lie in a plane parallel to the slip-stream. No gap occurs where the ailerons join the wings, as there is a dural fairing on the wing and a dural strip rolled over the back of the aileron.

Technical? Of course! But let me emphasize one thing right away. Nearly All of the Serious Reading Which the Modern Business Man and Manufacturer Must Cover Is Shot Through with Technical Facts. These Facts Are Expressed through Words and Symbols in Their Own Special Way.
Hence, to Read Them Well, You Must:

1. Know the Facts.
2. Know Their Symbols.

One reason you may have trouble with your reading is that you never learned the facts in school; another reason is that, after you learned the facts in your business or profession, you did not master their symbols.

You may have a magnificent grasp of the facts alone and still read about them with difficulty. If so, you must start at once building up a habit of word use and word recognition.
The Better Your Vocabulary, the Better You Will Read.
But a Good Vocabulary Does Not Consist Merely of a Set of Words. It Includes Also the Many Various Shades of Meanings These Words Carry in Special Contexts.

Many readers fool themselves about their vocabulary. They think they know, let us say, 40,000 words. But in reality they only know about one-fifth of each of these words; that is, they know some one meaning of each.
A Big Vocabulary Is Not Nearly So Useful as a Moderate One Thoroughly Understood.
It is Much More Useful to Know All the Important Meanings of 15,000 Words than to Know Only One Meaning of Each of 50,000 Words.
Mastery of a Little is Better Than Shallow Knowledge of Much.

One of the commonest causes of poor reading among adults is the habit of reading easy matter. This habit is founded in our schools, which teach us reading by putting into our hands the best writings of the world's greatest masters of literary expression. The vast bulk of serious reading material used in the everyday business of most men and women is produced by writers of average ability or less. Naturally, their books and articles are much harder to read than the masterpieces of Dickens, Thackeray, and Kipling. And this, too, quite apart from the fact that the subject matter of practical reading is always more complex than the subject matter of pleasant fiction.

Our schools still further habituate us to easy reading by teaching us all the other subjects, such as geography, arithmetic, history, civics, etc., through textbooks pre­pared with the greatest of skill. The clarity and simplicity of the American textbooks is on the whole extraordinary. They are deliberately planned so as to offer the least possible resistance to the teacher in teaching and to the student in learning. Now this is all well and good. Young people ought to learn everything as easily as possible. But if they receive no other drill in reading than such as is offered in literary masterpieces and model textbooks, you may be sure that they will go out into the world quite unprepared to read an engineer's report on some business project or a trade digest of market conditions in iron and steel.

The plain truth is that our grammar-school and high-school graduates must learn to read all over again as soon as they attain responsible positions in the world. So, too, must those of our college graduates whose training has been preeminently cultural.

We come now to two very bad habits which are some­times related but usually occur in different people separately.

Word Reading

1. Word reading is the habit of looking at each individ­ual word and dwelling too intently upon its own separate meaning. This is likely to result from one of two tend­encies: either some childhood difficulty at the time when one learned to read or else, in adult years, to the habit of reading very technical, hard work calling for the closest concentration. The childhood difficulty is hard to overcome, just as is any other defect of early education or early nature. It can be conquered with effort, though, unless it is caused by some eye defect or poor intelligence.

As nobody who studies this book will suffer from poor intelligence, I shall consider as the one possibility slow eye perception. You can easily test yourself for this.

A normal adult eye takes in four or five ordinary words at a glance. The finest eye in the world cannot take in more than seven. And the worst eye takes in only one, as did a student who once came under my observation. I am speaking, of course, about continued reading. Not about a single act. In some of the tests which follow, you may take in at a glance seven or eight words. But you will be utterly unable to maintain any such rate in actual reading.

If you take in two or three words at once, as you read, you are surely a word reader and will have to do something drastic to improve yourself, if this is at all possible.

First of all, have your eyes examined by an oculist. They may not be receiving a clear image of more than two words at once.

After this possibility has been eliminated, there remains the other one: perhaps you simply have formed a bad habit of looking at words instead of at longer phrases. To test yourself in this respect, work on the exercises which follow. And be very careful about timing yourself well.

Revery Reading

2. Revery reading appears, to an external spectator, to be the same as word reading. But it is not. Here, the central nervous system responds too lustily to the per­ceived word. The revery reader slows down badly as a result of being too intensely stimulated by words. Images, memories, and emotions flash up superabundantly with each fresh word or phrase. And his attention shifts from the printed page to these inner responses of the spirit. Hence, he loses the drift and the larger meaning of the text. His mind leaves it, flies all over the universe, and then returns to pick up the lost thread.

