Use these five apps to train yourself to read text faster.

British essayist and politician Joseph Addison once said, “Reading improves the mind; exercise improves the body.” These days, most if not all of us train our brains by reading on computer monitors, television screens, mobile devices, street signs, newspapers, magazines, and papers at work and school.

Given the amount of written information we receive every day, it seems advantageous to train our brains to read faster by doing specific exercises that challenge our classic reading habits and teach us to absorb more content and data. The purpose of learning these skills is not just to skim text, because reading without understanding is a waste of energy. The goal is to improve your reading speed while still achieving a high level of comprehension.

Read and process input

Before we dive into speed reading, let’s look at the reading process. According to French ophthalmologist Louis Emile Javal, reading is divided into three steps:

  1. fixed
  2. To deal with
  3. scanningsaccade

In the first step, we determine the fixed points in the text, called the best recognition points. In the second step, we introduce (process) new information while the eyes are fixed. Finally, we change the position of the gaze, an operation called saccade, in which no new information is acquired.

In practice, the main differences between faster readers are shorter stationary times, longer saccades, and less rereading.

Reading practice

Reading is not a natural human process because it is a fairly recent development in the span of human existence. The first writing system was created about 5,000 years ago, and it wasn’t enough for people to develop into reading machines. Therefore, we must use our reading skills to become more skilled and efficient in this basic task of communication.

The first exercise involved reducing subvocalization, also known as silent phonics, which is the habit of pronouncing words internally while reading. It is a natural process to slow down reading speed, because reading speed is limited to speaking speed. The key to reducing subvocalization is to only say the words you read. One way is to use other tasks to dominate the internal sounds, such as chewing gum.

The second exercise involves reducing regression, or stress. Regression is a lazy mechanism because our brains can reread any material at any time, reducing attention.

5 Open Source apps to train your brain

There are several interesting open source apps that can be used to exercise your reading speed.

One is Gritz, an open source file reader that pops up words one at a time to reduce regression. It is available for Linux, Windows, and MacOS and is distributed under the GPL license, so you can use it as you like.

Other options include Spray Speed-Reader, an open-source speed-reading app written in JavaScript, and Sprits-it! , an open source Web application that can read Web pages quickly.

For Android users, Comfort Reader is an open source speed-reading app. It can be found in the F-Droid and Google Play app stores.

My favorite application is Speedread, which is a simple terminal program that displays text verbatim at the best reading point. To install it, clone the Github repository on your device and enter the appropriate command to choose to read documents at your preferred words per minute (WPM). The default rate is 250 WPM. For example, to read your_text_file.txt in 400 WPM, you should type:

`cat your_text_file.txt | ./speedread -w 400`
Copy the code

Here is the running interface of the program:

Speedread demo

Since you may not only read plain text, you can use Pandoc to convert files from markup format to text format. You can also run Speedread on Android devices using the Android terminal emulator Termux.

Other options

Building a solution is an interesting project for the open source community only to improve reading speed by using specific exercises to improve things like subvocalization and rereading. I believe this project will be very beneficial, because in today’s information-rich environment, improving reading speed is very valuable.

Via: opensource.com/article/19/…

By Jaouhari Youssef, Lujun9972

This article is originally compiled by LCTT and released in Linux China