Word: reader
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...write well, brilliantly sometimes." Yet what they write for their daily papers is often "quite appalling, long, loose, rambling and repetitive." This lifeless writing results, King declared, from a "fetish for objectivity." Reporters "divest news of its own inherent drama. They cast away the succulent flesh and offer the reader dry bones, coated with an insipid sauce of superfluous verbiage. They reject the flashing, illuminating phrase, which can make an unknown foreign statesman come vividly alive, or a dash of wit which may relieve the tedium unavoidably contained in much important news...
...second time. Their victim is Michael Meiners, left for dead on the Eastern front while the other squad members deserted before the advancing Russians. Meiners' reappearance menaces the peace of men who have deliberately paved over the past, and his murder is promptly arranged. In case any reader has missed the point, Author Kirst puts it on the tongue of the detective assigned to find Meiners so that his comrades can kill him. "The criminals or accomplices of yesterday," says the investigator, "have lost all consciousness of their guilt or complicity. They've genuinely forgotten...
Reading was not always so hectic. In fact, the whole idea of rapid silent reading is less than 35 years old. Until the 1920's, reading instruction in America stressed accurate oral reading almost exclusively. The good reader was the pupil who could sight read aloud with expression and fluency. Then experimenters at the University of Chicago demonstrated what appears obvious today: by the fourth grade most students can read silently faster than orally. They proved, furthermore, that comprehension and retention is significantly better after silent reading...
...movements had no independence but were only symptoms of the central brain processes of perception and comprehension. Because they are reflective rather than primary it must be useless to change the eye patterns. The logical conclusion is that the only way to improve reading is to improve the reader's ability to perceive and interpret the material. For this reason, few college reading centers in the 1950's offered any courses labeled "speed reading." Whatever teaching was done in this area was structured to improve reading-study skills like vocabulary, selectivity, and versatility...
There is almost no text. McLuhan relies on aphorisms, unusual type faces, and impossible lay-outs to put his ideas across. Much like television, which the book strongly resembles in shape, it requires a great deal of participation. Passages printed upside down or inside-out force the reader to become involved. Many of the pictures at first seem incomprehensible. Only if the reader participates-to a degree he would never participate in a conventional book-is he likely to recognize, for example, the grotesque blow-up of a human foot which covers five full pages...