Spreeder.com | read 300 words/minute instantly
spreeder.com
spreeder.com
Anyway, the intended purpose for spreeder is not to supplement your reading (I personally don't use it for that purpose), but rather as a training tool. The one (and probably only) thing I got out of any speed reading training course was that there's a lot of redundancy when reading texts.
People "read" text in their head (subvocalize), which slows down reading (vs just seeing + understanding it). Also, most people tend to reread a lot as well since they're not focusing.
Spreeder is meant to be a trainer of sorts. When words are flashing at a high speed in front of you, you're forced to focus more on what's going on, and you don't get a chance to reread things you missed. So you're naturally inclined to pay more attention. When I want to train, I read at a speed where I can barely keep up - it helps eliminate me naturally trying to subvocalize the words in my mind.
In the end state, I've found it's helped me in my normal reading. I don't actually use spreeder to read my daily dose of internet stuff, but I spend less time in the unfocused state so I get more out of it.
Just my two cents.
I have trouble reading long words with spreeder (for example when reading German texts). Maybe you could make the tool pause a bit longer for words above a certain threshold.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speed_reading
Even if rapid serial visual presentation improves reading speed (which is dubious), it has enough negative aspects to counteract any benefits. For example, going back or doing any controlled skimming is difficult. You also lose all the contextual and landmark cues of page layout.
Comprehension always trumps speed. I'm always surprised by people who say "I've read that book in an hour" or something like that. When I read, I get hundreds of ideas and have hundreds of questions in my head and I usually either write them down or look up the references on the web. That takes time.
I read a lot and the only piece of advice that has worked is: stay focused and concentrate on what you're reading. Don't have an email client open, don't have a dozen tabs open... just eliminate all of the distractions and concentrate on what you're reading.
Not that I ever learnt how to do this though, not even after I put a full 15 minutes of effort into it.
Concerning this kind of spead-reading; in my experience it's great for alpha-subjects (is that English? It means non-scientific in Dutch). I used to be able to read 400 page books at 40 (or 60, or 80, probably 80 because my memory is always exaggerated) seconds per page and still get enough out of it to pass the tests.
I have a pretty good method down now that might work for others. Whenever I'm reading a (non-fiction) book I put a dash in the margin next to any important point. I usually have two or three marks per page. Then after I'm done reading I go back and retype the sentences I marked into a MindMap. That way I can read the book at a reasonable speed since I'm not making marginalia, and after I'm done with the book it takes maybe three or four hours to transcribe into the MindMap.
Typing out the full text of the interesting parts of the books is relatively fast since I am a fast typist, only slightly longer than condensing it down into quick notes.
The MindMap itself has a few advantages. First, the hierarchical nature of the software provides built in context and allows me to mentally switch gears between the different layers of the argument very fast. Because of this I often am able to create new ideas that I wouldn't have been able to have otherwise. It also makes it very easy for me to incorporate the important parts of the book into other projects later. If someone says something that reminds me of a book on news.yc, I can find the relevant quote and have it cut-and-pasted into the comment field in less than a minute.
Also, because I organize all my startup ideas and other projects in MindMaps, I can easily drag and drop an entire book directly into that project if it is relevant. Then if I'm talking to someone about the project and they ask me a question, I can look up the answer almost instantly if I don't already know it offhand.
FreeMind is the best product out there because of its speed and its emphasis on folding. The latter part might not make any sense until you play around with it for a while and start making really big maps.
As Jakob Neilsen's eye tracking studies have shown, most people don't read the text on a Web page linearly, they scan it in an F pattern (http://www.useit.com/alertbox/reading_pattern.html). Good info architects design pages to convey the most important information in these spaces and put supplementary information below and to the right in case the user needs more info. Likewise, they use hierarchical headings to show relationship between information, and bullets and ordered lists to show groups of information.
With spreeder, the benefit of all this architecture is gone. You may be able to read the words faster, but do you actually comprehend the concepts and do you have good recall later? I'm skeptical.
Now, if a future version of spreeder could parse a page and somehow show these hierarchies and groupings in a simplified way (isntead of just showing one sequential word at a time), that might be interesting.
http://liveink.com/demo_samples.php
And the slashdot about it: http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/05/11/148220
If you want to skim or go back, don't use it. But there are sometimes things you read where you don't need that.
I just tested my reading with both this and the original text of an article (for those curious, it was some random chunk of text that was posted here: http://abstractgeneratorfactory.blogspot.com/2008/07/why-jav...).
When reading the article over (2nd time, avoiding pauses to think) I managed to get the 2072 words read in about 2:20 (so, between 850 to 900 words/min).
When reading with spreeder, I couldn't keep track past 600 words/min.
This was done a couple of times with consistent results (so it wasn't just me remembering what I'd read beforehand)
So with spreeder, your speed is actually divided by 2-3, you lose the context, the ability to pause and think, the images, the ability to skim, etc...
When the rate at which you ingest words is fixed, it doesn't allow you to actually process them. What's important is concepts expressed and learned in a given amount of time, not the words scanned.
Comprehension-wise, at the 30 wpf setting, the trouble seems to be when the app splits at sentence boundaries.
It's very interesting that this simple tool gives me personal insight into how I visually process texts.
Suggested Improvements: * A hotspot animation of the body of text instead of a status bar * could work well in low page real estate - a ticker-reader. * clickable, or used to navigate search results
- No check on JS being blocked. Trivial but the site just gives a blank stare.
- When loading the first time the RH Google adverts advertise competitors before your app.
- Why are you flashing 1 word at a time?
The first 2 are trivial, the third I'm not so sure about. In any speed reading that I've read about or tried the emphasis is on being able to increase the chunk of text the eye/brain can input and comprehend at once. When I added some text to read I (surprisingly) could comprehend the text at default speed. The speed however was not fast enough. And I got the distinct impression the reading flow was broken up by word instead of sentence. So I then tried a quick experiment using the tool to read the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speed_reading entry.
Surprisingly it worked pretty well. I got through the article pretty well. I even read on the pro's and con's of "centre-based" text vs whole word chunking and agree this one works well after you get used to it. One thing I did notice was large words can be missed if shown infrequently. I also tried to move the text to left justification. It did not seem to solve this. It would be interesting if you had some training tests to calibrate your speed and check your comprehension. Read a 1800 word essay, answer some questions to see if you are reading at your optimum.
All in all, the app works for me.
More recently, a research project called 'BuddyBuzz' out of Stanford was pushing it for reading on cellphones.
Also, it might be better in cases where you want to be sure you read the whole text, rather then skimming, maybe learning? (obviously not always).
I wish my kindle would support this, however, its e-ink display is too slow.
But, after a little bit of tweaking, I was able to get my speed up to 500 wpm without too much trouble.
You read a TEXT. A text is not just an array of words but an array of words linked to each other in context. So you don't get information out of your text very well if you see one word after each other. It's useful to go back and re-think what you have read sometimes. The other drawback is that information is unequally distributed in the text and some parts can be read in a quicker way than others. Text is never linear for a human being.
So let's drop this application. You better read 1 text and get the whole context than read 3 texts in the same time without giving your brain what it wants ...
That was my first reaction as well. The difference is I tried a quick experiment to see if what I thought was what was actually happening. While individual words read out do appear chunked maybe gains in reading can be made by pre-parsing the text. I noticed it was much like reading a piece of text out aloud and the only stumbling blocks long words.