Did you know that you can "speed read" articles on the Steemit website at speeds up to 1,000 words per minute?

As a regular reader of RSS feeds through theoldreader.com, one of the abilities that I have appreciated for a long time is the ability to speedread through long articles. I guess that I've used it periodically over the last 8 years or, or maybe more. This is possible because TheOldReader has a partnership with SpritzInc to make use of the Spritz speed reading tool.

Over the years, I have also played with Spritz (and other spritz-like applications) in my Android cell phones and tablets for reading PDF articles. This has met with limited success because the PDF downloading is clunky and the speed reading tool is unable to present images, tables, and graphs, so articles that refer to figures and tables lose context. At one time, Spritz let me read arbitrary web sites through the use of a javascript bookmarklet, but this never really worked well, and they discontinued it some time ago. So, until now, my use of Spritz has been almost exclusively through TheOldReader, and even that suffered from the problem that many RSS feeds are only short excerpts of the full article, so there were many sites that I could not read.

In the last week or two, however, I decided to check on the Spritz website to see how the technology had developed in recent years. I was pleasantly surprised to learn that they now offer a browser extension for Chrome and Safari, so I installed it and tried it out. What I found is that it's much more effective than the previous bookmarklet. So, with the use of this browser extension, it is now possible to read articles on the Steemit website at speeds up to 1,000 words per minute (this works for other web sites, too!).

Here is an example using @o1eh's post, Earth on the verge of self-destruction?.

Step Number	Steps
1.	Install the browser extension from the Spritz website.
2.	Open the Steem article that you want to view through the Steemit web site. In this case, Earth on the verge of self-destruction?
3.	Select the text that you want to speed-read through, and click on the little "Spritz" icon that pops up
4.	Use the familiar video-style controls to adjust the speed and to "rewind", "fast forward", "play", and "pause" the text.

That's all there is to it. I find that my comfortable reading zone is in the range of 350-450 words per minute.

To me, this is very useful for a couple reasons:

1. Knowing that the words in the reader are going to disappear in a moment, I have an easier time resisting distractions when reading long articles.
2. There's no need to reorient my eyes every time a new line is encountered.

In summary, it turns out that I read the article faster and pay attention better. On their web site, Spritz describes it, thusly:

Average readers typically read around 200 words per minute (wpm) with a comprehension of 60%. With the Spritz reader, people quickly begin reading a (sic) 300 wpm or more at a comprehension level of 90%.

There are also, however, some potential pitfalls:

1. I can't vouch for this application's security. I don't know if the extensions would be able to intercept things like passwords and wallet keys. For this reason, I set the security in the browser extension to activate on a site by site basis, so it cannot access a site if I don't give it permission.
2. As I mentioned with my attempts to read PDF's in the past, context-specific references to things like tables and figures will probably be hard to understand.

Three possible ways to improve the experience also come to mind. If I could submit a wish list, I'd hope that:

1. Steemit or other Steem website operators could enter into a partnership with Spritz so that this capability could be provided by the web site instead of the browser.
2. I wish that the speed reading tool had the ability to save bookmarks at a particular sentence or word location. If it does have that capability, I haven't learned how yet.
3. A "next level" improvement would be to translate the text between languages and let me speed read foreign language articles.

Final note: I didn't realize it until now, but it's even possible to speed read the preview section of our own posts using this tool, as can be seen here:

Update: From the Spritz website, here is a YouTube embed that describes how the technology works:

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Thank you for your time and attention.

As a general rule, I up-vote comments that demonstrate "proof of reading".

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Steve Palmer is an IT professional with three decades of professional experience in data communications and information systems. He holds a bachelor's degree in mathematics, a master's degree in computer science, and a master's degree in information systems and technology management. He has been awarded 3 US patents.

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^{Pixabay license, source}

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