Spritz it

Reading is becoming increasingly important in the knowledge economy, and remains the most effective activity for transforming information into knowledge.With the volumes of information that people are now required to make sense of on a daily basis, alternate means of digesting reading material are constantly being investigated. Speed-reading has long been a skill peddled by supposed experts, and recently a number of apps claiming to teach the technique have put it back in the spotlight. Most of us tend to read at about 200 – 400 words per minute. Speed-readers claim to hit around 1,000 – 1,700 words per minute. But the question remains: how good is their comprehension of the text and retention of the information when reading at this speed and can this skill really be used when reading books, or is it more of a news and information processing skill?

“People read more than ever on mobile devices and usually in 10-minute bursts,” reports Angela Chen on the Wall Street Journal. “To tap into this, there’s a revival in traditional speed-reading classes as well as new apps that promise to make reading on a small screen easier.”

“When you factor out the amount of time spent thinking through complex and unfamiliar concepts—a rarity when people read for pleasure—reading is an appallingly mechanical process,” says Timothy Noah on slate.com.

“You look at a word or several words. This is called a ‘fixation,’ and it takes about 0.25 seconds on average. You move your eye to the next word or group of words. This is called a ‘saccade,’ and it takes up to about 0.1 seconds on average. After this is repeated once or twice, you pause to comprehend the phrase you just looked at. That takes roughly 0.3 to 0.5 seconds on average. Add all these fixations and saccades and comprehension pauses together and you end up with about 95 percent of all college-level readers reading between 200 and 400 words per minute.”

There are different techniques that can be used to increase the speed at which one reads. Cutting down on subvocalization, the habit of saying the word you read in your head as you read it, is effective. Other methods of speed reading are: skimming, which teaches you to find the important parts to read; meta guiding, which uses a pointer to guide your eye to specific words; and Rapid Serial Visual Presentation (RSVP), used by most of the recent digital speed reading systems. With this, single words flash on the screen so you’re concentrating on a single word at a time without having to move your focal position. As you get used to the system, you speed up how fast the display shows you words. The technology is based on the premise that moving our eyes back and forth, the “saccade”, wastes reading time.

Keith Rayner, a psychology professor at the University of California-San Diego (who’s paper in the European journal of Cognitive Psychology on “Eye movements and information processing during reading” is a comprehensive look at how our eyes work when we are reading) is not convinced that speed reading over 500 words per minute is really possible. According to his report, most speedreading claims are nonsense because our eyes limit us.

“Speed reading is a nice idea, and the ability to see 1,000 words a minute is possible. However, you don’t truly understand those words,” he says. When it comes to eliminating subvocalization with techniques like meta guiding, Rayner points out you quickly lose comprehension, especially when the text becomes difficult. With regards to RSVP, it is the working memory that gets overloaded as the words come in faster than the brain can deal with them. Many studies show that as reading speed increases, comprehension drops.

“This means you’re not taking in the information, which defeats the purpose of reading. RSVP hurts comprehension because it doesn’t let people look back at previous words,” says Rayner, who is much quoted on the subject. New apps like Spritz would have you believe the opposite and in this information age, a quick way in which to process information would be wonderful. Spritz claims that since their system allows your eyes to rest on a single point by highlighting a single letter in each word, you can read faster as you don’t have to waste time moving your eyes across the page.

Spritz claims its studies show that people who were reading 250 words a minute sped up to reading 400 words a minute after using Spritz for 20 minutes with no loss in comprehension. That’s something to take note of. In her article for WSJ, Angela Chen also reports Spritz Technology Inc. cofounder and CEO Frank Waldman as saying that using the app is a more modern way of reading. The company’s goal isn’t to help undergraduates cram for exams, he says, but to change how people keep up with mobile news.

“You wouldn’t really want to read classic lit or Shakespeare on [Spritz],” he says. “We want to work on focused reading on the go.”

But for those who would perhaps like to give it a go, Oyster and Spritz have teamed up to provide public access to a full-length, in-copyright book. Available at OysterBooks.com/Spritz, “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People” is available for free reading using Spritz technology. Apparently, the 432 print-pages of the book can be finished in under 2 hours.Spreed is a Google Chrome extension that also uses RSVP to flash words from any text you choose, where Outread, Velocity and Syllable are three iOS apps that use different techniques to teach you speed reading on your phone. There are also a couple of apps for android devices: Faster Reader , Speed Read, and Speed Reader, and there are also a few online tests you can do to see how fast you can read whilst still maintaining your comprehension. It is clear though that most of these are designed to help people get through the information delivered to them on a daily basis rather than help them plough through books on their mobile devices whilst on lunch.