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Comment by ghc | Hacker News Reader

I've never thought much about my reading speed before, but after trying this and finding the deafault setting a bit slow, I decided to compare my natural reading speed.

I was able to read the article I chose in about 85% of the time of the default 400WPM of the bookmarklet (I read the article first with a timer, and then reread with the bookmarklet), which would put me at 470WPM. With Squirt, I was only able to get up to 650WPM before it felt too uncomfortable.

I wonder if people really read one word at a time, especially when they're short words. If people do read more than one word at a time, I think a more intelligent approach might be necessary to really make the experience both comfortable and fast.

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> I wonder if people really read one word at a time

They don't. I always thought the whole point of speed reading was to ingest multiple words simultaneously.

These speed reading tools should be extended so that they can show multiple words at once rather than one word at a time. A really ambitious improvement would be to automatically recognize very common phrases and constructions and to make an effort to always show those as single groups.

> These speed reading tools should be extended so that they can show multiple words at once rather than one word at a time.

http://spreeder.com/ allows you to put in multiple words.

However, if the code for this is available for anyone to edit/modify, perhaps anyone wanting that feature could add it.

For me it depends on the content and my mood. With my app [0] I read at about 5-600wpm, whether it's 1, 2 or 3 words at a time. If I'm having trouble with a particular article, changing the number of words often fixes it. Though of course, for some content, I need to drop the WPM (esp when there's a lot of technical and/or unfamiliar terms).

[0]https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.hughesoft....

Good point! The tool should create a reading difficulty score and only offer selecting wpm, if it's beneficial.

Readability tests:

    * Accelerated Reader ATOS
    * Automated Readability Index (ARI)
    * Coleman-Liau Index
    * Dale-Chall Readability Formula
    * Flesch-Kincaid readability tests:
        * Flesch Reading Ease
        * Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level
    * Fry Readability Formula
    * Gunning-Fog Index
    * Lexile Framework for Reading
    * Linsear Write
    * LIX
    * Raygor Estimate Graph
    * SMOG (Simple Measure Of Gobbledygook)
    * Spache Readability Formula

Tool: https://readability-score.com/ Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Readability_test#Readability_te...

Totally right!! I trained myself to read two lines at once, but a tool that takes the burden of putting the pieces of the sentences together in the mind would be very very welcome! It could display two words ontop of each other that would otherwise be next to each other.

UX shows that this is the most digestable way to consume information. Going vertical should be preferred over going horizontal.

Please please somebody, would you give nilkn's idea an ear?

Word by word is feels unnatural, phrase by phrase may be better - I don't know.

However, I have dyslexia and I often struggle to follow the line, sometimes I drop out and I have to read a sentence or two again to get in flow state.

I found this method to really improve my reading speed but I am still not sure if want it as my default reading method.

When I was playing around with something like this before (Can't remember what, it was linked on HN recently), I found the optimium was 2 words at a time.

Great idea! I would love to experiment with different presentation modes. There's a discussion in here somewhere about using n-grams to choose the right phrase boundaries, which sounds like a much harder problem than I'm equipped to solve in a weekend :)

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