Several years ago, I came across the manual for a self-paced speed reading course. S Intrigued by promises of reading thousands of words per minute, I worked my way through the book. To my disappointment, my reading speed did not improve very much. I re-read the instructions and was urged to go faster! Skip words! Ignore the unimportant stuff! I did all that and my speed improved, but my understanding and retention of what I read dropped dramatically. I concluded that for some reason I just wasn’t a good candidate for speed reading. Much later I learned that my experience was quite typical.
The term speed reading was coined by a school teacher named Evelyn Wood in the 1950s.