Slashdot Mirror
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
We could all
just start typing
all our messages
just like this!
Nah, that might
be too annoying...
My blog
I personally just highlight the text with my mouse as I read through an article seems to help me keep my place and read faster.
Of course it drives anyone reading over my shoulder nuts....
Technology, the cause of and solution to all of life's problems.
...someone would have already invented this "new" method. Unfortunately, it's not better. The text is certainly easier to follow (which proves the research), but that's only half the battle. The formatting implies certain cues such as tone, volume, and emphasis. By reformatting the text, the software loses the original cues and accidentally adds new ones. The new cues may change the overall meaning of the text resulting in a failure to communicate.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
Years ago I saw a shareware program that was supposed to help you read text faster. I think they were basing it upon a different principle involving eye movement speed, but it would be a compatible idea to this approach. You would just look at a certain fixed point on a blank page and it would feed you one word at time at whatever speed you select. The words always showed up at the same position, so in terms of this article your "straw" would be in a fixed position.
I was able to read quite a bit faster, but I did not have the money to spend on it at the time. I also wasn't sure how useful it would be outside of novels.
WTF? This is how I've always done speed-reading...
Don't tell me to get a life. I'm a gamer; I have LOTS of lives!
Does anyone else see the similarity between the formatted text and what many advertisers and graphic designers have been doing for years?
That's supposed to be LESS confusing? My eye jumps to the colored words first, which appear to be picked almost randomly. (It looks like they are actually the verbs of the sentences.) Then I have to force my eye back to the beginning of the sentence and try to ignore the different colors. Then, because there's a break between that sentence and the next, I have to do the same thing all over again.
And what's the difference if my eyes are pulling words from the previous and next sentence or the pieces of the current one? It's still giving me information that I don't need -right now- in the sentence.
And the additional poem-like formatting is also confusing, as special formatting usually -means- something.
Training myself to read this, which is only used online and only if licensed by this company, would be a hassle. And used very little.
"If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; But if you really make them think, they'll hate you." - DM
I couldn't understand the summary... there is too much text there in one big block. Could someone please explain it to me... maybe reformat it so it's easier to read?
I guess there really is something to be said for haphazard scrawling of random broken sentences which trail annoyingly around the page.
It looks like there are quite a few Vogon-poetry hopefuls in sororities and coffeehouses to whom I owe an apology!
Slashdot Burying Stories About Slashdot Media Owned
Of course their FAQs are not posted in that format.
we see things not as as they are, but as we are.
-- anais nin
I try to forrmat my writing In a way that is easy to read. But Slashdot has Lameness filtering That makes it difficult indeed.
/usr/games/fortune
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!
First impressions when looking at the image that accompanies this article:
1) The block text version is actually blurred. Compare the initial "M" from each side... there's a major difference in clarity of the image.
2) I find the "clear" version nearly impossible to read. It's a bit too randomly coloured and formatted.
3) The people who did this research are idiots.
OK, so two of the three are subjective. But I'm pretty certain about the first, and I think the third is pretty likely.
Add in the points other people have mentioned -- long scroll times, loss of standard formatting tricks to convey meaning -- and this all starts looking pretty useless to me.
They just went and put an indenter on the English Language!
Now someone needs to invent a variant of English that requires indentation as a part of the syntax. It would be the Python of natural languages. Pyglish?
seeing the article
text, strangely familiar
where have I seen it?
the light bulb goes on
a haiku generator
can it truly be?
There is a spellbook here; eat it? [ynq]
My uncle could read 700 words per minute. He would look a section of a page and grab part of 3 or 4 lines at once. He brain would be putting the lines back together while he was scaning the next section. He always read that way. He was a farmer - he almost no time for reading in the summer but long stretches in the winter. He could easily read over 100 books in that time.
In other words the effect that this process is fighting can be used to read much faster than most of us do. I can't do it for more than a few minutes but if you trained early enough or hard enough I think you could get there.
All generalizations are false, including this one. Mark Twain
At work, I deal with the software used to help kids who are struggling with reading a lot. Presently, all it does is give them a section of text, let them listen to recorded readings of it, and then have them try to emulate what they heard. It does work for a lot of kids, but it's slow going.
What I see in this new method of formatting is that the sentences are being being broken up very similar to how their natural spoken rhythm would flow, making it much easier for a struggling student to read aloud. It shouldn't be a crutch, but I can picture a kid being shown the entire written text, and then this version of it. Have the kid read the Live Ink version aloud into a microphone and play back the recording for him to hear how it sounds, then try to do that with the "normal" text.
This could really be something huge for education. I'm about to go talk to our special programs director about it, this looks like it could be very useful.
