Slashdot Mirror
Bringing Speed Reading To the Web
vencs writes "With the latest cycle of speed reading fad catching on all over, there bloomed a rather neat technique called Spritzing (an online implementation of Rapid Serial Visual Presentation). Even before the company released its SDK, many clones popped up, offering bookmarklets that do the same task. It's a cool (though situational) tool for going through text articles quickly (400-600 wpm)."
Speed reading seems like a solution in search of a problem to me.
I'll just be happy if this trend towards low-information-density videos without transcription stops. It's such a colossal waste of everyone's time and bandwidth to have to watch a 45m video of two blowhards talking about something when I could get the same effect from 5 minutes of reading and looking at a couple of graphs or 20-second video demos.
If you're trying to speed up your casual reading, how casual is it really? I tried the little Spritz button / example thing on the spritz website and thought it was pretty cool. 450 wpm took a short time to get used to but was readable. The problems are with unfamiliar names. It seems like you'd have to train yourself to NOT slow down when coming across an unfamiliar word (for me it was company or city names, or names of people) or in that fraction of a second you're trying to process it you lose words.
Just need to build a good interface. I'd like to see a "clutch" - a button I hold down to read and let go to stop. Then easy rewind/forward. Maybe a button that moves back to the last punctuation mark? I think SOME of the problems we could solve with good UI design.
I'd actually disagree. I think it'd be best-suited for casual reading.
I tried it out on the Wikipedia page linked in the summary and a few other pages, and found that at 500 wpm it quickly got confusing once it started hitting references, parentheticals, and other asides, since the flow would be broken up by the various brackets, parentheses, and content out of the main flow of the sentence. In contrast, it did great at that speed on the portions of the page that were typical prose, and I found I wasn't having to focus much at all to keep up at 500 wpm, despite having had no practice in using the method, nor any practice at other speed reading techniques.
So long as you're not reading something that's beyond your vocabulary, I'd expect it to work exceedingly well. That said, once it hit a word I wasn't expecting (typically a proper name I didn't recognize), I found that I was "jarred" for a split second, throwing me off. The parentheticals and other such text had a similar effect. But were I reading a novel, I'd expect this system to work rather well, and would love to see an implementation of it for eReaders on tablets. Plus, the actual Spritz thing had a feature to jump back a sentence if you missed something, which, taken altogether, would still be much faster than a typical reading pace.
but reality, seldom the whole sentence.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Dictionary of white listed words 6th grade reading level (to be displayed at max speed, the rest at a settable sub-speed)
Long words broken up by syllable
Dead-man switch - hold down to keep reading release to pause and display Fwd and Rew
-- "Oh. This guy again."
Not suited, then, to casual reading.
It doesn't seem suited to serious reading either. When reading technical material, I need to read more than one word at a time, and when it gets challening, I go over sentences a couple times. I also often find things that mean I have scan back a paragraph or two to see if what I just read fits in with the previous material.
I guess for me, reading is not a linear activity. It's more of an exercise of finding and making connections throughout the text and with other texts. I just don't get that with reading one word followed by the next.
Takes longer to consume a page, since normally you don't read each and every word, you glance across a page picking up critical words to glean the meaning.
Running it on their webpage, I got bored waiting for it, meanwhile in less time previously, I'd digested the entire page.
That being said, I passed the link on to a dyslexic friend, we'll see how she feels, presuming she can successfully read my G+ post to her. ;-)