A challenge. If the reader is to concentrate, he needs the challenge of new interests, different points of view, and information that makes demands on his understanding; without this challenge his attention is liable to wander.

Efficiency is itself a challenge. Even when the material is not particularly interesting, good methods, ways of disposing of the project as quickly and as easily as possible, can provide a most effective stimulus to concentration.

FIXATIONS AND EYE SPAN

If you'll notice, the eyes of a person while reading travel in little skips and jumps: a darat, a pause; a dart, a pause; a daart, a pause. These brief pauses are known as fixations.

It is during these fixations that the eyes do the reading. During the darts, or interfixation movements, the eyes see nothing.

The number of fixation per line depends upon two things. (1) the length of the line of the print and (2) the amount of printed material the eyes can take in at one pause -- an "eyeful," so to speak. As a general rule, the average book should be read with two or three fixations per line.

Words are read on either side of each point of fixation in one unmoving glance or visual 'span'. The eye cuts the line of print into segments, taking snapshots like a camera; it does not read phrases, the mind does that. Nor does the eye fixate important words within the perceptual span. This manner of fixation is not understood, for sometimes the eye lands on the empty space between the words; all that can be said is that it seems to choose a point of vantage. The eye is like a movie camera, taking snapshots of the print; these the mind interprets as a continuous movement within the flow of meaning.

The expert reader has disciplined eyes. When the eyes of a skillful reader dart at a page of print, they see more, faster, than the eyes of the ordinary reader.

SEEING VERSUS READING

To read we must process the author's words; we must distill and extract from the words, as such, the nuggets of thought which the author is trying to express. In the process of being written, the thoughts of the author have undergone metamorphoses: what started in the thought areas of the author's brain as notions, ideas, thoughts, concdpts come to us as a string of black symbols on a white background, irregularly grouped, and put together according to an accepted and arbitrary formula, involving rules of grammar and rhetoric, which we call by the blanket term of writing, or written communication.

There is one thing that the efficient reader is looking for, that is, what thought lies beneath the printed word.

Words are important; though they are not all-important. One of the greatest things that any reader ever learns is that not all words are equally important. The words may be many; the ideas, few. Or the reverse may be the case. The skillful reader, however, spots the compactness of the thought almost as soon as his eyes alight upon the page. This is a characteristic of the printed page which he definitely looks for, and it is one of the skills of good reading to appraise the thought density of the page immediately and set one's pace of reading accordingly. But, no matter how compact the thoughts may be, every sentence that expresses these thoughts has some dead spots where the eye notices the words, but where the mind does not do any reading. Why? Because nothing is in those particular words that helps to convey or advance thoughts.