To day dream over a page is common in childhood and youth, when all reading is still a delightful novelty. It is very rare among business and professional men. Day dreamers usually fail to rise in the ranks of modern cor­porations ; so we shall here be spared the worry of reeducat­ing them. But there is a minor variety of them that must be mentioned because it occurs among professional workers now and then. It is the scientifically minded person whose interests in the subject being read are both intensive and extensive. He is the genuine student. He slows down simply because he thinks of so much that is relevant to the subject. His mind does not wander as the day dreamer's. Rather does it plunge deeply into things. Instead of advancing, it dives.

Now, this is a fault only in so far as it becomes a fixed habit which prevents the student from rapid reading of material that does not require intensive study. I find some engineers laboring under this handicap, and also some lawyers. Their professional reading habits are all right, but their non-professional reading goes on sluggishly. They do not know how to relax with their eyes and minds. But, luckily, they can learn this. The exercises later given for skimming will start them right.

3. MOMENTARY CONDITIONS OF READING
A. Your Surroundings Noise.

Unless you are too old, train yourself to read in noisy surroundings. But whenever possible, read where it is quiet. The ability to shut out disturbing stimuli is price­less, but this is no reason why you should always try to exercise it by retiring to a boiler factory for your day's reading. Altogether too many children are coddled by parents and teachers, who place the little darlings in the quiet for their serious studies. I often think the old-style Chinese school is better than ours in this respect. For there, you know, all the pupils learn their lessons by shouting out loud in class.

Air.

Be sure that you do no serious reading in an overheated room. A headache may result; and, if not that, then poor comprehension of the subject matter.

Chill air and draughts may disturb your reading. But they are less likely to do this than heat.

Time of Day.

At which time of day do you read best?
Check up on yourself carefully. Perhaps you know. But it is more than likely that you don't. Few of us ever study ourselves thus.

I happen to be one of those unfortunates who can do no heavy reading after dinner. And I prefer to omit all early morning reading for the sake of other tasks requir­ing my best efforts. Hence, more or less of necessity, I am strictly a mid-day and early afternoon reader.

Were I to try forcing myself to read important tech­nical or scientific books at night, I should fall asleep over them or else make such sluggish progress that the time would be unprofitably spent.

Possibly you are the reverse, as many people are. To study difficult material before eleven o'clock (in the morn­ing) is impossible for them; and so, too, is all other hard reading.

Whatever your natural and best distribution of reading time happens to be, make the most of it. Avoid trying to alter it, for it is certainly the result of hundreds of old, deeply rooted habits. (This, of course, would not apply to children. I am speaking solely to adults.)

Illumination.

Be sure to have correct illumination when you read.
Eye strain may be caused either by too bright light or too weak light. It may also result from a bad reading position with reference to the source of light.

When you read under an excessively bright light, the pupils of your eyes contract and so do the muscles of the eyelids and the face. These muscle tensions eventually become painful and may cause severe headaches.

If you read in too faint light, another set of annoying muscle tensions develops.

Should you assume a bad reading position relative to the light, one of the commonest ill effects is a different adjust­ment of each eye to the printed page. For example, your left eye may adjust so as to shut out light while your right eye adjusts so as to take in more. This unbalance can cause extreme discomfort and fatigue.

Fortunately, it is easy to have correct illumination these days. Other things beside the amount of illumina­tion must be considered, however, for easy and comfortable vision. Wrong colors, reflecting surfaces at bad angles, too-bright ceilings, shadows, the wrong kind of work to be done in a given light may all be factors in causing eye strain. Uncovered lights may easily be another source of eye discomfort, although these are not now prevailingly used, particularly in modern offices.

Probably the best form of indirect lighting is a fixture so constructed that the opaque undersurface is indirectly illuminated with a not too-high candle power lamp. More fixtures with low candle power are better for easy vision than one or two with high. The source of light should be so placed that the direct rays do not enter the eye. Other­wise these rays are brighter than the object viewed, causing eyestrain.

Reading Matter.

