I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by.
- Douglas Adams

Yesterday was June 17. The self-imposed deadline for getting my speed reading skills up to 500 words per minute, both for English and Dutch. And even self-imposed deadlines need to be honored, so yesterday was the day that I had to check whether I met my goals.

I underestimated the time and energy involved in learning how to speed read. My assumption was that it was mainly another way of reading, that results in a higher speed. And in a way it is, however as with most skills it takes some time to learn, and (this is what I underestimated) it uses some underlying skills that weren’t really strong in my case.

Experiences of last month

Most of all, I was surprised by the tremendous work my eyes had to do. The muscles in my eyes weren’t trained to get up to higher speeds. Speed reading for only 15 or 20 minutes made my eyes very tired, and they needed some time to recover. Since I just had my eyes measured and have the appropriate glasses for my eyes, that couldn’t be the problem. Later on in the training the stamina of my eye-muscles improved, and at
the same time the need to move my eyes so fast reduced, as I picked up on the skill to absorb more words in one look.

Not surprisingly, having a quiet and distraction-free environment is essential during training and during speed reading itself, and when you want to get to the really high speeds. Then again, such an environment is quite essential for most high-productivity activities.

Exercises are boring

I used Tony Buzan’s book, and did the exercises from his book. The exercises are big lists of numbers, that you have to cover, uncover for a flash and write down. Now in themselves the exercises are good and provide good training. However at the time Buzan wrote the book, he had to rely on paper to get the exercises across.

Now picture yourself awkwardly behind the book, with a sheet of paper to cover numbers, a pencil in the other hand, and often a stopwatch in front of you to time the exercise. Now cover the numbers, uncover them for a very brief moment, write down the numbers. It’s awkward, it’s tiring on both hands, the book moves around all the time and you get frustrated. Well I did anyway!

The exercises do not encourage you to do over and over again, and that’s a real shame, as
repeated exercise deepens the skills. But the thought of fumbling around with books, pencils, paper and stopwatches is not really appealing. I looked around on the web, but couldn’t find a good free solution. I found spreeder.com, but as you can read here, I use that more as a productivity tool, than as a training tool.

And the results?

In the end I did meet my goals. My speed and comprehension for Dutch are around 560 wpm and around 85%. For English I did not have a real good test, but I use spreeder to read the bigger blog posts (e.g. Steve Pavlina’s posts). My speedsetting is 500 wpm, and the comprehension is good enough for me there, although I can’t really test it.

My normal reading speed has picked up through training, but isn’t quite on speed reading speeds. I have to say that I use speed reading as a tool, I choose to speed read something. That can either be because there are time-constraints (that happens at work), or information overflow (scanning/reading my blogreader). When I need real good comprehension, I read at normal speeds. 85% is simply not enough then.

Onward from here

I plan to keep up the skill, and improve it gradually. Without goals this time. I still think the exercises are important, yet I’m not doing them on paper anymore. I still haven’t found them on the internet, but I have some ideas that I’m discussing with Reman Child of Spreeder. Maybe there will be exercises available on the net soon. I’ll keep you posted.

Spreeder.com is a very cool tool for speed reading text online. In this article I’ll be discussing all the neat little features that are in the tool, that make it rock!

The basics

When you first start spreeder, you get a basic input screen for text. There’s no limit to the number of words you can paste in there. I tried up to 100k words, and although the app slows down a little, it works fine. You get the text in the box, either by copy-paste, or by
using the spreed! bookmarklet (which is even easier and eliminates the copy-paste action).

The settings

In the righthand corner on the bottom, you can find the link to the settings. The default is shown in the screenshot. The settings are:

• words per minute
  the effective speed with which spreeder will show you words
• chunk size (words)
  the number of words spreeder will show you at the same time
• window width (px)
  width in pixels
• window height (px)
  height in pixels
• font size
  again in pixels
• font / background color
  70 colors to choose from
• alignment
  center, justify, left

The alignment option “justify” can give strange results in some cases as you can see in the screenshot.

The words per minute and chunk size settings are the most interesting options, and the combination determines the “flash” time. In the table you can find the flash time in seconds for different speeds and chunk sizes. I suggest you keep inside the white area, the
orange areas are tricky as you’ll probably lose some effectivity, the red area is very challenging and the chances of effective speed reading are very slim.

Advanced settings

Quite hidden in the left bottom corner of the settings section, you can find the advanced settings. They are:

• Speed variability
  This setting takes the length of words into account. Short sections get less time, long sections get some more time.
• Start new chunk at end of sentences and paragraphs. This setting ends chunks at periods. This gives a more logical chunk size, and helps comprehension.
• Slight pause at end of sentences and paragraphs. This setting adds a little pause here and there. The pauses are so small that you hardly notice them at all.
• Skip over “stopwords” which convey no additional meaning to the sentence (i.e. “the”, “an”, etc) This strips the text of words and reduces it to words with essential meaning. This obviously only works for english.

The speed variability is very useful and helps simulate a more natural reading behavior. The other options can be used as you like them, they are more of a personal preference.

Some hacks for the window size

You can play around with the window size to suit your needs. As you increase the chunk size, you’ll want to adjust the size of the window as well.

