Interruptions and distractions can make reading long articles on the web a time-consuming task, so I was intrigued to come across ZAP Reader, a site that outputs text by flashing words one at a time at whatever rate you choose. The default is 300 words per minute, which I find a bit slow. (According to this test, that’s about the speed I naturally read web pages.) At 375 I can still keep up and understand what I’m reading; 400 seems doable with a little practice.
The reader works because it forces you to stop subvocalizing words and ignore incoming distractions, and because most of the time you can miss a few words and still comprehend meaning. It’s not a service you’d want to use all the time, but for when you just want to mainline a lengthy, factual article, it’s a handy tool. Cut and paste to give it a try.
[Hat tip: David Tufte.]
Jacob Grier is a freelance writer, bartender, cocktail consultant, and magician in Portland, Oregon. He writes, eats, and drinks a lot. His articles have appeared in the print or online editions of The Washington Post, The Atlantic, The Los Angeles Times, Reason, The Oregonian, and other publications.
That’s the death of written humor. Without author-directed pauses by way of paragraph breaks, commas, sentence endings, ellipses, etc., there’s no way the humor can come across. Oh well. 450 works fine for me, and I added a Greasemonkey extension that provides a Zap button on Wikipedia entries, since that’s the sort of the thing for which it would be helpful, I think.
Agreed. This isn’t something I’d use when I want to appreciate someone’s writing. But for a long news story when I just want to cram in the facts I find it pretty useful.
I love it!
Perfect match for online pubs like Economist, Atlantic, etc…