Paying an undisclosed amount for the then-struggling business, D.E.A.R. In 1962 the Woods sold the business to a group of Washington investors, Diversified Education and Research Corporation (D.E.A.R.), which operated it mainly as a franchising system. Nevertheless, Kennedy's prolific reading and Wood's methods merged in the public mind, lending legitimacy to Wood's claims. He said he'd taught himself speed-reading after taking a few classes from a different company that had since ceased operations. Kennedy, who reportedly read at 1,200 words per minute, had no formal association with Evelyn Wood Reading Dynamics. Kennedy elevated speed-reading to a craze, or, as some saw it, a job requirement. Ī scathing critique of the method in the Saturday Evening Post got somewhat more attention. Early on, an educator at the Harvard Business School raised questions about the validity of Wood's data, but these were largely ignored. Early coverage of the method in Time magazine accepted all of Wood's claims as factual, and other major news outlets were equally uncritical. Instrumental in the business's success was its wholehearted embrace by the media. Their company, Evelyn Wood Reading Dynamics, was initially based in the Washington, DC, area but quickly expanded to 32 cities. With a small group of partners, Evelyn and Doug Wood created a speed reading business in 1959. Later she worked for nine years as a teacher and girls' counselor at Jordan High School in Sandy, Utah south of Salt Lake City. She spent the next two years observing individuals that, according to her assessments, read thousands of words per minute. Wood said she initiated her own study of the habits of naturally fast readers after watching a professor flip through her master's thesis at surprisingly high speed before asking her questions that, she said, indicated perfect comprehension. The couple had one biological daughter, Carol Wood Davis Evans of Tucson, AZ and an adopted daughter, Anna Wood North. in business from the University of Utah in 1929. Doug Wood grew up in Salt Lake City, Utah and earned a B.A. ![]() ![]() and Ellen Sutton (Goddard) Wood – and student body president at the University of Utah. On June 12, 1929, she married Myron Douglas "Doug" Wood (1903–1987), son of William Wood Jr. in English from the University of Utah in 1929 - later pursuing a master's degree in speech. Background Įvelyn Nielsen, the daughter of Elias and Rose (Stirland) Nielsen, was born in Logan, Utah, in 1909 and grew up in Ogden. It eventually had 150 outlets in the US, 30 in Canada, and others worldwide. The system was taught in rented offices dubbed "institutes" as Evelyn Wood Reading Dynamics, a business Wood co-founded with her husband, Doug Wood. She created and marketed a system said to increase a reader's speed (over the average reading rate of 250 to 300 words a minute)īy a factor of three to ten times or more, while preserving and even improving comprehension. Evelyn Nielsen Wood (Janu– August 26, 1995) was an American educator and businessperson, widely known for popularizing speed reading, although she preferred the phrase "dynamic reading".
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