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bluefoxicy writes
"Speed reading has matured into technological solutions. Rapid Serial Visual Presentation, or RSVP, provides faster reading than the manual finger-following method, with retention on par with standard reading at 250 words per minute. Research shows most people can start at 400WPM, and reach 800WPM in an hour; and further advancements used in products such as Spritz and Sprint Reader claim 1000-1800 words per minute when practiced by offsetting and context pausing.
Thus far I have not found any software to read ebooks with these methods. Are there any open source applications, Nook or Kindle Fire applications, or otherwise to read ePub or Mobi or Kindle books via RSVP?"
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will always be useful and which never will grow dim or doubtful.
-- Mark Twain
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Boxzy on Tuesday March 11 2014, @01:17AM
Just don't. Speed reading cannot be 'taught' beyond a certain level in that way, it is a matter of visual brain function and you will simply forget what you have skimmed VERY quickly.
Go green, Go Soylent.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by frojack on Tuesday March 11 2014, @02:08AM
Do you have some evidence to support this opinion?
Your "beyond a certain level" leaves a lot of room for you to be right (since you are imprecise in the definition of failure), but that still a lot of room for improvement.
Even if all we need to do is break bad habits, some tools might be very helpful, just to get up to the speed we are naturally capable of.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 3, Informative) by efitton on Tuesday March 11 2014, @02:35AM
Not the best article, although not a bad read: http://www.slate.com/articles/briefing/articles/20 00/02/the_1000word_dash.html [slate.com]
Although I would be curious to try it on a phone. Anything larger and I already read about 600 wpm so not a lot of speed incentive. I can't find the article I read earlier stating that the research goes back to the 60s and that there are real limits to RSVP.
(Score: 1) by SurvivorZ on Tuesday March 11 2014, @03:21AM
I must be completely abnormal then, because I have trained myself to read ~450 words/minute leisurely and 600-700 wpm when fully trying.
(Score: 2, Informative) by baldrick on Tuesday March 11 2014, @05:50AM
another article - http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2014/03/ is-speed-reading-possible/284326/ [theatlantic.com]
just another gimmick - if you want to read faster and understand what you are reading ,you need to read more - that hard work / practice thing
there is no shortcut you can buy for $1.99
... I obey the Laws of Physics
(Score: 1) by efitton on Tuesday March 11 2014, @02:08PM
That was the article I was looking for. Still think it might be nice to have it running while running on a treadmill; phone at the Dr's Office, etc.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 11 2014, @08:53AM
I like you. You're a funny man
(Score: 2) by Boxzy on Tuesday March 11 2014, @08:16PM
I think it's fairly obvious, evidence be damned. Failure was not one of the options, you clearly have not had to help others finish their thesis after massively ill-advised speed-reading experiments. Nor have you actually tested this yourself by reading a book speedily and a week later ask another to ask questions about it. While there are those who have an excellent visual cortex able to ingest data at impressive speeds, they are very few and far between. Do some tests yourself, be scientific. Google doesn't know everything.
Go green, Go Soylent.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by wjwlsn on Tuesday March 11 2014, @02:10AM
I just downloaded Sprint Reader (the second item listed in the summary) and gave it a try using a few articles on Wikipedia. While I found the experience interesting; individual words flashed by very quickly, and I could recognize and parse each one mentally, but before I could put anything together conceptually, the next word had already come and gone. Maybe, with a lot of practice, you could make this work for you, but I really wonder if it is defeating some of the basic, necessary techniques that your brain uses to understand and retain written concepts. Sometimes, I think, sentences don't really make sense unless you can see multi-word chunks at once; the words within a chunk reinforce each other with context that conveys the whole message, something you may miss if you're reading one word at a time.
Alternatively, you could possibly use this as a fast pre-reading to establish a mindset and to trigger associations that might make a second, normal reading more efficient and meaningful... and/or use it as a fast review of text that you have already read.
It is a very interesting idea, though. I plan to keep using it and see if it can be helpful... if not for rapid input, then for enhanced comprehension when combined with a second (or third) reading.
I am a traveler of both time and space. Duh.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 11 2014, @05:51PM
It does take practice. Back in the 90's I used a program to do this with giant text on the PC. IIRC I was up to 1200 WPM before the next jump became too much for me to adapt to (given a 60Hz monitor your WPM options are limited to 3600/integer, so the speed increases *very* quickly at the high end: 900 -> 1200 -> 1800 -> 3600). Modern software often is a bit more adaptive, flashing short words more quickly than long words for example, but still run into the same basic problem - there's no way to display a word for a fraction of a frame.
At any rate I reached the point where I would read a word, integrate it into the sentence, and reflect on it a bit while tediously waiting for the next word to appear. The combination of tedium from the inability to bump the speed up further without jumping to ludicrous speed, along with the inability to vary pacing or easily flick back to re-read a phrase/sentence that didn't parse right eventually caused me to give it up, but it was fun for a while. I could whiz through a novel or technical document in a fraction of the normal time, but the experience was considerably less satisfying. Also, I hadn't yet discovered Project Gutenberg (in fact I'm not sure it even existed at the time)
(Score: 2) by wjwlsn on Tuesday March 11 2014, @07:40PM
I think I need to adjust the Sprint Reader options considerably. It is adaptive, as you mentioned, so shorter words are flashed faster than longer words, but I find the amount of variation to be distracting. It does seem to be fairly configurable though, so I might be able to tweak that specific issue.
I got up to about 900 WPM pretty easily, but I think I may have scaled up the speed too soon. At 300 WPM, it seems like the delay between new words is interminably slow, yet comprehension is easier. When you get to a level at which words flash by at a pace that seems reasonable, however, comprehension seems to suffer. I will probably go back to 600 WPM for a while and see if that improves things.
I am a traveler of both time and space. Duh.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Tuesday March 11 2014, @02:10AM
Over a certain limit, even comprehension is impaired.
For instance: is this post about speed reading or spreading?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford