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One Word at a Time

How else can you read but one word at a time? It seems like an obvious question. But we don't think one word at a time; we think in pictures and feelings and sounds (words aren't sounds, and sounds aren't words3) and smells and tastes. Then we use words to try to convey these experiences to other people. Even at this point we don't use words one at a time, because words can't be defined or understood without other words around them.

Untrained readers take in word pairs or phrases without really thinking about it. You may recall the previous section said reading 360 words per minute is easier than reading 180 words per minute. There is nothing magical or illogical about this. The speed of 180 wpm was arrived at by forcing you to read in an unnatural manner, one word at a time, at an unnaturally fast rhythm. This is how most people try to "speed read," and it just doesn't work. Drilling with different meaning group sizes at different rhythms ensures you have clear evidence, your own experience, that rhythm is as important as words per minute. Reading at the proper rhythm will allow you to dramatically increase the size of the meaning groups that you read. The drills teach you to adjust your rhythm and meaning group size to fit your material, your mood, and your reading needs.

Since we don't think one word at a time, it doesn't make sense to keep reading that way. Once you break the subvocalizing habit you can start reading in larger groups. This is even true for reading out loud. A good "performance" reader doesn't read word by word. Instead they read ahead, and figure out---mostly in the back of their minds---just which words go together and which ones don't. Then they alter the speed and volume and voice tone for different groups of words, which makes the reading come alive. This is even more important in speed reading. No word stands alone. To understand what I mean by the word "run" you have to know if I am talking about your hose, a woman's hose, salmon, grunion, horses, humans, or luck. Without other words around the word "run" there is no way to know which of over one hundred meanings (go look in any good sized dictionary) to pick.

In speed reading we break the habit of pretending that individual words have concrete meaning. Instead we look at word groups. The drill starts with singles words for the same reason we start at sixty words per minute for the counting. It is important to start with a success and work up from there. But the very first drill introduces the experience of working with word pairs. It may seem odd, at first, to count word pairs and ask yourself, "Do these words go together?" All you are doing is making yourself more conscious of something you do all the time. Once you have the hang of working with pairs, start looking for pairs of pairs, then phrases, clauses, and sentences.

Many people place undue emphasis on words, lines, and pages. No one reads that way. What you will learn to do is look for larger and larger meaning groups. This is the same task as when you went from noticing curves and lines to noticing letters. You started taking in groups of things to make meaning, understanding the larger meaning groups without paying attention to individual lines and curves. Later you did much the same thing in the move from letters to words, except that most people don't go all the way with this. Phonics is part of why most people never make the break from words to larger meaning groups. Although letters have sounds associated with them, we learn words as sounds first; the letters comes later. But phonics tries to start with the letters, but because most sounds can be represented by more than one letter group, translating from sounds to letters can be a confusing task. Often there is a huge difference between how we expect a word to be spelled and how it really is spelled. Just as often we will see a word we've never heard and end up pronouncing it wrong. Most people never learn to work with meaning groups larger than a word because of the slippery relationship between letters and sounds. You know the word "action" doesn't sound like "act-eye-on". You know what it really sounds like, and you also know what action means without the sound, but if you are subvocalizing you will never make a habit of getting meaning by sight instead of sound. Counting breaks subvocalization, thereby helping you notice that you can read, know, and understand a word without having to hear it. Add the idea that there are larger and more useful meaning units to pay attention to and you really get a boost in speed. If you use that speed for reading routine work reports, you will have time left over to read other things for the beauty of the words at whatever speed you choose.

There is a problem that comes up because of the way word groups are laid out on the page. In a perfect world each new sentence would start a new line, and when the sentence ended the line would end. Instead, we use capitals and periods because doing it the other way takes up too much space. What we end up with is a system where some sentences take up several lines, and some lines have more than one sentence. Sometimes a whole paragraph is only one word long. In school this made things hard. Maybe you remember asking the teacher, "How long is a paragraph?" One teacher told my seventh grade English class that a sentence is a complete thought. The next week, the same teacher told us that a paragraph is a complete thought. How could they be the same? The answer is that the definitions of sentence and paragraph aren't very scientific. The good news is that even if you can't define the difference between a sentence and a paragraph, you still know what the difference is. You know it the same way you know the difference between "The cat ate the rat," and "The rat ate the cat." The same words are in both sentences, but many years before you ever learned about subject position or SVO construction, you intuitively knew how very different the two sentences are. You don't need to know all the proper grammar terms to speak well, nor to write well, nor to read well. Knowing those terms has little to do with understanding the meaning of what we say or hear or read.

Because of the variable length of sentences and paragraphs some of the drills shift from counting clauses to counting partial lines. Remember, you aren't really trying to read half of a line all at once. For the drill you are looking at the half-line and asking yourself, "What's the biggest meaning group in this half line?" Beginning with the very first drill, looking at word pairs puts you in a receptive mode for noticing larger meaning groups. You already know plenty about how words go together. Linguists call this 'constituent structure', a fancy way of saying you know what does and what does not constitute a phrase. Think about the sentence,

The painter of the picture hoped the public would like his work.

The words "The" and "painter" go together in a different way than "painter" and "of" go together. The word "hoped" goes with the word "painter" in a way that it doesn't go with "work." You know all of these things without having to think about them. Normally you wouldn't bother to think about how the words go together at all, any more than you think about the specific muscles you use to shake someone's hand. Evaluating word pairs will help you better use your intuitive knowledge of how words go together. When you look at two words and ask yourself, "Do these go together?" you are using an important part of your mind with extra precision. As a result you will naturally start seeing larger groups.

There is no limit, in theory, to the size of a meaning group. In theory a book is a meaning group all it's own. In reality there seem to be some limits to what size meaning groups we can use for reading. The natural speed readers I have studied say the paragraph is an upper limit. Some systems claim to teach page at a glance reading. Because a page is a "printing group" instead of a "meaning group" it seems unlikely that anyone ever really reads a page at a time. The section titled "The Obstacles," discusses the page-a-second claim in more detail.(not available on line)

When you read by phrases and clauses, you will begin to notice how often some words occur. These words don't really have much effect on the meaning of the sentence, but good grammar requires them. Little clues like tone of voice and facial expressions and gestures keep things clear when we talk. Since these things are missing in print we use these helper words to keep things clear in print. You wouldn't say things they way you write them, and when you read at the larger meaning group levels you become aware of the amount of repetition and "non-meaning" words that are used in writing. As you get used to seeing these helper words they will let you take in even bigger groups of words. In a sentence like,

The cat chased the rat

there are five words, but only three meaning groups:

1. The cat
2. chased
3. the rat

We use "the" in two of those groups for grammar, but you don't really need to pay much attention to them to understand the sentence and "see" the action. The more you drill with larger meaning groups the more you will automatically take in these kinds of words, and phrases that work like them, leaving your mind free to make pictures and understand meanings.