Speed Reader (RSVP, One Word at a Time)

About the Speed Reader (RSVP, One Word at a Time)

Paste an article, a chapter or your notes and read them one word at a time, each shown in the same place with one letter in colour as a fixed point for your eyes — the method called rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP). Set any speed from 100 to 1,000 words a minute, show one, two or three words at a time, and let the reader pause a moment longer after commas, at the end of sentences and paragraphs, and on long words. The sentence you are in can stay on screen under the word, and one key takes you back a sentence when something slips past.

Be honest with yourself about speed: reading research finds a trade-off between speed and understanding, and it is unlikely that anyone can double or triple a normal speed and still understand as well. Use high speeds for skimming, and slow down for anything you need to remember.

Without a pass you see a free preview: the first words of your text (up to 100), read at the speed and with the settings you choose. The text stays in your browser; only a fingerprint of it is kept, so you can pick up where you stopped.

Common uses

• Getting through long emails, reports and articles faster when an overview is enough.
• Practising reading at a steady pace, without the eyes wandering back.
• Reading on a small phone screen, where a single large word is easier to see than a page.
• Finding your own comfortable speed for different kinds of text.

What research says about speed reading

A review of the research on reading and speed reading by Keith Rayner, Elizabeth Schotter, Michael Masson, Mary Potter and Rebecca Treiman, So Much to Read, So Little Time: How Do We Read, and Can Speed Reading Help? (Psychological Science in the Public Interest), sums it up:

• There is a trade-off between speed and accuracy: it is unlikely that readers can double or triple their speed, from around 250 words a minute to 500–750, and still understand the text as well as at their normal speed.
• When a thorough understanding is not the goal, speed reading or skimming gets you through a text faster with moderate comprehension.
• The way to read faster and still understand well is practice and a larger vocabulary: language skill is at the heart of reading speed.

RSVP shows each word once, so you cannot glance back at an earlier word as you can on a page. That is why this reader can show the current sentence, pauses at punctuation, and goes back a sentence with one key.

How each word is timed

At a speed of w words a minute, a word stays 60,000 / w milliseconds: 200 ms at 300 words a minute. With Pause at punctuation on, a word stays 1.5 times as long before a comma, semicolon, colon or dash, twice as long at the end of a sentence and 2.5 times at the end of a paragraph; with Longer for long words, words of 9 or more letters stay 20 % longer and of 13 or more 40 % longer. The page shows the time the whole text takes with these pauses, and the speed that works out to.

The focus letter sits a little left of the middle of each word (the 2nd letter of a word of 2–5 letters, the 3rd of 6–9, the 4th of 10–13, the 5th of longer ones), the usual choice of RSVP readers, and stays at the same point on screen.

Keyboard shortcuts

With the reader selected: Space plays and pauses, ← goes back a sentence and → forward, ↑ and ↓ change the speed by 25 words a minute, Home restarts, and Esc pauses.

Limitations

• Comprehension drops as the speed rises; nothing in the reader changes that.
• Only the words are shown: pictures, tables and layout are not, so texts that rely on them read poorly this way.
• Languages written without spaces between words (Chinese, Japanese, Thai) are split into words by your browser, which works well in modern browsers but is not perfect.
• The reader pauses when you switch to another tab or window, because browsers slow down timers there.

Privacy

On this device: nothing is sent

Everything happens in your browser. What you enter or open here is not uploaded or stored by MySmartCoPilot.