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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS - I wish to acknowledge with thanks the privilege of reprinting, for use in exercises, several articles and news items from The New York Times; from the publications of the McGraw-Hill Book Company, Inc.; from "The New Reformation," by Michael Pupin, published by Charles Scribner's Sons; and from "The Twilight of the American Mind," by Walter B. Pitkin, published by Simon and Schuster. Each reprint is individually accredited.

HOW TO - This book has three divisions of instructive reading matter. They are the Introduction, Part I, and Part II.

Please Read These Three Straight Through as You Would Read a Magazine Article. Do Not Stop to Analyze Anything. Do Not Stop to Perform Any Exercises. First Form a General Impression of the Whole Subject.

WARNING EXERCISES - The value of the exercises in this book depends largely on your being unfamiliar with their content when you try them.

Do not turn through the book and read the text of any exercise. Omit every exercise which you may have accidentally read in advance.

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.

01. 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.

02. WORD HABITS - In a book like this I cannot set exercises suited to the special needs of readers in many fields of industry and trade. I cannot teach the silk salesman the right word habits for things in the silk trade, or the automobile engineer the right word habits for his laboratory reading. The best I can do is to submit sample exercises and ask you to invent your own, drawing on your own specialty for the facts and language symbols.

03. EYE GRASP - Warning! Do Not Look at the Following Pages Except under Test Conditions. If You Do Look at Them Accidentally, You Will Have to Ask Somebody to Prepare Another Set of Phrases to Be Used in Testing Your Skill of Perception.

The purpose of these exercises is to show you how many words your eye takes in at a single glance.

The success of the test depends entirely upon your own skill in reducing your look to a single glance.

04. SKIM - Test your speed and accuracy from time to time by measuring yourself as you read or skim articles in periodicals.

Distinguish carefully your purposes.
If you wish merely to find out what an article discusses, and cannot learn this from the headline or opening para­graph, remember that you ought to be able to do it fairly well at the rate of at least 600 words per minute.

05. PRACTICE - Here are some exercises for practice reading. They represent four degrees of difficulty. Before each group the reading rate which you should be able to attain is indicated. Perhaps you cannot read it at this speed at first. But you ought to after you have worked for two months on this book.

Make other exercises for yourself, classifying the reading matter as it is done here. Time yourself accurately. Keep this up for four to eight weeks.

06. PROGRESS CHART - As soon as you begin to study this book, start entries in this chart.

Make at least fifty entries on as many days. It is best not to make them on successive days, inasmuch as you will not improve your reading day by day, but rather in a series of spurts at irregular intervals.

It would be best if you could manage to make an entry every second or third day for the first two months, and perhaps once every five days during the third and fourth months.

THE END