- Companies like Tumblr and Twitter have helped make micro-storytelling the narrative trend-du-jour, but the new app “Spritz” may very well propel us back to a more “longform” era. Spritz’s mission harkens back to the glory days of speed-reading courses, which developed in tandem with the nineteenth century’s dependence on mass media. As information was made more readily available to the public, there was demand for a technique that allowed people to rapidly absorb a growing number of books and newspapers. However, as the advent of computers led to the birth of blogging, speed-reading quickly found itself no longer au courant.
Though the Internet has made it so we have a seemingly infinite cachet of information available for consumption, much of this reading material is pushed to the side and left to build up in our bookmarks and on our bookshelves. And while a slavish adherence to all forms of news media is now considered a vocational necessity, the sad reality is the number of hours in a day remain just as fixed as before. After observing this new media conundrum, Spritz’s founders set out to alleviate time crunches by bringing speed-reading, currently the purvey of infomercials and adult extension courses, back into vogue.
Neuroscientific research indicates that our brains process words more quickly when they’re presented in isolation. To that end, Spritz has developed a software kit that takes large chunks of text and puts them, ticker-tape style, through a process that showcases each word individually. This “rapid serial visual presentation” program then allows the user to set the app’s “speed,” which in turn controls the numbers of words a reader will be exposed to in any given minute. After a period of time, users are encouraged to challenge themselves by graduating to the next “level” (a higher WPM rate), ostensibly cutting down the average time it takes for them to recognize and process larger collections of words.
Shortened reading times might lead to marked improvements in workplace productivity, as well as give people a bigger incentive to delve into the books and articles they’ve been putting aside due to horological constraints. When time no longer remains (such) an object, can you imagine the number of stories people will get to telling? Try it out today!
It's certainly interesting. I managed to get up top tier of 700wpm on their example and did successfully understand what was being shown. However, I'm not sure I'd like to read a book like this. News articles and the like would seem viable, what with their aims for readability, but the sometimes complex syntax of novels etc might pose a bit of a problem. The top comment in a post about this to reddit raised some interesting points: Here are some facts about reading: 1) The amount of time you spend fixating on each word is a function of the frequency of that word. Words you encounter often are easier for you to recognize and integrate into the sentence than words that you encounter rarely. Word frequency depends on your exposure to words and you become a faster reader the more you read (the more exposure you have to low frequency words). This software presents words at a fixed speed, limiting your ability to spend little time (or skip) words that are easy for you and spend a little longer on words that are more challenging to ensure that you have appropriately accessed that word in your mental lexicon 2) Regressing - or going back a few words- is the best strategy to get "unstuck" when reading. Ambiguous sentences or sentences that are more complex require more work on your part to understand because you have to tie together all of the syntactic relations between the words in order to take home the meaning of the sentence. You can't do this with RSVP and you end up going forwards without actually understanding the sentence completely. 3) Comprehension is not linear. Sometimes we pause to understand a sentence or a paragraph and sometimes we just power through. This is because we are not processing the meaning of a sentence at a constant speed throughout our "reading session". These are three reasons why comprehension is not the same when speed reading and partially explain the uncomfortably sensation that occurs when the speed is too fast but we still seem to be understanding some of what we're reading: language is a redundant phenomenon and if you miss a word or two, or even a sentence, you will still get the gist. But unfortunately that's not what reading is about for many people. Source: I am a psycholinguist who researches sentence processing during reading in a big US university.This way of presenting words is commonly called Rapid Serial Visual Presentation (RSVP) and it has some significant disadvantages due to the fact that reading text horizontally with the possibility of regressing (looking back a few words) is how we maximize our comprehension.
Here's another article bringing up similar points: http://www.psmag.com/navigation/books-and-culture/speed-reading-apps-will-not-revolutionize-anything-79890/ In an experiment, the researchers had 40 undergraduate subjects “read sentences both normally and in a condition in which words became masked after they moved their eyes away,” meant to mimic the speed reading app experience of not being able to easily glance back. According to previous research, these movements are called “regressions,” and readers do them “about 10% to 15% of the time….” Comprehension of sentences decreased significantly in the condition where there was no opportunity to reprocess information, no matter the ambiguity of the constructions. Eye movements were not a burden; they were a key to knowledge.[R]emoving eye movements from the reading process is precisely the fatal flaw in such speed-reading apps and the reason why they will not be useful for reading any text that is not extremely easy or short; control over the sequence and duration of word processing is the most important variable that supports reading, and control of the oculomotor system is crucial to accurate comprehension of text.
Wow. That comment is really insightful. I like it. I agree with his concerns (although I'm not nearly as knowledgable on the subject). I think that this type of reading would be especially problematic while trying to digest heavier materials like papers, books, deeper articles going over unfamiliar subjects. However, I believe their target audience is people who would like to read the standard slew of articles we all read every day rather than a book. I mean, you could get through the latest tech news in a couple minutes with this app and those tech articles don't have anything that requires much brainpower. I can also see uses for it on Google Glass. From "GOOGLE GLASS: WHAT YOU'RE NOT SUPPOSED TO DO"" ... The text is so close to my eyes, the book feels like it's inside my brain. I'm in my own secret world, like the kid with the flashlight under the blanket, but without the flashlight or blanket. ... After forty-five minutes, I get an ice-pick headache and have to stop. I could see an app like this being a way to digest a couple articles while waiting for the bus or laying in bed or something. It might eliminate the weirdness of reading on such a small screen. Same goes for reading articles in your spare time on your latest smartwatch of choice.The sentences don't fit on the screen. If I want to finish a line, I have to turn my head to the right, then shift it back to the
left. I look like a spectator at Wimbledon or a five-year-old throwing a tantrum. I'm also carsick.