Today, Lifehacker covered a free speed reading windows application. I have to say, it sounds very handy. I have in certain past times tried to learn speed reading. Unfortunately, as all the techniques I found rely on my own constant concentration and discipline, I always ended up watching TV.
While the SpeedRead sounds great, these days I’m not working on my own personal computer, and installing a windows application on somebody else’s computer isn’t really my bag of tea.
I have, instead, followed Lifehacker’s link to spreeder. It’s free, it’s online, and over the last two hours I’ve done nothing but play around with it.
There’s no real manual, there’s no course to follow, just some recommendations. You can put any text you want into the application, and it flings the words back as fast as you tell it to. The speed, font size, number of words at a time, and even the color are all customizable.
At the moment I’m focusing on getting rid of the voice in my head that reads along with me. This, according to spreeder’s FAQ (as well as the books on speed reading I skimmed in high school) is the main reason why we’re not reading as fast as we could be.
Soon, I shall increase the chunk size.
And then I will rule the world.
Hey, you don’t have to reply, and maybe this isn’t the place for this(?), but anyway, I just saw your message on http://photosthatchangedtheworld.com/burning-monk/ ,
and I wanted to say that the exact same thing happened to me during a class once! (…now that I think about though, I wish I’d left it for future students heh.)
# John Says:
August 27th, 2008 at 2:06 pm
I remember seeing this picture in my history books as a child. I was in the middle of ignoring a lecture, flipping through my textbook, and suddenly saw this. I was so moved I tore it out and kept it.
So nice to know we aren’t alone, right? hahah
Hope you have a productive day Mr. Campbell.
Oh yeah, I’m going to check out Spreeder! =-)