120 characters for a sig? That's bloody useless.
But that's so slow. Not everyone reads "through a straw" like they claim. IF you're really interested in reading, then you should be training your brain to read faster. Stop doing slow stuff like moving your mouth or running your finger along word by word.
You shouldn't be like a beginner reading one of those children's books with 3 words a page.
Learn to read stuff chunk by chunk - keep your eyes further away from the screen if the whole column is to wide to fit - that's why newsprint is in narrow columns. Most human eyes don't have a wide angle of view especially with those crappy blind spots.
Brains definitely can do parallel processing, and read multiple lines at a time. And brains can learn and adapt. Trust me, you do not want to adapt to reading like a beginner.
Often I can spot spelling mistakes after just a glance at an entire page of print - they just stick out. And sometimes at a glance, my brain notices that there's an unusual word somewhere, and I become aware of it, but just don't know where I saw it on the page (but just a brief search and I'll find it). I think there must be editors (real ones not slashdot ones) out there who do this much better.
In this day and age where there's lots of textual data I don't think it's a good idea to teach people to read stuff in a format where they have to keep doing "next page" every second.
Life is too short.
Newspapers already do this
to some degree.
They use narrow columns when
formatting their text so
people can read it faster.
Your fovias don't have
to bounce back and forth
as much.
Ruby + English = Rubish
Summary:
buy our product.
USE HOT GRITS WITH STATUE OF NATALIE PORTMAN (NAKED AND PETRIFIED)
Why do you think we format code this way?
Deleted
It sounds to me like scientists are over-thinking the problem. These are all basic design problems a designer with good typography skills can resolve. The solution certainly isn't to reinvent how we write.
I see three glaring problems making text difficult to read, especially online.
1) Text blocks are too wide. This is the biggest problem I see. It's difficult to follow progress when you're reading 10pt text running all the way across the screen. One of the biggest things I hate about websites is when they stretch EVERYTHING including text. Open the window too wide and you get these ridiculously long lines of text. Slashdot is guilty of this.
The solution to this is to restrict the width of any copy, even if the page itself can stretch. A line of text shouldn't really be run any longer than roughly 10 long words. I'd say a good example of line width can be found in paperback novels.
2) Not enough leading. Leading is the space between lines. This alone solves the problem mentioned where a reader starts getting distracted by words above and below the sentence currently being read. Again, this is basic design and it's something completely disregarded on the internet where lines of text are crammed together.
The solution here is especially simple. Increase linespace, and I suggest being fairly liberal with spacing.
3) Poor font selection and small point size. The standard browser fonts are somewhat readable. Serif fonts, like Times New Roman, are more legible than san-serif fonts like Verdana and Arial. This is a minor problem but serif fonts are recognized more quiclky. But I'd say font selection is dependent on the overall design of the site. A bigger problem is when someone uses some wacky font that's difficult to read, although this is more of an issue in Flash where fonts can be embedded.
The bigger problem is font size. After all these years with dramatic increases in screen resolutions why are we still reading text online in 10 point? We should be at least at 12 point, and ideally 14pt or higher. There's no need to go huge, but it's time we start utilizing these screen resolutions more effectively. There's no need to cram a novel onto a single page. When a reader encounters a screen crammed with type, psychologically they're overwhelmed and less likely to actually bother reading anything. If course, with all the advertising appearing on some websites it's getting increasingly difficult to design a page that's actually easy to read.
If these scientists want to address online text legibility take a few basic typography courses.
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.
This reminds me of something my taiwanese sister in law used to say. She claimed that the chinese form of writing is more efficient because a person can glance at a large amount of information and just "get it". Maybe I should not have been so dismissive. Maybe by distilling an idea into just two graphic 'characters' you have something dense that you can concentrate on/focus on. For all the flexibility of western language, it spreads things out.
Just my thoughts,
You're overlooking the simple elegance of Rubish word blocks. Some moldy old writers just don't see the problem with "sentences" and "paragraphs". The verbosity of these older techniques is what makes managing texts like "Ulysses" and "War And Peace" so difficult and complex. These works would barely be novellas if they had been written in Rubish.
Also, Rubish has excellent automatic garbage collection. PC Magazine was impressed when they saw a draft of The Complete Works Of John Dvorak in Rubish: a single exclamation mark in the middle center of an otherwise blank sheet of paper.
And let's not forget its other features: four levels of variable article, exception handling (one Rubishist summarized this as the "no ifs or buts" rule), advanced punctuation overloading (exclamation marks aren't just for shocks), and something I can't believe English STILL doesn't support: regular expression (say one thing, mean another. The RIAA and MPAA tried introducing this feature to English in an attempt at explaining the advantages of DRM. Not only did they fail, they sued one another for copying the other's idea.)