You can set the window like a single line with every word next to each other, to resemble written text as you are used to it. This is helpful in training for speed reading text outside of spreeder as well. Use the following formulas for the settings:

• window width = monitor resolution - 300 pixels
• window height = font size * 2

You can also choose to have a single column with every word beneath each other. This is a setting that gives a good view of all the words in one glance for chunk sizes up to 6. Use the following settings:

• window width = 10
• window height = 300 (this will keep all controls “above the fold” for most resolutions)

My personal setup

At the moment I use 500 wpm @ chunk size 3 in a 700 x 40 window with centered alignment and a 20 px font. I use both speed variability and new chunks at new sentences. This is a comfortable speed for me, and results in a good comprehension for me. The next step will be moving to a bigger chunk size.

Summary

Spreeder.com is a very cool app that’s very useful for speed reading text online. It can be setup to suit personal preferences and is a great tool for getting your reading productivity up a notch. Speed reading offline requires an additional set of skills to get through the pages of a book, and still recognize all the words. They aren’t as neatly isolated then as they are in spreeder. So while it can also be used to train speed reading skills for offline reading, by design it’s most suited as a productivity tool. And in that field it does a very good job!

If you liked this post, please reward it with a Digg, a bookmark on Del.icio.us or a thumbs up on StumbleUpon. Also please consider subscribing to my RSS feed if you don’t want to miss any future posts.

One of the subjects that returns in speed reading literature and theories is subvocalizing. Subvocalization is the process in which you “say” the words you read in your mind, you’re in a sense reading to yourself “out loud” silently.

I recently discovered that subvocalizing is a matter of controversy in speed reading country. The general opinion is that it’s a bad thing. It slows you down, after all: who can speak (comprehensively) at a rate of 1000wpm? So subvocalizing is something that needs to stop. It doesn’t require training though, if you increase your speed, you will get this as a bonus. It will stop simply because it cannot keep up.

I can’t get it to stop

I use subvocalizing when I read. And while I’m writing this, I realize I even use it when I write. During my training of speed reading I noticed a change in subvocalizing, and I gradually changed from every single word to only the key words. And this is something I cannot seem to get rid of.

So I turn to the all knowing web to check out subvocalizing. And to my surprise I found a couple of links from pretty reliable sources, that subvocalization isn’t as bad as it is presented in a lot of books. Subvocalization needn’t slow you down if it’s not accompanied by physical movements (e.g. talking, murmuring). It even plays a role in comprehension!

Now whether or not subvocalization primarily has benefits or primarily has downsides we may never know. We cannot measure it after all as it happens inside a person’s mind. For my training I’m going to accept it on a keyword level.

Oh, and when I’m reading for the sheer fun of reading (I like fantasy books, absolutely love Raymond E. Feist and his world of Midkemia), I subvocalize every word. I love it how the words suck me into the sentences and smoothly guide me into the magical world of the book.

I have been learning speed reading techniques in the past week. The good news, my speed is up by 200% (to around 350 wpm). The bad news, my comprehension is down by 50% (from 94% to 52%). Not quite what I expected, as the effect evens out to almost zero. I don’t want my comprehension to suffer from it…

Yet I still feel I’m making progress. Learning how to speed read is not a simple trick, it requires training. The eye muscles have to get used to the new way of reading. It’s pretty similar to starting to run actually. If you’re untrained and start to train, you’re not ready for the marathon in a week. I definitely feel my muscles, 30 minutes of training is hard on the eyes, they are tired after that. I wonder if I need to do a cooling down for these muscles as well…can these muscles get sore as well?

I’m keeping up with the practice, and learning the new techniques from the book. I also have to master the different skill of understanding several words at one glance too. Here are some links on the subject and some tools for those who want to take a shot at it.

• Spreeder
  For faster single word recognition
• Reading soft
  Test your current speed and comprehension
• Speed reading 13yr old (video)
  Besides that it’s amazing, it also shows some of the techniques
• Wikihow
  Well…a how to, as can be expected from wikihow
• Abasoft speed reading
  There’s some software there, but visit them for a lot of information, tools and links
• Double your reading rate
  A post on the subject by Scott H Young
• Overclock your reading speed
  A recent post on the subject by Kim Roach on Zen Habits

I read a lot as I like learning a lot. A great deal of the resources for learning are text-based (written) resources, much like this blog is a text-based resource as well. And as I have been caught by the productivity virus for a while now, and feel this is an area that needs improving: I want to get better at reading. There are several ways to do this:

Eliminate the unnecessary

In dealing with the vast amounts of text, I have already developed a habit to eliminate everything that’s not adding value to the standards I have set for myself (although I have to admit this is a sliding scale). These resources are not necessary for the learning process I am in. Actions I have undertaken:

• unsubscribe from most newsletters
• unsubscribe from some blogs
• stop visiting some websites
• select books to read for the coming period, get the rest out of sight
• rank books in order of most (expected) value
• get my name of most magazine circulation lists at work

This gave a real boost in my productivity. However this is not enough (anymore).

Read smarter

Scott H Young has a post on his blog about reading smarter. He opened my eyes to this habit, as I have been reading smart for a long time but wasn’t aware of it. Reading smarter is definitely a productivity boost.

Cranking up the speed

This is where my new challenge is. I’m a slow reader, always have been, but that will change! So the next step I’m taking up is to really learn how to speed read. I started in Tony Buzan’s book a couple of days ago, and my initial speed is 156 wpm (words per minute, Dutch). Yeah that sucks…

I have a goal to get to 500 wpm both in English and in Dutch (my native language) by June 17. The book says that 1000 wpm shouldn’t be a problem for most people, however with a 320% increase in speed in two languages I’m already very happy.

One of the best ways to get extra motivation for a habit change or for a goal, is to publicly announce it. Well this is one of those announcements, and I’ll keep you posted on my progress and on the resources I’ll be using along the way.