Textcelerator, a browser plugin that hacks your vision to make you read significantly faster. I made it because I really value being knowledgeable, and pre-existing speed reading software wasn’t practical. I recently added Textcelerator for Sites, a version that can be embedded into blogs or other pages to enable speed-reading those pages without installing anything.
(Disclaimer: Payware with a free trial; I’m the author.)
Thanks—I just tried it. I’m intrigued, and in general always interested in these kind of experiments. Did you base it on some existing research? I use auto-scroll when reading PDFs sometimes, to force-feed me. One of the advantages seems to be that the mind is put under some stress, and less likely to wander off.
BTW, I found that some words go together naturally when reading (say, a book title), and it’s a bit confusing when textcelerator splits them.
The rapid serial visual presentation technique is old and has lots of research; my modification to it (moving the words up and down) has only been tested by me and people who’ve tried the app, so nothing formal.
The way words get grouped together is mostly determined by their physical size, but I might be able to put in a special case for capitalized proper nouns.
Wow, brilliant idea! I’ve been doing some speedread-training and realised how much I could improve my speed. Your plugin is ingenius I must say!
What you really should do to it improve though, is remove the “-” at the end of a sentence where a word is too long so the whole word is displayed together (shouldn’t be too hard to fix?). At the moment this can make it quite hard to read some articles.
You should also make it pause when it encounters a heading.
Btw if you are looking for some help on devoloping it or promoting it, I might be able to help :)
Thanks! The hyphenation thing is trickier than it seems, since in general there’s no easy we to distinguish a compound word which happened to fall at the end of the line, from a hyphenated word. This will be one of the things I focus on when adding PDF support, since PDFs tend to use hyphenation much more heavily. Most web pages don’t use hyphenation at all; if there’s one where it’s particularly bad, send me the link and I’ll see if there’s a good workaround.
I’m not looking for programming help, but publicity is always welcome. If you know people who would benefit from it, show them a demo and encourage them to install it. If you have a blog, you can put a Speed Read This button on it.
Personally, I suspect I mostly read at the rate I can comprehend stuff. In other words, I suspect thinking is the limiting factor in my reading, not the rate at which I can shove words through my eyes.
Sure, in some cases you get popular nonfiction books that are so full of fluff that you’re best off skimming them (comprehending only a hastily organized slice of the book), but I’d rather just find a denser resource like a summary of the book.
Personally, I suspect I mostly read at the rate I can comprehend stuff. In other words, I suspect thinking is the limiting factor in my reading, not the rate at which I can shove words through my eyes.
Did you actually try it? You might be surprised. I read the article you linked to at 950wpm (but my unassisted reading speed is only about 350wpm).
So did you have anything to say about the article?
I just tried the demo. I guess it is plausible that word shoving speed is rate limiting, since I had a hard time shoving all the words through my eyes at 700 words per minute, which might improve through training. But I’m wary of using a tool that might hurt comprehension, which seems harder to measure. I remember reading that subvocalizing improves recall for instance, but I doubt you could learn that just by observing yourself.
If you want to optimize your reading, making spaced repetition cards seems like the obvious thing. Why are you reading it if you don’t want to remember it? Are you really confident that you remember any significant portion of the stuff you read on the Internet? Shouldn’t we be optimizing for facts/habits/models acquired instead of words consumed?
So did you have anything to say about the article?
It seemed wrong. It took the observation that most people read at about the same speed, stretched it way too far, and treated it as a given rather than as something to improve on. Then juxtaposed a probably-real example (JFK reading at 1200wpm) with an obviously-fake one (a person who claimed to read 17k wpm), in order to discredit the real example. Then it pulled a definition trick, redefining “reading quickly” as “skimming”, and failing to notice that the distinction between reading and skimming is whether or not you skip things.
The more subtle mistake was that it only acknowledged speed-reading software as a training method, rather than as a tool to use for ordinary reading. I don’t blame the author for that, since at the time it was written the only tools available were too impractical to use all the time. But fixing that is the whole point of Textcelerator.
But I’m wary of using a tool that might hurt comprehension, which seems harder to measure. … If you want to optimize your reading, making spaced repetition cards seems like the obvious thing. … Shouldn’t we be optimizing for facts/habits/models acquired instead of words consumed?
Yes, one hour of studying a topic won’t give as deep an understanding as two hours of studying that topic, no matter what reading techniques you use; and what we really care about is understanding gained. The thing is, time is usually a limiting factor, and if you’re reading faster, then you can use the extra time to read something twice, or read it and reflect, or read it and make flashcards, or read it and also read some related material. Increasing speed by 2x (and that is the sort of speedup we’re talking about) is not as good as spending twice as much time reading, but it’s worth a hell of a lot.
My own experience—and yes, this is hard to measure and therefore somewhat subjective—is that Textcelerator doesn’t significantly reduce my comprehension until I get over 900wpm, but that when reading unaided, if I try to read that fast it degenerates into skimming and I retain very little.
