don’t apply the “pause after period” rule). and treat the dots in these differently (i.e. Why? Because that would exclude all references provided using an Author-Year citation style and make reading academic texts a lot easier. hopp over) brackets containing a four digit number.
Having said that, here are some suggestions for improvement in Sprint Reader, especially for people like me reading scientific texts: It’s not perfect (I did encounter a couple of crashes or whatever it was when it simply did not work until I restarted the browser), but it is very customizable and it works with pdfs, which not all of the others do. Why did I chose Sprint Reader and not any of the many other similar services and extensions such as Spreed – speed read the web, Spread Speed Reading Extension, Spreeder, or OpenSpritz, to name but a few? Well, it’s the best of them all. You will also encounter problems when there are tables and figures in the text, but hey, otherwise it works okay. This content downloaded from xxx.xxx.16.16 on Thu, 06:49:43 AMĪll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions There are also a couple of other drawbacks that we currently will have to live with, especially that the reader will – not surprisingly – read all the text in the pdf, which means it will also read the header on each page, the page numbers, and – most annoyingly, the text inserted on every page by various publishers, such as: I also set the “pause after paragraph” to 2000, but that basically has no effect when reading a pdf, because there seem to be no paragraphs in there that the Sprint Reader would recognize as such, unfortunately. I recommend setting the “pause after period” higher than the default 450 milliseconds. If you have an image of text, you need to run some OCR on it.) The Sprint Reader extension in action
#Spritz reader online pdf
(Needless to say that your pdf file needs to have actual text in it, not just a scanned image of text. Select the text you want to read, right click and select “Sprint read selected text”. You can now use Sprint Reader to speed read not only text on websites but also your locally stored pdf files (just drag them into the browser). The following will not work with pdf-files that are not displayed using Chrome’s PDF viewer. In order to enable Chrome PDF Viewer, type “chrome://plugins/” into Chrome’s address bar and scroll down to find Chrome PDF Viewer and, well, enable it. This is the case by default, but if you are using Adobe Reader or Adobe Acrobat, you might have disabled it. You also need to make sure that you have the native Chrome PDF Viewer enabled. All you need is the Chrome bowser with the Sprint Reader extension installed. It’s not a big deal, actually, but it took me a while to figure it out nevertheless.
#Spritz reader online how to
My point here is to show you how to read pdfs using this technique (not the original Spritz itself, cause their app is not released yet) because the reading apps that are out there at the moment seem to work only with plain text, while most academic articles come as pdf files. Suffice it to say that if the aim is to get through a text reasonably fast at 350 words per minute with at least superficial understanding of the content (or even ridiculously fast at 800 wpm with probably minimal understanding but a rough idea), then this Spritz technique seems adequate to me, and I have indeed read two articles that way yesterday. Now, I don’t want to philosphize too much about the pros and cons of speed reading here. Sometimes I get so distracted that I even look up some of the references and start reading those instead (and so on).Īnother reason is that when I read an interesting paragraph of sentence, that often triggers my own thoughts and associations and I start wandering off, thinking about how I might integrate that idea into my own text or whatever.įinally, the third problem is that I simply read slowly, I guess because I really want to understand and thing through everything, rather than focusing on the essentials. I am a very slow reader for three reasons: the first is that I look up every other reference and almost all footnotes. I immediately thought that this could be a way for me to read all those texts that I have to read as an academic a lot faster. You get the idea once you look at the Spritz website.
#Spritz reader online serial
A couple of days ago, I came across Spritz, a company that is popularizing a speed reading technology whose name I’ve forgotten called Rapid Serial Visual Presentation.
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