Scientists Offer New Way to Read Online Text 404
An anonymous reader writes "Scientists at a small startup called Walker Reading Technologies in Minnesota have determined that the human brain is not wired properly to read block text. They have found that our eyes view text as if they're peering through a straw. Not only does your brain see the text on the line you're reading, but it's also uploading superfluous information from the two lines above and the two lines below. This causes your brain to engage in a tug of war as it fights to filter and ignore the noise. The result is slower reading speeds and decreased comprehension. The company has developed a product that automatically re-formats text in a way that your brain can more easily comprehend."
Dr. Seuss (Score:5, Insightful)
The only downside I can see (if this gets used in print) is the waste of paper compared to current methods.
Scrolling (Score:5, Insightful)
looks good.
It breaks the text down
into phrases
like poetry.
(It looks sort of
like code.)
But, for anything
other than a short document,
you will be scrolling a long time,
baby.
Just up the css line-height to 2, and call it a day.
Really? (Score:1, Insightful)
Great for... (Score:1, Insightful)
FAQs (Score:4, Insightful)
Ever read poetry? (Score:3, Insightful)
Also, while it is true that people stumble on the text above or below a line, this effect can be helpful if you're skimming. It would be a pain to skim a ten (block paragraph) page of text in this poetry format. Not only would there be a lot more scrolling, but you can't just "image" a paragraph at a time to find the piece you're looking for. I'll admit, the modern way of formatting text may not be the best, but it is so entrained that'd be tough to change without all sorts of unintended consequences.
Re:Scrolling (Score:4, Insightful)
Did they do such a shoddy job in the study? Why is there no link to a peer-reviewed study?
Re:oooooo (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Summary (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Dr. Seuss (Score:5, Insightful)
I noticed several things that make it difficult for me to actually evaluate the difference. First each uses a different font, then the one that is supposed to be inferior ends with an incomplete sentance "A cell is" - making it gramatically inferior, if you zoom in you'll notice that the inferior sample didn't compress well in the jpg, the fonts are different sizes, and finally live link labeling the new sample as "Section 1:" provides more contextual information making it in fact more informative. While these changes are subtle each by themselves they are all time tested methods for improving text. Don't blur the text, add contextual info, complete your sentances and use standardized grammar. If this is the standard output from their software then this is truly not impressive. Aside from these issues, haven't people used collumns for a long time too?
Re:Dr. Seuss (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Who needs Live Ink? (Score:3, Insightful)
The problem I have with the examples are that they are really easy to read aloud, either in one's head or vocally, but very difficult to read fast without actually verbalizing the script. Some of the research notes support this view:
Re:If it was really better... (Score:4, Insightful)
Because paper costs money and space is limited. Both of these explanations are superior to yours.
"Poetry regularly follows such patterns, using them to express a certain spoken "tone" within the meter."
Poetry is not a legitimate comparison. Poetry is frequently formatted with no regard whatsoever to how easy it is to read. Often, the formatting is done to preserve tings which actually make it harder to read, on purpose.
"So why can't we transfer it to regular text? There must be an overriding reason?"
Because paper costs money and space is limited. Both of these explanations are superior to yours.
"When you introduce a solution to a problem, you need to make sure that it's easily adoptable."
No actually you don't.
"Is the new solution truly superior if the supposedly superior solution is more difficult to use than the solution it replaces?"
Did you really say this? How many things did you learn as a child that you found a better way to do later, but had to learn first? If it's difficult at first, but then becomes more efficient after learning, then yes it is better.
It seems that ultimately your only real objection is that this is "inelegant", which has caused you to manufacture other spurious objections in order to justify your dislike of this methods aesthetics.
Re:Scrolling (Score:4, Insightful)
It's actually quite annoying, and I prefer block text.
Re:Dr. Seuss (Score:4, Insightful)
Then Myspace would have to be invented.
Or Wired.
Yeah, they've gotten better, but they still spin the random color wheels every now and again.
Re:Who needs Live Ink? (Score:3, Insightful)
Some people who have trouble reading speedily might be trying to "silently speak out" what they're reading, acting like a narrator and a listener in one, instead of just absorbing and processing the incoming stream of 2-3 lines at a time (and a line or two during the backscan, if you're into boustrophedonic reading).
For them this layout may help. For experienced readers, not so much.
Re:If it was really better... (Score:3, Insightful)
The new cues may change the overall meaning of the text resulting in a failure to communicate.
I think this might be my only objection to the idea. I went to their site and started reading Moby Dick, and it immediately occurred to me that, by changing the formating, it changed the way I was reading the text. I think it does make reading the text easier, but it made me read the text more like poetry, and in poetry, line breaks often have a sort of significance. A line break tends to change the timing, almost like a form of punctuation.
If you think about it, we often use whitespace like punctuation. I just did-- I broke to a new paragraph to signify that I was shifting focus. Maybe this is something fairly innate in people, or maybe it's strictly conventional. Either way, that's how we all read. Whitespace is punctuation. Therefore, it's not clear to me that it's necessarily appropriate to go adding whitespace to other people's writing without considering the effect on meaning.
Consider if someone published a copy of Moby Dick with new punctuation, periods and commas where they weren't before, and dropping some commas and periods. Let's say they broke up paragraphs how they wanted and not how Melville wrote them. Could they make it more readable? Perhaps. But it's trickier to ask whether such an act would be appropriate. By changing the punctuation and whitespace, you change the cadence and timing, and potentially the meaning. I'm sure Faulkner could be edited to make it more readable, but readability isn't everything.
Re:Dr. Seuss (Score:5, Insightful)
Exactly! (Score:3, Insightful)
not new (Score:4, Insightful)
In fact, childrens' book typesetters have known about this, ever since there have been childrens' books.
Now - for reading text on the web; I've noticed - particularly in ad-supported content, that there's a trend (who am I kidding? It's been the standard for over 10 years now - and before that; ad-supported print) - to condense text to make more room for ads. (which is why the text-size plugins for firefox are so great!).
Sorry, but I'm not too terribly impressed with this "study".
Re:Dr. Seuss (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Dr. Seuss (Score:3, Insightful)
Others think primarily visually (can you see what I mean?) Some think spatially (do you need to organize your thoughts? Seeing this from a different angle? Wrapping your mind around it?). Some think tactilely (can you feel what I'm getting at here? Getting a grip on it?). Some think kinetically (am I moving you at all? Finding common ground?) I'm sure there are others which I'm forgetting.
Any means of processing incoming information, is going to be affected by your thinking style. I agree with you that the GP's demonstration of how "bad" the style is is far faster and easier to read than the original paragraph-- but then, I'm a spatial thinker, not an aural one.