Paper and Type.—Here are the characteristics of paper and type which make for easy reading:1

1. Size of the Book.—Smaller books which can be easily held in one hand are preferred. Larger books must usually rest on a support, with the result that the letters are often exposed at an angle, thus greatly lessening their legibility.
2. Texture of the Paper.—The paper should be of such a quality that the printing on one side will not show through on the other. Furthermore, the printing on one side of the page must be so done that the evenness of the surface of the other side of the page is not affected.
3. Color of the Paper.—The paper should be pure white, inasmuch as the legibility depends in part on the contrast between the black of the printed letters and the white of their background. Furthermore, the surface of the paper should have no gloss, since a glossy surface is especially trying to the eyes.2

This causes the least eye strain because the mass of the page constituting the background of type reflects the least amount of light. Unfortunately,there does not seem to be any way of manufacturing dead black paper cheaply enough to justify such a radical departure from trade practices.

The next best combination is dead black type on lemon yellow paper.
The amount of light reflected under ordinary conditions of illumination is much greater from lemon yellow than from white. There seems to be no reason why publishers should not put out books on paper of this tint.

4. Color of Type.—The printed letters should have sharp, clear cut outlines and should be deep black.
5. Color of Pictures.—The use of highly colored pictures and drawings is questioned by some investigators. Experiments indicate that peripheral color stimuli may affect the accuracy of fixation and interfere with the accuracy of the reading movements.
6. Length of Lines.—Investigators generally favor the shorter rather than the longer lines. There is a preference for lines between 60 and 80 millimeters in length, with 90 millimeters as a maximum. Experiments show that lines the length of those in the columns of a newspaper can be read more rapidly per unit than lines of greater length.
7. Uniformity in Length of Line.—Huey and Dearborn agree that the lines of a given selection should be uniform in length, because a reader drops quickly into a habit of making a constant number of movements and pauses per line . . .
8. Distance between Lines.—A minimal leading of 2.5 millimeters between lines should probably be required. Increasing the leading does not seem to help. If the letters are undersize, the extra space should be used in increasing the size of the letters . . .
9. Size of Type.—Investigators are generally agreed that eleven point type, about 1.5 millimeters in height for the short letters (m, n, o,) should be made a minimum. Material printed in this size of type is read faster and individual words recognized more quickly than when the type is smaller . . .
10. Thickness of the Vertical Stroke.—The letters should stand out clearly and distinctly. The thickness of the vertical stroke should not be less than 0.25 millimeters, and 0.3 millimeters is preferred by some . . .
11. Space between Vertical Strokes.—The vertical strokes within a letter should be from 0.3 to 0.5 millimeters apart; the vertical strokes of adjacent letters should be from 0.5 to 0.75 millimeters apart.
12. Space between Letters.—Huey states that a minimum of six or seven letters per running centimeter is a convenient approximate guage.
13. Space between Words.—A distance of 2.0 millimeters between words has been generally accepted.

These characteristics best suit school children. But few adults will fail to find them right. Donald G. Paterson and Miles A. Tinker have recently tested several hundred college students and find that they read fastest and most accurately when the type size is ten-point and the line length is 80 millimeters. This, you will observe, is almost the same as with young children.1

Well-trained men and women, are not easily disturbed by colored pictures, though some are. They can also read, without effort, lines considerably longer than 90 millimeters after a little training. And type smaller than ten-point serves quite as well; but it must not run below eight-point in any case, if maximum ease of reading is sought.

You must keep in mind that economic factors interfere more or less with these ideal rules. To print, for instance, an unabridged dictionary or an encyclopaedia in eleven-point leaded lines of not more than 90 millimeters in length would so increase the size of such works that few people could afford to buy them. And the necessity of making them extremely readable is not great, inasmuch as we seldom read continuously in them for longer than ten or fifteen minutes.

Type like this is too black and thick to be easily read. There is not enough contrast between the letter and its background.

The Major sate down at his accustomed table then, and while the waiters went to bring him his hot toast and his newspaper, he surveyed his letters through his gold double eye-glass. He carried it so gayly, you would hardly have known it was spectacles in disguise, and examined one pretty note after another, and laid them by in order. There were large solemn dinner cards, suggestive of three courses and heavy conversation; there were neat little confidential notes, conveying female entreaties; there was a note on thick official paper from the Marquis of Steyne, telling him to come to Richmond to a little party at the Star and Garter, and speak French, which language the major possessed very perfectly; and another from the ßishop of Ealing and Mrs. Trail, requesting the honor

Type like this is too thin and faint to be easily read. In fast action, the eye fails to catch some of the thinner lines and misconstrues the letters.