Textcelerator, a browser plugin that hacks your vision to make you read significantly faster. I made it because I really value being knowledgeable, and pre-existing speed reading software wasn’t practical. I recently added Textcelerator for Sites, a version that can be embedded into blogs or other pages to enable speed-reading those pages without installing anything.
(Disclaimer: Payware with a free trial; I’m the author.)
Thanks—I just tried it. I’m intrigued, and in general always interested in these kind of experiments. Did you base it on some existing research? I use auto-scroll when reading PDFs sometimes, to force-feed me. One of the advantages seems to be that the mind is put under some stress, and less likely to wander off.
BTW, I found that some words go together naturally when reading (say, a book title), and it’s a bit confusing when textcelerator splits them.
The rapid serial visual presentation technique is old and has lots of research; my modification to it (moving the words up and down) has only been tested by me and people who’ve tried the app, so nothing formal.
The way words get grouped together is mostly determined by their physical size, but I might be able to put in a special case for capitalized proper nouns.
Texcelerator is nicely done!
I use Spreed! http://www.spreeder.com/app.php for speed reading. It’s free. The big hassle with using it, is the cut and paste.
Wow, brilliant idea! I’ve been doing some speedread-training and realised how much I could improve my speed. Your plugin is ingenius I must say! What you really should do to it improve though, is remove the “-” at the end of a sentence where a word is too long so the whole word is displayed together (shouldn’t be too hard to fix?). At the moment this can make it quite hard to read some articles. You should also make it pause when it encounters a heading.
Btw if you are looking for some help on devoloping it or promoting it, I might be able to help :)
Thanks! The hyphenation thing is trickier than it seems, since in general there’s no easy we to distinguish a compound word which happened to fall at the end of the line, from a hyphenated word. This will be one of the things I focus on when adding PDF support, since PDFs tend to use hyphenation much more heavily. Most web pages don’t use hyphenation at all; if there’s one where it’s particularly bad, send me the link and I’ll see if there’s a good workaround.
I’m not looking for programming help, but publicity is always welcome. If you know people who would benefit from it, show them a demo and encourage them to install it. If you have a blog, you can put a Speed Read This button on it.
What’s your take on this article?
http://www.slate.com/articles/briefing/articles/2000/02/the_1000word_dash.html
Personally, I suspect I mostly read at the rate I can comprehend stuff. In other words, I suspect thinking is the limiting factor in my reading, not the rate at which I can shove words through my eyes.
Sure, in some cases you get popular nonfiction books that are so full of fluff that you’re best off skimming them (comprehending only a hastily organized slice of the book), but I’d rather just find a denser resource like a summary of the book.
Did you actually try it? You might be surprised. I read the article you linked to at 950wpm (but my unassisted reading speed is only about 350wpm).
So did you have anything to say about the article?
I just tried the demo. I guess it is plausible that word shoving speed is rate limiting, since I had a hard time shoving all the words through my eyes at 700 words per minute, which might improve through training. But I’m wary of using a tool that might hurt comprehension, which seems harder to measure. I remember reading that subvocalizing improves recall for instance, but I doubt you could learn that just by observing yourself.
If you want to optimize your reading, making spaced repetition cards seems like the obvious thing. Why are you reading it if you don’t want to remember it? Are you really confident that you remember any significant portion of the stuff you read on the Internet? Shouldn’t we be optimizing for facts/habits/models acquired instead of words consumed?
It seemed wrong. It took the observation that most people read at about the same speed, stretched it way too far, and treated it as a given rather than as something to improve on. Then juxtaposed a probably-real example (JFK reading at 1200wpm) with an obviously-fake one (a person who claimed to read 17k wpm), in order to discredit the real example. Then it pulled a definition trick, redefining “reading quickly” as “skimming”, and failing to notice that the distinction between reading and skimming is whether or not you skip things.
The more subtle mistake was that it only acknowledged speed-reading software as a training method, rather than as a tool to use for ordinary reading. I don’t blame the author for that, since at the time it was written the only tools available were too impractical to use all the time. But fixing that is the whole point of Textcelerator.
Yes, one hour of studying a topic won’t give as deep an understanding as two hours of studying that topic, no matter what reading techniques you use; and what we really care about is understanding gained. The thing is, time is usually a limiting factor, and if you’re reading faster, then you can use the extra time to read something twice, or read it and reflect, or read it and make flashcards, or read it and also read some related material. Increasing speed by 2x (and that is the sort of speedup we’re talking about) is not as good as spending twice as much time reading, but it’s worth a hell of a lot.
My own experience—and yes, this is hard to measure and therefore somewhat subjective—is that Textcelerator doesn’t significantly reduce my comprehension until I get over 900wpm, but that when reading unaided, if I try to read that fast it degenerates into skimming and I retain very little.