Evelyn Wood

Evelyn Nielsen Wood (January 8, 1909 – August 26, 1995) was an American educator and businessperson, widely known for popularizing speed reading, although she preferred the phrase "dynamic reading". 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) by a factor of three to ten times or more, while preserving and even improving comprehension. The system was taught in rented offices dubbed "institutes" as Evelyn Wood Reading Dynamics, a business Wood co-founded with her husband, Doug Wood. It eventually had 150 outlets in the US, 30 in Canada, and others worldwide. Background Evelyn Nielsen, the daughter of Elias and Rose (Stirland) Nielsen, was born in Logan, Utah, in 1909 and grew up in Ogden. She received a B.A. in English from the University of Utah in 1929 — later pursuing a master's degree in speech. On June 12, 1929, she married Myron Douglas "Doug" Wood (1903–1987), son of William Wood Jr. and Ellen Sutton (Goddard) Wood – and student body president at the University of Utah. Doug Wood grew up in Salt Lake City, Utah and earned a B.A. in business from the University of Utah in 1929. The couple had one biological daughter, Carol Wood Davis Evans of Tucson, AZ and an adopted daughter, Anna Wood North. 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. She spent the next two years observing individuals that, according to her assessments, read thousands of words per minute. Later she worked for nine years as a teacher and girls' counselor at Jordan High School in Sandy, Utah south of Salt Lake City. With a small group of partners, Evelyn and Doug Wood created a speed reading business in 1959. Their company, Evelyn Wood Reading Dynamics, was initially based in the Washington, DC, area but quickly expanded to 32 cities. Instrumental in the business's success was its wholehearted embrace by the media. Early coverage of the method in Time magazine accepted all of Wood's claims as factual, and other major news outlets were equally uncritical. Early on, an educator at the Harvard Business School raised questions about the validity of Wood's data, but these were largely ignored.