Quote:
Originally Posted by kacir
That Spreader is not done properly.
There are other programs that do that much better.
Try searching for
Rapid Serial Visual Presentation
When you set spreader to display more than one word, it doesn't take into account the length of the word (number of presented characters), as some other programs do. So sometimes it presents you with three very long words, wrapping them on several lines.
There are quite a few programs, even commercial software, and a few plugins for Firefox. Try "Yet Another RSVP Reader".
Install plugin, select text, right click, select YARR (name for the Yet Another Rapid Reader) and here you can adjust speed, width of the chunk and other things. Use up/down arrows to adjust speed and right/left arrows to adjust the number of characters. I am pretty sure that you could push yourself to much faster reading using this little program. As I said, there are even better programs
When people that are considered "average" readers read, they usually look at the chunks of the text, not at individual letters. So your eye jumps around recognizing entire words, not individual letters. People that read with decent speed often look at groups of words, the larger the group, the faster reader.
One of my friends, an exceptionally smart and intelligent guy, can read entire line of text with one glance (in a book typically between 50 and 75 characters). He is capable of reading an entire novel in a couple of hours. But he says that he rarely reads full speed, because you have to concentrate very hard. He also reads more slowly when he needs to understand the text thoroughly. He also made a very interesting remark that he can only high-speed-read only text in serif font. And it must be typographically well made.
Another guy I have met told us a story about his grammar school. He was attending a special school in a "captive town" founded by famous Czech enterpriser Tomas Bata. In captive towns all housing were built by factory for factory workers, all stores, schools and other institutions were operated by the same company. He said that for the first two (or was it three?) years, they were learning almost exclusively reading. He said that at the end of third class pupils were able to read much faster than an average adult and that this skill has helped his academic career tremendously. He claimed that he is able to read an A4 page at a glance, just by sweeping it with eyes from top to bottom. |
That is interesting. Never head of factory towns. Live and learn.
I tend to read a paragraph at a chunk if less than 6 lines. The physical length of the line sees to make more difference in how comfortably I read than the characters per line. Aging eyeballs perhaps. On a 5 inch reader I am good with 80 character per line, on a 6 or 6.8 reader it is more like 60. Not really the number of characters but the physical length of the line.
It is all really well to cram as much text as possible on a page, but it just doesn't work for me. I have to almost concentrate on each line and often go back to the line before. Slightly shorter lines I don't even notice any transition in reading unless the evil Kobo skips ahead or back a page or 6.
Helen