How to get the most out of spreeder.com

Spreeder.com is a very cool tool for speed reading text online. In this article I’ll be discussing all the neat little features that are in the tool, that make it rock!

The basics

When you first start spreeder, you get a basic input screen for text. There’s no limit to the number of words you can paste in there. I tried up to 100k words, and although the app slows down a little, it works fine. You get the text in the box, either by copy-paste, or by
using the spreed! bookmarklet (which is even easier and eliminates the copy-paste action).

The settings

In the righthand corner on the bottom, you can find the link to the settings. The default is shown in the screenshot. The settings are:

• words per minute
  the effective speed with which spreeder will show you words
• chunk size (words)
  the number of words spreeder will show you at the same time
• window width (px)
  width in pixels
• window height (px)
  height in pixels
• font size
  again in pixels
• font / background color
  70 colors to choose from
• alignment
  center, justify, left

The alignment option “justify” can give strange results in some cases as you can see in the screenshot.

The words per minute and chunk size settings are the most interesting options, and the combination determines the “flash” time. In the table you can find the flash time in seconds for different speeds and chunk sizes. I suggest you keep inside the white area, the
orange areas are tricky as you’ll probably lose some effectivity, the red area is very challenging and the chances of effective speed reading are very slim.

Advanced settings

Quite hidden in the left bottom corner of the settings section, you can find the advanced settings. They are:

• Speed variability
  This setting takes the length of words into account. Short sections get less time, long sections get some more time.
• Start new chunk at end of sentences and paragraphs. This setting ends chunks at periods. This gives a more logical chunk size, and helps comprehension.
• Slight pause at end of sentences and paragraphs. This setting adds a little pause here and there. The pauses are so small that you hardly notice them at all.
• Skip over “stopwords” which convey no additional meaning to the sentence (i.e. “the”, “an”, etc) This strips the text of words and reduces it to words with essential meaning. This obviously only works for english.

The speed variability is very useful and helps simulate a more natural reading behavior. The other options can be used as you like them, they are more of a personal preference.

Some hacks for the window size

You can play around with the window size to suit your needs. As you increase the chunk size, you’ll want to adjust the size of the window as well.

You can set the window like a single line with every word next to each other, to resemble written text as you are used to it. This is helpful in training for speed reading text outside of spreeder as well. Use the following formulas for the settings:

• window width = monitor resolution – 300 pixels
• window height = font size * 2

You can also choose to have a single column with every word beneath each other. This is a setting that gives a good view of all the words in one glance for chunk sizes up to 6. Use the following settings:

• window width = 10
• window height = 300 (this will keep all controls “above the fold” for most resolutions)

My personal setup

At the moment I use 500 wpm @ chunk size 3 in a 700 x 40 window with centered alignment and a 20 px font. I use both speed variability and new chunks at new sentences. This is a comfortable speed for me, and results in a good comprehension for me. The next step will be moving to a bigger chunk size.

Summary

Spreeder.com is a very cool app that’s very useful for speed reading text online. It can be setup to suit personal preferences and is a great tool for getting your reading productivity up a notch. Speed reading offline requires an additional set of skills to get through the pages of a book, and still recognize all the words. They aren’t as neatly isolated then as they are in spreeder. So while it can also be used to train speed reading skills for offline reading, by design it’s most suited as a productivity tool. And in that field it does a very good job!

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Posted in 15 bean soup on Sun 2007.06.10