People today are spending increasing amounts of time reading on their computer. I will now present and discuss some of technologies that will help you to make the time you spend reading more effective.
RSVP
The average person reads 200-250 words per minute. Since reading speed (i.e. rate of information input) is one of the most important and commonly inhibiting factors in learning, the U.S. military invested in researching the biomechanics of reading, to improve the reading speed of combat personnel.
Their research revealed a few fundamental factors that slow down reading speed. These were
- Subvocalization, the practice of "sounding" each word in your mind as you read. This is not necessary for comprehension, and since your mind can digest information much faster than vocal speed, should be reduced when trying to speed read.
- Skipping back over words & sentences. The practice of moving back and re-reading what you've already read. This is sometimes essential if the material is difficult, however if it's difficult material, you shouldn't be speed reading it! Very often skipping back is just a bad reading habit!
- Stopping your eyes on every single word and reading it individually. Your eyes don't move smoothly over the text when reading, in fact they make little hops, taking a snapshot on every hop & decoding the text. You can train yourself to be able to process larger groups of words on each hop, which improves your reading speed
In order to "combat" these points, the "military" researchers developed a technologically assisted method of reading, which rapidly presents words in the same place on a screen in a serial manner, and called it "Rapid Serial Visual Presentation" (RSVP). They found that reading in this method significantly increased both reading speed AND comprehension. A true measure of reading speed incorporates both the speed and comprehension of the material. I.e. in a test passage, you might say you have read a 400 word passage in 60 seconds, but when tested it is found that you have only comprehended 50% of the facts. This implies that your actual reading speed is 200 words per minute!
I will now present some of the PC based speed reading software applications that I have had some experience with, with a brief outline of their pros and cons.
eyeQ from Infinite Mind (www.infmind.com) is an interesting program which aims to improves your reading speed by making you do various exercises. It tracks your progress for you, so you are able to see and measure the results. I am about half way through the program. Here are my results so far:As you can see, even accounting for inconsistent inputs, there has been a significant increase in speed.
The next significant PC application I will present is called AceReader (www.acereader.com). This application is also primarily structured as a training program, with one crucial difference--that it allows you to paste your own text! This means that you are able to read your own material using the software, which is a killer app. It lets you load doc, txt and pdf files, and also lets you paste from the clipboard. Downloard the trial and give it ago, it's probably the best desktop application on the market.
Finally, I would like to give mention to an application which has just recently been brought to my attention, and which I am currently evaluating. I stumbled upon it on the Iris Reading site (www.irisreading.com), who provide resources helping people to improve their reading ability. They have a bunch of video webinars introducing the concepts I have outlined in this book, and it was inside one of these webinars that I discovered this lovely little Firefox extension that places a toolbar in your browser, and allows you to "rapidly serially visually present" any selection on a web page! So far I'm enjoying it, it's not perfect but very good indeed! Check out RSVP Reader here.
That's all for now, check back for the continuation of this article, where I will show you some of the options for speed reading on your Windows Mobile device!
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