The ma]or sate down at his accustomed table then, and while the waiters went to bring him his hot toast and his newspaper, he surveyed his letters through his gold double eye-glass. He carried it so gayly, you would hardly have known it was spectacles in disguise, and examined one pretty note after another, and laid them by in order. There were large solemn dinner cards, suggestive of three courses and heavy conversation; there were neat little confidential notes, conveying female entreaties; there was a note on

Type like this is too small to read fast. Avoid it when­ever you can.
The major sate down at his accustomed table then, and while the waiters went to bring him his hot toast and his newspaper, he surveyed his letters through his gold double eye-glass. He carried it so gayly you would hardly have known it was spectacles in disguise, and examined one pretty note after another, and laid them by in order. There were arge solemn dinner cards, suggestive of three courses and heavy con­versation ; there were neat little confidential notes, conveying female entreaties, there was a note on thick
Length of Line.

Lines like these are too short to make easy reading. The eye must jump back and forth too fast. Furthermore, too many words have to be broken at the end of the line and hyphenated. And a hyphenated word is considerably harder to read than an unbroken one.

Some people are constitu­tionally poor readers simply be­cause they are poor visualizers. If you happen to be of this sort, we might as well admit at once that we shall not be able to im­prove your reading nearly so much as that of most other people. But we can still do something for you. A good vis-

Lines as long as these are hard to follow. The eye loses contact and has to go back and catch it. It is also hard to find where the next line begins. Avoid books and magazines using this unsound typography.

Some people are constitutionally poor readers simply because they are poor visualizers. If you happen to be of this sort, we might as well admit at once that we shall not be able to improve your reading nearly so much as that of most other people. But we can still do something for you. A good visualizer is a person who "sees things in his mind's eye"—that is to say, he forms vivid and distinct images of things which he has seen long after he has been looking at them. An unusually good visualizer will be able to do what a friend of mine does, to the great astonishment of the onlookers. He can tell you the exact position on the page and the approximate position in the book of given sentences which he has read several years back. To be an excellent reader, you need not be endowed with such extraordinary eye imagery. But you must be able to gather the meaning from a printed page without Lines about as long as those used in this book are the easiest to read, and the type is of the most readable size.

The Best Length of Sentence.

For most people the maximum length of thoroughly easy, natural reading is around 16 words, provided that these fall into subordinate units of 4, 5, or 6 words each which can be taken in as units.

No ordinary person attends naturally and easily to more than five or six words at a single moment.
Here are samples of overlong phrases:

The street, which has been in dire need of repaying ever since the Hylan administration went out, will be badly and expensively repaired this year.

The enterprising publishers of the long, elaborate and highly technical industrial engineering history textbook have announced its forthcoming publication.

Sentences like the following are hard to read chiefly because they are too long. Avoid writers who inflict them on you. And give orders to your office staff to keep their sentences down under 16 words. If many of the words are unusual or very long, keep the sentences still shorter; down to 10 words, if possible.

1. Considering the technical difficulties of making reliable daily
   analyses of our product at the ovens, the directors have found it advisable to formulate a trade policy which permits our customers, whenever a shipment of our products turns out to run below specifications, to place a substitute order on a rush-delivery basis without extra charge, we assuming the ordinary liabilities and risks in the entire transaction. Following a conference with the director of personnel, who makes other additional suggestions, it seems advisable, in the light of difficulties that have come up within the Credit Department, to move the head of the Credit Files to another department, and to promote his assistant to the head of that department, a change which will be advantageous both to the bank and to its patrons.
2.  The witnesses summoned in the case of Ransom v. Phyles are not available at the present time, one having gone to California and the other being temporarily incapacitated due to injury during the last week, which makes it necessary to postpone the taking of both deposi­tions until a later date.
3. One of the largest deals this season in the easterly Yorkville section, which has been the scene of exceptional activity by operators and builders since Jan. 1, was closed yesterday with the purchase by Dr. Stuart L. Craig of two choice corner plots, one being the northeast corner of First Avenue and seventy-second Street and the other the northeast corner of York Avenue and Seventy-ninth Street.

Among long sentences, the least difficult are those which consist of nothing more than a series of short sentences connected by "and" and "but."
Here is a sample:

Trading in crude rubber futures on the Rubber Exchange was dull and the price movement was narrow yesterday, although it opened fairly steady, but the market dipped a little and then closed barely steady with prices in seven deliveries unchanged to 20 points down.

