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Comment by sgoody | Hacker News Reader

Huh, strange thing is it seems like I just can read that quickly anyway. Started on the banner at 250wpm, pretty comfortable, went straight to 500wpm on the banner and still fairly comfortable to read. So I thought I'd have a go at just reading some plain text as quickly as I comfortably could and it turns out that I can read more quickly than I do. I don't know why I don't read more quickly than I do, perhaps it down to comprehension, but I think in the future for articles I'm not trying to fully absorb that I may try to just read them more quickly!

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My comfortable reading speed is a bit above 700wpm. On a book with proper line length, or on my Kindle. Strangely, or not at all, I only read at that speed when parsing non-fiction texts. Reading a novel, the reading times on my Kindle boil down to 300wpm.

Some stuff needs to be savored, I guess. Even at that speed, I'm known for devouring books, so I am probably reading too fast.

On a side note, if Spritz is that good, I'd like to try it out above my comfort zone. Say, 1000wpm.

I thought the same thing. Nothing a little JavaScript can't fix:

  // Insert drop down item.
  var li = document.createElement('li');
  li.innerHTML = '<a href="#">1000wpm</a>';
  li.setAttribute('data-value', '1000');
  document.querySelector('.speed ul').appendChild(li);
  
  // Create 1000wpm script
  var s = document.createElement('script');
  s.id = 'learntospritz_en_1000';
  s.type='spritztext';
  var data = JSON.parse(document.querySelector('#learntospritz_en_500').innerText);
  data[17] = '1000';
  s.innerText = JSON.stringify(data);
  document.body.appendChild(s);

I've thought about this before too, and I've realized that unless I give it some thought, my eyes read at about a talking speed, especially when reading essays and comments such as yours. My guess is since we hear the words in our heads, we prefer to hear them as if they were naturally spoken.

And that's how spritz gets its speed improvement -- by forcing you to go faster than you would choose to read.

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