You're interested in learning more about Rubish, I can tell. I recommend Prattling Rubish, part of the Prattling Penmen series. The book itself is written entirely in Rubish. It's three pages long and takes most people a couple of weeks to decipher.
The GP's reformatted paragraph didn't take into account the line indentation that the article showed. I think part of the trick for them is to make the "carriage return" shorter, making your eyes have to travel less distance to get to the next piece of the sentence. Note how, in the article, the lines that started indented were short, so that the distance from the end of them to the beginning of the next line, which was indented less, still wasn't much? This keeps the text from creeping across the page as it goes down.
Also, if you try to read
something that
is randomly
broken
along indeterminate
points in a sentence,
then it will be
much harder to
read than if it has
been dissected into
parts that pay attention
to the natural
breaks in the language.
The Spoon
Updated 6/28/2011
I tend to read about 2-3 times faster than most "good" readers I know.
I'm not sure that should have been rated "funny". I actually find the block text to be easier to read than the poetry-style lines. First of all, the color interferes with my ability to keep the whole sentence together. My brain actually ends up sticking the black text together in one group, and the red text together in another group. That really slows me down.
So I started thinking about why I read block text so fast.
Let's go over that last "funny" post. Yeah, it was written in the style of tongue-in-cheek quips, but I'm not sure the guy was joking.
Maybe it's just me, but I don't discard the extra 'noise' that I get from reading. I read roughly every second or third line
Okay, I read approximately one phrase (line) at a time. When I'm speed reading, I don't bother to understand the words of that line until my eyes are already on the next line. It feels like I'm reading every second or third line, but I'm actually hitting every one.
build up a composite image of the paragraph, tokenise it in parallel
I then attach a significance to the phrase, and approximate what the relation of the phrases are, according to ifs, ands, and buts, as well as punctuation.
and then parse it from that.
Then I discard the lines that seem relatively unimportant, giving me a basic summary of the paragraph. From this, I fit the other sentences back in as needed. What that means, realistically speaking, is that I look at the paragraph, identify the main topic, and glance through it as needed to understand the specifics.
It's a much better fit with how the optical system works than how people tend to describe reading, and possibly why I read a lot faster than most people I know. This new system slows my reading rate a lot.
Which is what I've experienced, too.
Correct Horse Battery Staple: 72 bits of entropy. Enter "Correct H" into google. When it generates the phrase, that's
I'm not sure that should have been rated "funny". I actually find the block text to be easier to read than the poetry-style lines. First of all, the color interferes with my ability to keep the whole sentence together. My brain actually ends up sticking the black text together in one group, and the red text together in another group. That really slows me down.
So I started thinking about why I read block text so fast.
Let's go over that last "funny" post. Yeah, it was written in the style of tongue-in-cheek quips, but I'm not sure the guy was joking.
Maybe it's just me, but I don't discard the extra 'noise' that I get from reading. I read roughly every second or third line
Okay, I read approximately one phrase (line) at a time. When I'm speed reading, I don't bother to understand the words of that line until my eyes are already on the next line. It feels like I'm reading every second or third line, but I'm actually hitting every one.
build up a composite image of the paragraph, tokenise it in parallel
I then attach a significance to the phrase, and approximate what the relation of the phrases are, according to ifs, ands, and buts, as well as punctuation.
and then parse it from that.
Then I discard the lines that seem relatively unimportant, giving me a basic summary of the paragraph. From this, I fit the other sentences back in as needed. What that means, realistically speaking, is that I look at the paragraph, identify the main topic, and glance through it as needed to understand the specifics.
It's a much better fit with how the optical system works than how people tend to describe reading, and possibly why I read a lot faster than most people I know. This new system slows my reading rate a lot.
Which is what I've experienced, too.
Correct Horse Battery Staple: 72 bits of entropy. Enter "Correct H" into google. When it generates the phrase, that's
It's not indeterminate. It looks like they're breaking at commas and verbs, and highlighting the finite verbs (including auxiliary and modal verbs). Trouble is, that won't work for many kinds of sentences. For example, the summary reformatted would start as follows:
... reading" in the fifth sentence as an auxiliary-plus-participle combination, when it's actually verb-plus-gerund.
== quote==
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.
== end quote ==
The first sentence ends up as block text anyway, and I find the wildly varying lengths of clauses make the third sentence difficult to read too. I'm really not impressed, especially as they're going to have to pull some fancy tricks with AI to get the app to recognise verbs properly.
For example, a dumb programme would probably misidentify "tug" in the fourth sentence as a verb, "ignore" as a finite form when it's actually an infinitive, and probably also mistakenly highlight "is