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Scientists Offer New Way to Read Online Text
An anonymous reader writes "Scientists at a small startup called Walker Reading Technologies in Minnesota have determined that the human brain is not wired properly to read block text. They have found that our eyes view text as if they're peering through a straw. Not only does your brain see the text on the line you're reading, but it's also uploading superfluous information from the two lines above and the two lines below. This causes your brain to engage in a tug of war as it fights to filter and ignore the noise. The result is slower reading speeds and decreased comprehension. The company has developed a product that automatically re-formats text in a way that your brain can more easily comprehend."
It's certainly very easy to read, and the formatting reminds me of Dr. Seuss books.
The only downside I can see (if this gets used in print) is the waste of paper compared to current methods.
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
The screenshot
looks good.
It breaks the text down
into phrases
like poetry.
(It looks sort of
like code.)
But, for anything
other than a short document,
you will be scrolling a long time,
baby.
Just up the css line-height to 2, and call it a day.
technical writing / development
You mean they created columns?!
online advertisting! If you thought an article spanning 10 pages was bad, wait till they become 40-50.
Of course their FAQs are not posted in that format.
In poetry, this sort of formatting is common. But the formatting implies emphasis, inflection, and so on. All of the readers know this, consciously or not. So their perception of what the text says will be different. Block text adds little emphasis (although short paragraphs convey faster action).
Also, while it is true that people stumble on the text above or below a line, this effect can be helpful if you're skimming. It would be a pain to skim a ten (block paragraph) page of text in this poetry format. Not only would there be a lot more scrolling, but you can't just "image" a paragraph at a time to find the piece you're looking for. I'll admit, the modern way of formatting text may not be the best, but it is so entrained that'd be tough to change without all sorts of unintended consequences.
Use the Firehose to mod down Second Life stories!
This is news reporting. The fact that it's related to a commercial product does not inherently make it less news-worthy than if it's from a government or academic institution (though it's reasonable to do a bit of fact-finding, in either case).
Summary: buy our product.
The problem I have with the examples are that they are really easy to read aloud, either in one's head or vocally, but very difficult to read fast without actually verbalizing the script. Some of the research notes support this view: After several students requested to read the syntactically formatted textbooks aloud in a low voice, and were permitted to do so, a majority of students elected, at least from time to time, to read these texts aloud. Although poorer readers in the VSTF group would read aloud regularly, one-fourth of the students in the VSTF group preferred to read silently and alone. This request to read aloud never emerged from the control groups , who, by contrast, generally resisted or declined reading aloud. In other words, the VSTF format seems to be geared toward verbalizing the sentence, either in one's head or vocally. That makes it good for 'slow' reading for facts in complext texts, like all of their tests were (college and high school textbooks), but maybe not good for speed reading esp where the exact content doesn't matter (harry potter).
"Why?"
Because paper costs money and space is limited. Both of these explanations are superior to yours.
"Poetry regularly follows such patterns, using them to express a certain spoken "tone" within the meter."
Poetry is not a legitimate comparison. Poetry is frequently formatted with no regard whatsoever to how easy it is to read. Often, the formatting is done to preserve tings which actually make it harder to read, on purpose.
"So why can't we transfer it to regular text? There must be an overriding reason?"
Because paper costs money and space is limited. Both of these explanations are superior to yours.
"When you introduce a solution to a problem, you need to make sure that it's easily adoptable."
No actually you don't.
"Is the new solution truly superior if the supposedly superior solution is more difficult to use than the solution it replaces?"
Did you really say this? How many things did you learn as a child that you found a better way to do later, but had to learn first? If it's difficult at first, but then becomes more efficient after learning, then yes it is better.
It seems that ultimately your only real objection is that this is "inelegant", which has caused you to manufacture other spurious objections in order to justify your dislike of this methods aesthetics.
Now how does this explain that we're able to read text more than 20 times as fast as it can be uttered ?
Some people who have trouble reading speedily might be trying to "silently speak out" what they're reading, acting like a narrator and a listener in one, instead of just absorbing and processing the incoming stream of 2-3 lines at a time (and a line or two during the backscan, if you're into boustrophedonic reading).
For them this layout may help. For experienced readers, not so much.
Flourescent (adj): smelling like ground wheat.
The new cues may change the overall meaning of the text resulting in a failure to communicate.
I think this might be my only objection to the idea. I went to their site and started reading Moby Dick, and it immediately occurred to me that, by changing the formating, it changed the way I was reading the text. I think it does make reading the text easier, but it made me read the text more like poetry, and in poetry, line breaks often have a sort of significance. A line break tends to change the timing, almost like a form of punctuation.
If you think about it, we often use whitespace like punctuation. I just did-- I broke to a new paragraph to signify that I was shifting focus. Maybe this is something fairly innate in people, or maybe it's strictly conventional. Either way, that's how we all read. Whitespace is punctuation. Therefore, it's not clear to me that it's necessarily appropriate to go adding whitespace to other people's writing without considering the effect on meaning.
Consider if someone published a copy of Moby Dick with new punctuation, periods and commas where they weren't before, and dropping some commas and periods. Let's say they broke up paragraphs how they wanted and not how Melville wrote them. Could they make it more readable? Perhaps. But it's trickier to ask whether such an act would be appropriate. By changing the punctuation and whitespace, you change the cadence and timing, and potentially the meaning. I'm sure Faulkner could be edited to make it more readable, but readability isn't everything.
Why do you think we format code this way?
Deleted
This sounds like the conventional wisdom from your basic Tech Writing class, where the rule of thumb is; at least 50% whitespace on the page.
In fact, childrens' book typesetters have known about this, ever since there have been childrens' books.
Now - for reading text on the web; I've noticed - particularly in ad-supported content, that there's a trend (who am I kidding? It's been the standard for over 10 years now - and before that; ad-supported print) - to condense text to make more room for ads. (which is why the text-size plugins for firefox are so great!).
Sorry, but I'm not too terribly impressed with this "study".
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.