Dale:
I had a friend who had an Evelyn Woods franchise in Northern Virginia many years ago (I was in college and Max was perhaps 40.) He gave me the course for free in exchange for driving him to the class meetings.
On simple material I could read upwards of 3000 wpm with fairly good comprehension (80 to 90 percent.) He even used my picture in the Washington Post for advertising. I'm sitting there with a stack of books, and the one open is a genetics textbook. Of course one cannot read tech stuff that way. It's only good for fiction, and a lot of the good stuff gets lost.
But I stopped doing it because it was WORK! Hard work. If I recall correctly you trained yourself to pick up the important words in the sentence. But it was easy to miss a no or a not so you could get the sense of a sentence reversed; you had to pay more attention than normal reading. I normally read around 500 wpm on fiction without resorting to this.
As I recall the course was developed by this Evelyn Woods person based upon her observations of the reading habits of Eleanor Roosevelt, who was a close friend of Woods. In the spiel for the course it was claimed she read whole pages at a glance, and could read upwards of 10K wpm. I honestly don't know whether to believe that or not, but I do know I could read relatively simple fiction (young adult stuff I would call it now) at a pretty astounding rate.
