Skip to main content

Use These Apps to Learn How to Speed Read 

Use These Apps to Learn How to Speed Read 

http://ift.tt/2rcbFRl

Reading is dope, so if you want to do more of it you should probably get better at it. The average human meat sack can inhale words through their eyes at a prodigious 250 words per minute, but speed-reading software can supposedly up your intake to close to 1000 words per minute if you’re dedicated. Be warned: various studies have shown that speed-reading methods might not be as effective as slower, traditional reading, and may dampen comprehension.

Either way, it’ll take more than that to get you through Gravity’s Rainbow (I suggest you put some money on it) but these speed-reading apps should help you build up the confidence you’ll need to believe in yourself long enough to finish it.

It’s always a surprise to me when I talk to someone who doesn’t use Chrome on their iPhone. Apparently die-hard Safari fans exist, and if you use the built-in Reading List feature you’re probably getting all your reading done in there anyway. The Boba app brings a bit of speed-reading functionality to whatever article you’re consuming through a Safari extension.

Find an article, tap the share button, and enable the speed-reading extension. You’ll see the speed-reading interface on the bottom of the screen while the plaintext version of the article hangs out above. You can adjust the words per minute anywhere from 50 to 450 depending on your reading level, but that’s about it in terms of customization.

Boba uses Spritz, a speed-reading service that can be integrated into a variety of apps. The Boba app itself is a web browser that links to popular news outlets and lets you speed read there, but its interface is clumsy.

Outread lets you pull from reading lists you already have. Finding a story is easy, thanks to its integration with other reading and bookmarking services (like Pocket or Instapaper). Subway readers can relax; Outread also supports offline reading. In terms of customization, you can futz with features like reading speed, font, size, and set the app to day or night mode if you’re more of an evening reader.

Article preview thumbnail

Reading your phone in bed is ruining your sleep schedule. But if, like me, you do it anyway, learn…

Read more

Outread features two reading modes: rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP) and guided highlighting mode. The RSVP method displays the text one word at a time in the center of your screen. Since your eyes aren’t panning and scrolling you can focus on a single spot on your phone and read at a faster clip as the words are swapped out like a fast-moving slideshow. Spritz uses the same RSVP method to accomplish the same task.

Guided highlighting mode takes your classic full page of text and bolds the words as it moves through them, training your eyes to follow the highlighted phrase while the rest of the text is greyed out, making it difficult to revisit previously read words.

There are more ways to speed-read then words coming at you one at a time. ReadMe! is an iPhone and Android app that uses both Spritz and the BeeLine method of speed-reading, which uses colors to help users separate words and sentences.

A ReadMe! subscription will run you $1 per month or $5 per year and grant you offline Spritz and BeeLine use, synchronization of books and bookmarks among your devices, and PDF support.

If you like BeeLine you can install its Chrome extension, which lets you use it free for 30 days and five times per day after that. A $10 per year subscription is available, as is a $30 per year option that includes five extra licenses as well as another five licenses for low-income students.

What’s your smartwatch doing right now? Nothing? Good. Get WearReader and turn it into the tiniest e-reader you own. Your watch’s screen is the perfect size for displaying a single word anyway.

WearReader works on the Apple Watch and Android smartwatches and lets you read from your wrist. You can start reading from your smartphone and select where to start reading on your smartwatch down to the word. It also lets you import files from your iCloud or Dropbox account (supported formats include ePub books, Microsoft Word docs, text files, and PDFs) or upload them to the device itself.

You can fast forward or rewind if you missed a few words, and adjust the speed anywhere from 50 to 1000 words per minute. If you’re not a fan of RSVP-style reading then you can display it as a normal block of text, but where’s the fun in that?





Singularity

via http://lifehacker.com

May 31, 2017 at 07:19AM

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

How to capture videos of brains in real time

Image
How to capture videos of brains in real time http://ift.tt/2sTaUgJ Individual neurons firing within a volume of brain tissue (credit: The Rockefeller University) A team of scientists has peered into a mouse brain with light, capturing live neural activity of hundreds of individual neurons in a 3D section of tissue at video speed (30 Hz) in a single recording for the first time. Besides serving as a powerful research tool, this discovery means it may now be possible to “alter stimuli in real time based on what we see going on in the animal’s brain,” said Rockefeller University’s Alipasha Vaziri , senior author of an open-access paper published June 26, 2017 in Nature Methods . By dramatically reducing the time and computational resources required to generate such an image, the algorithm opens the door to more sophisticated experiments, says Vaziri, head of the Rockefeller Laboratory of Neurotechnology and Biophysics . “Our goal is to better understand brain function by monitor
Read more

Kate McKinnon and Alec Baldwin break character to urge people to vote

Image
Kate McKinnon and Alec Baldwin break character to urge people to vote http://ift.tt/2eCjDNe In its last show before the 2016 Presidential election, Saturday Night Live checked in with Alec Baldwin’s Donald Trump and Kate McKinnon’s Hillary Clinton one final time before Tuesday, with both actors breaking character to urge voters to head to the polls. The cold open started by poking at the intense focus on Clinton’s e-mails. The interviewer dismisses questions come up about FBI, Vladimir Putin, and the KKK, even as Baldwin plants a kiss on each representative of each group and as McKinnon gets more and more annoyed with the pivot back to her e-mails. It’s a funny sketch, and it gets funnier as both actors break character, unable to keep up with the ridiculousness of what they’re doing. “I just feel gross all the time,” Baldwin remarked. This leads to a strange, but ultimately fitting bit as McKinnon leads Baldwin out the building, where we’re treated to a montage of the pair da
Read more