The Value of the Stereotyped Phrase.

Words in familiar groups are easier to attend to than those in unfamiliar groups.

If mere ease of perception is the chief aim of writing, the simple and conventionalized phrasing is best.

In much news writing, this is the case. Unusually "fine writing" is out of place here because the reader merely wants the plain facts as fast and as clearly as possible.

Rule: In Reporting Aim to Use the Simplest Habitual Phrases. Avoid the Badly Built Habitual Varieties.
The Usefulness of Short Words.

Short words have this advantage over long. They pack more meaning into a single moment of attention. Hence the reader covers more ground per unit of time.

As meanings they are more intense than long words.

Contrast these:
I had a good time at your house It gave me great pleasure to accept-
last night.        your hospitality yesterday evening.
I don't want to go to the lecture.        The prospect of attending the dissertation is not of an enticing nature.
The beach was crowded.      A motley congregation of hoipolloi was gathered at the surf.

Color of Paper.

While blue is a charming color and may be used for short letters that can be read in a minute or two, it is the worst of all for a book or magazine. It absorbs so much light that the contrast between the black type and the background is feeble. Hence it is easily read only in a very strong light.

Make Your Staff Help You Read!

Do you have to read masses of memoranda and reports submitted by members of your organization? Then advise the writers to adopt the Rules of Easy Reading. This will speed up your own work enormously.

B. Momentary Conditions of Body

Muscular Fatigue.

The great majority of people cannot do their best read­ing directly after strenuous physical exercise. (Note to the busy executive: Never try to read an engineer's report at the nineteenth hole!)

When you feel in great need of exercise, do not do heavy reading. You are in a state of muscular restlessness that will interfere with high concentration.

Hunger.

Never try to read anything important while hungry. You may be the one person in a hundred who can do this efficiently. But the other ninety-nine labor under a vague disturbance which is usually not serious enough to rise into clear consciousness, but is nevertheless an obstacle to whole-minded attention. Every school teacher is familiar with the child who is either restless or dull or both because he has not eaten any breakfast, or because he came to school in the afternoon without enough lunch. Hunger sets up muscle tensions, first in the stomach, and later in other parts of the body. They almost always interfere with the kinds of tensions which you need which serve to sustain eye attention and mind attention.

C. Momentary Conditions of Mind

The Poor Visualizer.

Some people are constitutionally poor readers simply because they are poor visualizers. If you happen to be of this sort, we might as well admit at once that we shall not be able to improve your reading nearly so much as that of most other people. But we can still do something for you. A good visualizer is a person who "sees things in his mind's eye"—that is to say, he forms vivid and distinct images of things which he has seen long after he has been looking at them. An unusually good visualizer will be able to do what a friend of mine does, to the great astonishment of the onlookers. He can tell you the exact position on the page and the approximate position in the book of given sentences which he has read several years back.

To be an excellent reader, you need not be endowed with such extraordinary eye imagery. But you must be able to gather the meaning from a printed page without definitely reading every single word on it. The competent reader takes in masses of words and perceives their significance in exactly the same way as you will take in the objects in a room into which you glance. Think of good reading just as you might think of your perceiving such a scene.

You step up to a closed door, open it quickly, glance about, and then step out, closing the door. What have you seen in the room? You will be able to enumerate an astonishing amount of its furniture and decorations—probably twenty times as much as you have specifically looked at with concentrated attention. So in the reading of a page—the art consists in taking in the whole situation and imagining accurately what you have not definitely perceived.

This manner of reading must not be confused with skim­ming, which is a wholly different trick. In skimming, you make no attempt to take in all the details. You aim merely at catching the drift.

The Listening Reader.

There is another type of reader which seems to be very common. He understands words by remembering their sounds. Psychologists believe that he is considerably slower in his reading than the visualizer and much faster than the silent talker.

Many people read in this manner by nature and cannot be trained out of it. Or if they could be trained out of it, we should have to begin with them in their first few years of life. If you happen to be of this type, do not be disappointed if you fail to attain the velocities which some other kinds of readers achieve.

The Silent Talker.

It is something of a misfortune that most of us, as little children, learn to read at about the same time that we learn to talk. Because we are learning these two main language functions during the same primitive years, we tend to link them. Our school teachers encourage this by drilling us in reading aloud. The result is that we become permanently fixed in the habit of " inner speech reading." Reading becomes a variety of talking to ourselves; and as talking is vastly slower than eye reading, it retards greatly the reading process.

