APP HELPS YOU READ FASTER
Speed- reading app will let you whip through War and Peace. But do you really want to?
For me, the downside was that, even at slow speeds, because I was only seeing one word at a time, I absorbed the information in a terribly staccato way, as if I was listening to Stephen Hawking’s voice box.
Whoosh. That’s the sound of me speed- reading this article. Thanks to a very clever new bit of technology, I’ve learned to read so fast that I’ve already reached the end of this piece by the time you slow coaches have got to the end of this sentence. Indeed, this article has taken me less than a minute.
Think what I could do with this new- found power. War and Peace could be polished off on a long train journey. I could suck up knowledge like a Dyson vacuum on amphetamines.
The technology has been developed by a U. S. company called Spritz. The idea is simple — namely, we spend an awful lot of time when reading a normal book or document scanning along the line looking for the next word. This searching creates a so- called saccade, a split- second of eye flicker, which slows down the whole process. The average person reads at about 250 words a minute.
Spritz, however, reckons that it can get you up to 900 or even 1,000 words a minute by eliminating all those saccades. How? Instead of displaying words on a line of text, it will flash them up on a screen, one word at a time — very rapidly.
In addition, each word has one of its letters shown in red. The developers say the red letter focuses the reader’s eyes on the “optimal recognition point” in each word, allowing them to take in its meaning as quickly as possible, without any need to flit.
Spritz, as it stands, is a smartphone app, which translates normal text into words that flash up in a tiny box ( the size of a cigarette paper). It is preinstalled on new Samsung devices and has already been downloaded more than one million times, with most people using it to speed- read emails .
And it works — up to a point. I am a pretty slow reader, but was able to graduate to about 450 words without too much difficulty. At any higher speeds, I seriously struggled. At 600 words, all I could discern was an alphabet soup of letters hitting my retina.
The guys behind Spritz do insist that the more you practise, the easier it gets; also, after a few hours speed- reading on an electronic device with Spritz, you should be able to read a normal paperback a bit quicker.
For me, the downside was that, even at slow speeds, because I was only seeing one word at a time, I absorbed the information in a terribly staccato way, as if I was listening to Stephen Hawking’s voice box. Any rhythm to the language was completely destroyed. Apparently, I need to stop sounding out the words in my head, but I find it very hard to follow this advice.
The other problem was that taking a split second to sneeze or sip a coffee meant I missed whole chunks of text. Once you start, you are on a treadmill of words and glued to the screen.
And let us not forget that speed- reading is nothing new. In the ’ 60s, John F. Kennedy was said to be an enormous fan, while Tony Buzan, the author, made a fortune selling speed- reading manuals back in the ’ 70s. Schoolchildren have long been taught to place a bookmark under a line of text to help focus the eyes on the words.
For dull documents or emails, this latest souped- up speedreading aid might be useful, but not for works of fiction. The novels I most love are associated with a time and place, something that can only be achieved if you are reading slowly and if you occasionally pause to glance out of the window, to think about the meaning.
Spritz is undoubtedly clever and perfectly suited to smallscreen smartphones; being able to read a long text or email without the need to scroll through text is useful.
But it is an enemy to elegant prose — and the fightback starts here. Slow readers of the world, our time has come.