These series of guest posts are written by the teams attending the Tetuan Valley Startup School 2010 Fall edition. This post is from the VeloRead.com team, formed by David Scarlatti and Luis Pérez.
If you feel the need of reading faster, and probably you do, specially for documents you are somehow obliged to read but you are not very interested in, you can benefit form the myriad of speed reading tools available to you.
Image: www.freeimages.co.uk
The first thing you should do is to learn how fast you read in deed. Maybe you are reading slower or faster than you think. There is no agreement on neither the “normal” nor the maximum speed you can achieve. But generally speaking reading at 250-300 wpm can be considered normal for an adult, and doubling this speed is quite realistic using speed reading techniques. These figures are valid for reading on paper, when reading on screen this drop between 10% and 30%. So take two or three different online tests form all this ones available and see where you are.
If you find you could read faster then you can opt for several ways of action:
- Take a course at some specialist school, you’ll need to visit the school once a week a few months
- Buy some self-study material and learn at home
- Use any of the speed reading software available in the market
With any of this options you’ll learnt a bunch of techniques to increase your reading speed, and after a lot of practices and exercises you’ll master them and will be able to apply it to your usually reading sessions.
However, all this efforts are directed to change the way you read and are based on the hypothesis you have to deal with the texts as they are presented to you. This is very sensible when talking about reading on paper. But what about reading documents on the screen of a computer or similar device? In this case the constraints of the immutable printed document should not exist… and then, some of the techniques of speed reading could be used the other way around, adapting the text in a way it is easier to read.
Some ereaders allow you to change a few aspects of the text (font type, size, background color…), but still aim to resemble the printed page in order to reproduce a paper-based experience. This implies a lot of limitations specially when using small screens (about 3″) like in smartphones.
But there is still room to adapt the text to make it more suitable for speed reading if you forget about the concept of page. There are two main techniques you could benefit from using the right software:
- Constant rhythm is essential to achieve higher reading speeds, you need to read words at the highest pace you can. In this sense it would be better if the text is presented to you following that constant pace instead letting you to establish it.
- Chunking is the process of reading words in groups instead one by one. The bigger the chunk, the faster you read. It will help then if the text is presented to you already broken in the chunks you can deal with.
These two functions are available in the RSVP (Rapid Serial Visual Presentation) tools. Unfortunately there is not RVSP alike software for smartphones.
Veloread is developing a tool based on RVSP which will allow you to read on your phone taking advantage of the speed reading techniques.
Veloread concept
