Once upon a time I sped through Melville’s lengthy novel “Moby Dick.” If I recall correctly, it has something to do with a fellow missing one arm who goes chasing after the devilish whale that bit it off. Nowadays my eyes tire more quickly so I appreciate the advantages of electronic readers such as Kindle that serve me up columns of enlarged text with only a few words per line. Then I needn’t work too hard looking back and forth. What really works well is keeping one’s eyes fixed and moving the text along the focus. This is called rapid sequential visual presentation, or RSVP.
Recently I got the heads-up from Scientific American*about a smart-watch from Samsung that comes equipped with an RSVP app called Spritz. They claim that their “Optimal Recognition Point” (ORP) technology increases reading-speed on-average by half-again, from 220 to 330 words-per-minute. My only question is how anyone can hold their wrist steady long enough to digest much. I’d hate to run into anyone walking down the street while absorbed in a particularly fascinating book. Texting is bad enough.
Then again it’s one thing to see a lot of words and even process them through your head, but yet another thing to comprehend fully what’s been read. That’s the point of Annie Murphy Paul of The Weekly Wonk in this blog that questions the claims of Spritz. If I read her correctly (ha ha), she suggests that subject-matter expertise is the real key to effective reading—not just doing it faster, but also with greater comprehension. Excepting pulp fiction that requires little intelligence (gotta love it!), that makes a lot of sense to me.
Nevertheless, I’m anxious to see RSVP come to Kindle so I can try reading more in the short periods of time that I can free up and/or last before becoming eye-weary. Maybe then I will re-read “Moby Dick.” I have this vague recollection of the whale being white, but that just doesn’t seem right.
#1 by BobH on October 7, 2014 - 12:58 pm
That is just weird. It has been found that lines of text with an average of 39 letters is the optimum comprehension set. (A space counts as a letter.) I adjust my Kindle to that level for each book but it is harder to cut my paper books down because they seem to have an average of at least 60.