Flash Reading
Here’s a free application for you to use to increase your reading speed! It’s called Flash Reading, and it’s an excerpt from the new software we’re working on.
This application will flash words on the screen at a speed of your choice. Sit back, relax, and let the words come to you! You can even adjust the Chunk Size, so that you can practice reading multiple words at a time.
The application is very easy to use. Just paste in the text you would like to read, click the continue button, and you’re ready to go! If you can’t think of anything to read, try looking in Wikipedia for an article!
In the main screen of the application, you’ll find sliders to adjust the Words Per Minute speed, the Chunk Size, and the Font Size. Use the Play/Pause button for when you want to start or pause, and use the Stop button to start over.
The main purpose of this application is to help you read at a speed high enough that subvocalization is rendered impossible. When words flash at a certain speed, each following word will come before the completion of the subvocalization of the previous word, resulting in a sort-of “assisted speed reading”, in the sense that subvocalization is forced to be absent.
So push yourself to the max, and see how fast you can go!
The full version of this software is scheduled to launch on July 30th. Look forward to more updates and free demos in the coming days!
Update: Due to the tremendous popularity of the tool, there is now a full page on the website dedicated to Flash Reading. Click here to go there now!
Seems to be pretty good application. Simple, but it works. It is good that it has a feature of adjusting the font size which is not available for many speed reading software packages. Many people read text in larger font than actually needed for reading. If you decrease your font size then there will be more words in your field of vision and you can read more words per minute.
This is a pretty cool tool – reminds me a lot of Spreeder, if you’ve heard of that. My only gripe would be that you’re actually teaching so-called “bad” speed reading tactics – this reads word-by-word rather than with “chunking”. It is a nice thing to play around with though.
@Robert
Actually, if you look a little closer, you’ll notice you can adjust the Chunk Size. The default is 1, but you can increase it all the way up to 10 words at a time.
And yes, I’ve tried Spreeder and loved it! It was one of the many inspirations for this application. (Zapreader comes to mind too.) I like to think I refined the concept, and improved on the ideas originally presented by the others in the community.