Tuesday, March 23, 2010

Speed Reading Link

http://www.spreeder.com/


Tutorial

Spreeder is an online speed reading utility to help train you to read faster. It does this by flashing words at a rapid rate, which helps in three ways:
  1. Reduce subvocalization
  2. Increase chunk comprehension
  3. Eliminate backreading
You can read more about it here. To read more about spreeder's specific settings, a good blog post is here.

Training Strategies

There are quite a few settings you can play around with to optimize your reading, but the two most important are the wpm and chunk size.

1. Increase wpm

When training, set the wpm to multiples of what you're comfortable reading at. For example, if you achieve 100% comprehension at 300wpm, try setting the wpm to 900wpm. Run through some text, and see how much you can absorb. Try this a couple times, making sure to really concentrate on the text that is flying by. Now reduce the wpm rate to 600wpm, and 400wpm. Chances are at the end of this activity, 300wpm will start to feel "slow", and you'll start comprehending at higher wpm's.

2. Increase chunk size

Once you start maxing out on how fast you can go in wpm's, another variable you'll want to toggle is the chunk size. Chunk size is the number of words that are flashed at a given time. Doubling the chunk size (i.e going from 1 to 2) will effectively halve the rate at which words are flashed, since you're showing twice as many words at once.
A tip on chunk size - look into setting the window width and font size accordingly. You'll want to be able to process a chunk in one eyeful, which means you won't want to have a 5 word chunk scroll across the entire screen, but rather in a tight little paragraph at the center of the screen.

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