| Hey guys, great idea, but your method seems off from most of the speed reading courses I've found. Whereas those courses focus on training you to not just read individual words, but entire lines or blocks of text, and without subvocalization, yours seems to focus on increasing your word-by-word reading speed as much as possible. In your FAQ you say: "We have taken the latest speed-reading curricula and cut out all of the extraneous exercises to create an effective, simple tool to improve reading speed. The readfa.st curriculum forces users to read at speeds that push the upper limits of your comprehension and by constantly challenging you to push yourself faster; at the same time we use regular quizzes to ensure that you maintain your understanding of the text." What is the 'latest speed-reading curricula' you've based the site exercises on? I have an interest but not expertise in this subject, would love to know more details. Also... "Ani, one of our co-founders, read at over 1,000 words per minute without any training. When we noticed how blazingly fast he was finishing books, we began to look into what makes people read at such vastly different speeds. We did extensive research into the scientific (and pseudo-scientific) literature around how people read, but the body of work is not very encouraging. Most speed-reading products make unverified and unverifiable claims about their effectiveness, and because of their SEO and sales interests, those specious claims overwhelm most legitimate discussion around speed-reading. One of our goals is for readfa.st to help us better understand the process of reading and what factors affect speed and comprehension." It would be both awesome in general and good marketing in particular if you elaborated on your findings. Think OK-Cupid data blog but about speed reading. Finally, one question. On the initial assessment I hit 'Too Fast' at 1105 WPM, but the report said I was only reading at 880 WPM. Why the discrepancy? http://i.imgur.com/zf9AC.png |
As far as a data blog - that is one of our middle-term goals, but until we have more users, the best we can offer are anecdotal evidence. This type of shoddy analysis is a big part of the problem with existing reading research, so the plan is to wait until we have a more robust data-set before we start publishing results. I'll post on HN when we start publishing results.
The reason for the difference between the final treadmill reading speed and the suggested speed is that users regularly demonstrated a significant loss of comprehension at the final speed. We think that it was because of the delay between realizing that the treadmill was too fast and stopping the treadmill. At first, we reduced the speed by 10%, but after a few more users, it was clear that was insufficient, so we're trying it at 20%. The quiz speed is adjustable (with the faster/slower buttons or by using f and s as hot-keys), so it's meant more as a suggested starting point than as a definitive reading speed.
Thanks for your feedback!