The commonest outward sign of this variety of reader is a faint movement of the lips while reading. It is doubt­ful whether many adults in whom this habit is well formed can be educated out of it. On the other hand, considerable speed and accuracy of reading is possible. Accuracy is likely to be greater here than speed. That is to say, a skillful silent talker may never be able to read very much faster than an average man of his own age and education, but he stands an excellent chance of retaining the content of his reading vastly better.

The Talking Reader.

The most unfortunate mortal of all is the talking reader. He must completely articulate whatever his eye takes in. No mere vestigial lip movement is enough to fix the meaning. The operations of his eye and intellect are slowed down by the far more sluggish throat and tongue movements. Fortunately, few well-educated adults fall in this class. Young children and adults of outstandingly inferior intelligence make up the vast majority of talking readers. Now and then, however, we do find an exception. I am certain that his handicap can be at least partly overcome, though I am far from believing this to be easy for either this type of reader or for his teacher.

If you have the habit of reading aloud to somebody or of being read to, give it up at once. This is surely retarding you in your business reading.

Inevitably you tend to carry over into your office the throat and mouth habits of oral reading, and thus time is wasted.

The Eye Reader.

The fastest of all readers is the man who reads wholly or almost wholly with his eyes and never has to complete the pronouncing of any words or phrases. Many psychol­ogists insist that he uses his throat and tongue just as the silent reader and the talking reader do. Perhaps he does. But he uses them in a muscular shorthand. Faint and very rapid motor reactions of the larynx are all that he needs. We have excellent proof of this in the fact that many skilled eye readers can read and assimilate material from three to five times as fast as anybody can talk it.

The Distracted Mind.

One of the most useless and annoying of practices is to attempt reading serious material while the mind is fixed on some other object. Millions of hours have been wasted in this futile endeavor. One man in a thousand can turn his undivided attention from one subject to another without effort. But the normal human being cannot shut the door on whatever is strongly interesting him at the moment and plunge into a book dealing with some totally different interest. Serious reading demands a whole mind. Rather than undertake it with half a mind, you might better not read at all. The ancient rule holds true here, "One thing at a time, and do that well."
The busy executive finds this rule one of the hardest to follow. The day's work brings to his desk such a variety of problems and interests!

The Overburdened Memory.

We come now to a wrong reading method which is all too common among men who have to pass on highly technical problems. Lawyers, engineers, production man­agers, and many others often try to read material dealing with some subject which can be understood properly only when the reader carries clearly in mind a vast mass of facts.

Here we see the need of supporting the memory in order to read with high efficiency. In one sense it is not a problem of reading. Rather is it a problem of mastering or having available the background of information which makes reading profitable. I have seen highly competent lawyers undertake to read contracts and case records whose significance went lost because, as they read, they could not clearly recall various facts and principles which underlay the subject matter.

The rational procedure here is to look up the necessary background of information before you read, or else to have it at your elbow so that you can refer to it, while you read. Many people never think of this simple trick, because their reading habits have all been built around easy reading, for which no such array of supporting facts is needed.

Inaccurate reading is fatal here. Better not read at all than read without comprehension!

How make such difficult reading as easy as possible? Organize all that you read in some quickly available form.
This brings us to the art of keeping notes.
Save the Gist of What You Read!

What I am about to say may not apply to some readers. But it surely does to nine out of ten.

The time you spend in reading is an investment. You ought to get good returns on it. But, in order to do so, you must salt down the essence of books and articles in whatever form proves most usable.

It is foolish to trust to your memory altogether. Why overburden that excellent function, when it is much easier to organize your findings in the form of notes and file records?

Furthermore, You Strengthen Your Reading Habits as Soon as You Establish the Deeper Habit of Approaching the Printed Page with the Determination to Grasp It Weil Enough to Write Down a Brief Report for Filing.

System in preserving the important contents of what you read cannot fail to make you a better reader, If You Use What You Thus Save. It will help little if you merely jot down notes, file them, and then forget them forever.

A notebook is not a miser's sock in which treasure is to be hidden. It is a tool drawer, which ought to be opened daily. So too with filing cabinets and their orderly contents.

Every man chooses his own method of filing material. The method should be determined chiefly by the nature of your subjects and by the kind of use you will make of the notes. An engineer requires a well-analyzed and volum­inous note file. A newspaper man must have one still vaster, but it need not be well analyzed. The manager of a department in a factory may be well served if he has a file with only 30 or 40 topic headings that cover the affairs within his own domain. There is no rule here, you see. You must find what you need.

