Having a tough time slogging through your bedside copy of the Pentagon Papers? Well, Spreeder is here to help you read all about our Indochina activities at a much faster rate.
It works like this: just copy+paste your text into the box on the website, and Spreeder will automatically convert the text into a file that flashes the words, one at a time, on the screen. The speed is variable (the default is 300 wpm), and the goal is to keep raising your rate in order to “silence subvocalization.”
According to Spreeder, most of us read at about 200 wpm, because that’s as fast as we can read a passage out loud. We have our inner-voice (in a literal sense, not in a Jiminy Cricket sense) constantly saying the words to us while we read them. By throwing words at you faster than your voice can speak them, the act of reading simply becomes a visual experience, and the human eye is very adept at processing information quickly.
So, really, there’s no excuse left for you not to read all that the National Archives has to offer. It’s what all responsible, informed Americans do.
I learned about Spreeder several years ago, but found that, whether its print or online material, you can achieve a similar result just by “scanning” words.
As someone who reads really, really slow, (lol) I am interested. Will check it out to see if I can get the internal editor out of the story and actually enjoy it this way.
As someone who reads really, really fast, I am dubious about this method, though I think the fundamental “getting away from phonics” principle is a sound one—the only people I know who read as quickly as I do are people who, like me, taught themselves to read rather than learning it via the “sounding-out” method taught in schools.
I’d be interested to read someone’s trip report from using Spreeder.