Speed up your reading with Spreeder
March 25, 2009
First of all, thank you for your faithful readership. Nothing pleases me more than knowing that you continue to devour every word that I write. I think its time that you and I took things to the next level. Aw, yeah. Time for a change of pace! I’m going to write faster and insert more strange links for no discernible purpose. Your job is to just keep reading.
But wait, you’re worried that you won’t be able to match my pace and keep up. That’s understandable. I can prattle on about any subject and type for miles, while you only have two eyes and a life outside of reading blogs. Spreeder is just the solution.
Spreeder helps you to train your eyes and brain for speed reading. Essentially, you copy and paste text to the site and it flashes each word in that body of text one-at-a-time for you to read. You can slow things down and speed things up by changing the settings, allowing you to make incremental gains. After you’ve got a pretty good clip going with the words per minute, you can change the chunk size. Now, instead of individual words, you can view small blocks of text all at once.
Even better is that there is a bookmarklet available for you to place in your browser’s toolbar. So the next time you want to read something, simply highlight that text on the page and click the Spreed! bookmarklet. A new page will open up with that text ready to go.
This flashcard-type method helps you eliminate subvocalization, which is when you read words with your internal speech. Pronouns and complex ideas can be stumbling blocks, however. Spreeder’s visualized delivery somewhat glances over punctuation and structure — road signs intentionally put there by the text’s author to clarify meaning, so use caution when showing Spreeder to your students. Spreeder is perfect for reading those blogs about celebs without make-up, not so much on those Bertrand Russell fan-fiction blogs. -NICK YINGLING