How use your reading notes?
There are many ways. But let me suggest one that you might not hit upon.

After you have finished, let us say, a magazine article on a given subject, write down your notes. Break these up into whatever topical headings you find useful. Then file them accordingly. As you do so, pull out all the other notes under the same headings and run your eye rapidly through them. Link Up What You Have Just Read with All That You Have Previously Read on the Same Subject.

It is almost certain that, as you do this, you will discover new relations, if not new facts. And you will strengthen your grasp on the entire subject.

The more frequently you run through your old notes thus, the surer your mastery of them.

And the better your mastery of them, the easier will be your future reading along these lines. For you will bring to future pages a better organized mass of information. You will eventually read faster too.

Office-hour Browsing.

I suspect that many busy executives will laugh at my next suggestion. I recommend that the executive's office be turned into a library, that he adopt the ancient and agreeable habit of browsing, that he dip into magazines, reports, and books at odd moments whenever two condi­tions can be fulfilled. First, that he can be undisturbed even for a few minutes, and second, that he is at the moment actively interested in learning some particular thing. In other words, he will read most and read best if his reading can follow the actual flow of his interests from hour to hour throughout the day. For most people, this procedure would prove much more fruitful than the more commonly adopted one of setting aside certain hours of the day or evening for serious reading.

Bear in mind that I am speaking only of reading that is done in connection with the day's work. I am not talking about the reading of fiction or poetry for the sake of relaxation. One cause of the unsatisfactory progress which many executives make in their serious business reading is their postponing it to the end of the day. They are in the proper mood for relaxation when they attempt it. Inevit­ably, they approach it in more or less the same spirit with which they would approach a popular novel. Is it any wonder that they find it appallingly dull and heavy going?

Regard your business reading as part of the day's work. Finish it during working hours. Take it as seriously as you take the payroll, and, as far as possible, when you leave the office at the day's end, leave your business reading there too. I will guarantee that most of you will increase your volume of reading at least fifty per cent if you encourage this habit.

Don't let any fake success cult trick you into the perni­cious habit of "improving your leisure hours" or "building your fortune" by doing heavy business reading out of office hours.

Interruptions.

Plan your important reading so that you can complete it without being interrupted by telephone calls or personal visits. Few people have a power of concentration suffi­cient to pick up a broken thread of thought quickly and easily. The more technical and the more novel the reading matter is, the more important continuous and undisturbed perusal. You have no difficulty in maintain­ing privacy while in conference with an important person. Think of every serious book or article you read as an important person. Usually it has a good deal more to offer you than has the important person.
Fit Your Reading to the Moment.

There is one rule of pleasure reading which can be adapted to business reading. An adult should never read anything in which he is not sufficiently interested to pursue with zest. That is the rule of cultural and pleasure reading. Plainly it cannot be literally carried over into your business office. For you often must read reports that merely irritate you, proposals from salesmen which you know you will turn down before you finish the first hundred words, and such things. But this much is possible.

Read Only What Bears Vitally on Your Most Pressing Tasks from Hour to Hour, Avoid Miscellaneous and Random Reading. Learn to Look Up in Good Books and Magazines and Reference Works New Facts Which May Give You a Broader Basis of Judgment and Action in the Immediate Affairs of Your Office.

What does this really mean? It means that you must relate your reading as intimately as possible to your hourly interests and duties. Then you will read at your best, for your whole "set of mind/' as well as your active interest and your desire to know things, will tune in with the words you scan.

Above all, it means that you must avoid reading in fixed daily doses and at fixed daily hours and in fixed books or magazines. This instantly puts books into the class with castor oil and early morning exercises. They taste like medicine, and you come to them with a wry face.

Apply Your Findings to Your Affairs as You Read.
If you will make it a rule to read only what bears on some immediate business interest, you will automatically tend to apply what you read to this interest. And this will prove ideal.

Probably, though, you may have to drill yourself a little in making such applications, especially when reading something that bears only remotely or somewhat indirectly on your practical affairs. Here we can give you no rule of procedure except the very simple one:

As You Read, Stop Every Few Minutes and Ask Yourself the Question: "How Does All This Bear on Me and My Affairs?"

The more systematically you do this, the more easily will you remember what you read, in so far as this is worth while, and dismiss all else as irrelevant.

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