Speed Reading

Speed Reading Returns

By ANGELA CHEN
March 26, 2014

Apps and Classes Help People Adapt to Reading on Their Phones

Reading these days is often a few minutes on the phone in the grocery-store line, not an hour curled up with a book on the couch. This quick-hit reading is sparking a renewed interest in the art of speed reading.

People read more than ever on mobile devices and usually in 10-minute bursts, according to research by e-reading subscription services. To tap into this, there's a revival in traditional speed-reading classes as well as new apps that promise to make reading on a small screen easier.

When Brett Kirby, age 33, reads the news in the morning, he doesn't grab a newspaper or browse a website. He picks up his phone and has his articles flashed to him, one word at a time, 650 words a minute.

Mr. Kirby, a research fellow in medicine at Duke University, is a beta-tester for Spritz, a mobile app that claims to help people read faster without the bother of classes.

Promises of blazing through "War and Peace" have been around since the Evelyn Wood speed-reading classes of the 1960s, and demand for in-person classes is growing, says Paul Nowak, founder of Iris Reading LLC, a Chicago-based company that hosts similar courses. Evelyn Wood Reading Dynamics, based in Mission, Kan., still offers workshops, DVDs and other resources, though it is smaller than its heyday. (Calls to its offices weren't returned.)

Spritz Technology Inc. co-founder and CEO Frank Waldman says using the app is a more modern way of reading. The company's goal isn't to help undergraduates cram for exams, he says, but to change how people keep up with mobile news. "You wouldn't really want to read classic lit or Shakespeare on [Spritz]," he says. "We want to work on focused reading on the go." Samsung Group's new Galaxy S5 phone and Gear 2 smartwatch come with the Spritz app preloaded.

The average college graduate reads about 250 words a minute, says Michael Masson, professor of psychology at the University of Victoria in Canada. A 7-year-old reads about 80 words a minute, while a sixth-grader reads about 185 words a minute. People who use Velocity, a $2.99 iPhone and iPad app that launched in September tend to go with its default speed of 300 words a minute, says the app's co-creator Matthew Bischoff. But 400 and 500 words a minute are also popular presets.

Spritz says its studies show people who were reading 250 words a minute sped up to reading 400 words a minute after using Spritz for 20 minutes with no loss in comprehension.

Can you really boost your reading speed so much so quickly? Going from 250 to 400 isn't beyond the realm of possibility, says Dr. Masson. But in general, comprehension gets worse the faster people read, he says.

In a 1987 seminal study on speed reading, Dr. Masson tested the text comprehension of three groups: people reading at a normal speed (about 240 words a minute); people skimming at 600 words a minute; and people who had taken an Evelyn Wood course and read through the text at 700 words a minute. (The three groups read on a TV monitor.)

The skimmers and speed-readers did much worse at answering comprehension questions afterward, especially ones about specifics or technical material. "One can have the impression of being able to immediately identify what those words are, but if they are going by at such a high rate, it's virtually impossible" to come away with coherent ideas from the text, Dr. Masson says.

Mobile speed-reading apps use "rapid serial visual presentation," or RSVP, in which words are flashed on the screen at a preset rate. The technology is based on the premise that a lot of reading time is wasted by moving our eyes back and forth.

RSVP hurts comprehension because it doesn't let people look back at previous words, says Keith Rayner, a psychology professor at the University of California-San Diego. In a study he co-authored, 40 college students read passages at their natural pace and also while using a technology that didn't allow them to refer back. In the first trial, subjects had 75% comprehension accuracy. In the second trial, they had only 50% accuracy.

Last year, nearly two million people participated in Iris's in-person courses, compared with 417,000 in 2012 and 22,517 in 2007, when the company began.

The company teaches a three-step process involving "preview" (look at headings and subheads for main ideas), "overview" (read the first sentence of every paragraph") and "read" (go from beginning to end, but only if the previous two steps have convinced you the article is worth reading).

None of this is possible using an RSVP app. In 2010, Iris launched its own free RSVP app, AccelaReader. "People still have to read on the printed page or on a full screen, so people need to know how to read well in both situations," Mr. Nowak says.

San Francisco-based startup Plympton Inc. has a different solution for people reading in short bursts on their phone. In March, Plympton launched its first iPhone app, the $4.99-a-month Rooster subscription service. Rooster can send users a 15-minute chunk of a novel—selected every month by Rooster's team—each day. (The 15-minute chunk is calculated using an average speed of about 200 words a minute.) Upcoming selections include "The Kreutzer Sonata" by Leo Tolstoy.

Rooster's approach is designed to make the thought of starting a book more appealing, says Yael Goldstein Love, Rooster's editorial director and a novelist.

Readers can choose to read on to the next installment if they've finished their 15-minute daily read. "You can binge read," Ms. Goldstein Love says. " 'Binge read' sounds like a funny thing to say because that was how we read normally, but people no longer feel like they have time to read a 300-page thing."