Scientists Offer New Way to Read Online Text

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."

Low tech workaround

[SlayerofGods]

I personally just highlight the text with my mouse as I read through an article seems to help me keep my place and read faster.
Of course it drives anyone reading over my shoulder nuts....

Re:Scrolling

[hawks5999]

Yeah Lots of scrolling so the time saved from reading will be lost to scrolling I'll stick to block text.

If it was really better...

[AKAImBatman]

...someone would have already invented this "new" method. Unfortunately, it's not better. The text is certainly easier to follow (which proves the research), but that's only half the battle. The formatting implies certain cues such as tone, volume, and emphasis. By reformatting the text, the software loses the original cues and accidentally adds new ones. The new cues may change the overall meaning of the text resulting in a failure to communicate.

Saw something similar before

[MontyApollo]

Years ago I saw a shareware program that was supposed to help you read text faster. I think they were basing it upon a different principle involving eye movement speed, but it would be a compatible idea to this approach. You would just look at a certain fixed point on a blank page and it would feed you one word at time at whatever speed you select. The words always showed up at the same position, so in terms of this article your "straw" would be in a fixed position.

I was able to read quite a bit faster, but I did not have the money to spend on it at the time. I also wasn't sure how useful it would be outside of novels.

Slower reading speeds?

[UncleTogie]

... uploading superfluous information from the two lines above and the two lines below...The result is slower reading speeds and decreased comprehension.

WTF? This is how I've always done speed-reading...

Looks Like an Ad or Poster

[UCRowerG]

Does anyone else see the similarity between the formatted text and what many advertisers and graphic designers have been doing for years?

Less confusing?

[Aladrin]

That's supposed to be LESS confusing? My eye jumps to the colored words first, which appear to be picked almost randomly. (It looks like they are actually the verbs of the sentences.) Then I have to force my eye back to the beginning of the sentence and try to ignore the different colors. Then, because there's a break between that sentence and the next, I have to do the same thing all over again.

And what's the difference if my eyes are pulling words from the previous and next sentence or the pieces of the current one? It's still giving me information that I don't need -right now- in the sentence.

And the additional poem-like formatting is also confusing, as special formatting usually -means- something.

Training myself to read this, which is only used online and only if licensed by this company, would be a hassle. And used very little.

700 Words Per Minute

[rrhal]

My uncle could read 700 words per minute. He would look a section of a page and grab part of 3 or 4 lines at once. He brain would be putting the lines back together while he was scaning the next section. He always read that way. He was a farmer - he almost no time for reading in the summer but long stretches in the winter. He could easily read over 100 books in that time.

In other words the effect that this process is fighting can be used to read much faster than most of us do. I can't do it for more than a few minutes but if you trained early enough or hard enough I think you could get there.

Re:If it was really better...

[n3demonic]

But what if the online text is mindless boring text, say an online history book. It's monotonous text which wouldn't be misconstrued if written in a different formatting. Wouldn't that help readers? Oh wait... they'd probably be sleeping anyways.

Re:Looks Like an Ad or Poster

[ilovechristy]

Don't forget about zapreader - zapreader.com

This would make an excellent teaching aid

[PFI_Optix]

At work, I deal with the software used to help kids who are struggling with reading a lot. Presently, all it does is give them a section of text, let them listen to recorded readings of it, and then have them try to emulate what they heard. It does work for a lot of kids, but it's slow going.

What I see in this new method of formatting is that the sentences are being being broken up very similar to how their natural spoken rhythm would flow, making it much easier for a struggling student to read aloud. It shouldn't be a crutch, but I can picture a kid being shown the entire written text, and then this version of it. Have the kid read the Live Ink version aloud into a microphone and play back the recording for him to hear how it sounds, then try to do that with the "normal" text.

This could really be something huge for education. I'm about to go talk to our special programs director about it, this looks like it could be very useful.

Read line by line? That's crazy slow

[TheLink]

But that's so slow. Not everyone reads "through a straw" like they claim. IF you're really interested in reading, then you should be training your brain to read faster. Stop doing slow stuff like moving your mouth or running your finger along word by word.

You shouldn't be like a beginner reading one of those children's books with 3 words a page.

Learn to read stuff chunk by chunk - keep your eyes further away from the screen if the whole column is to wide to fit - that's why newsprint is in narrow columns. Most human eyes don't have a wide angle of view especially with those crappy blind spots.

Brains definitely can do parallel processing, and read multiple lines at a time. And brains can learn and adapt. Trust me, you do not want to adapt to reading like a beginner.

Often I can spot spelling mistakes after just a glance at an entire page of print - they just stick out. And sometimes at a glance, my brain notices that there's an unusual word somewhere, and I become aware of it, but just don't know where I saw it on the page (but just a brief search and I'll find it). I think there must be editors (real ones not slashdot ones) out there who do this much better.

In this day and age where there's lots of textual data I don't think it's a good idea to teach people to read stuff in a format where they have to keep doing "next page" every second.

Life is too short.

Newspapers

[Kludge]

Newspapers already do this
to some degree.

They use narrow columns when
formatting their text so
people can read it faster.

Your fovias don't have
to bounce back and forth
as much.

Re:Slower reading speeds?

[Peganthyrus]

Yes! All that randomly placed red text slowed me way down. It's like comic book dialogue with the emphasis placed even more randomly.

I have also wired myself to read quickly for years; I probably do somewhat parallellize the processing of the sentences.

Re:Seuss - No, it's Code Formatting!

[mblase]

Well, it's not just indenting -- you can see from the highlights that they're breaking lines according to where the verbs are, kinda like those sentence diagrams you hated doing in junior high, and indenting according to the role that verb plays.

(On the flip side, this seems to suggest that the engine needs to work entirely differently based on what language you're reading.)

I'm kind of impressed, actually, in that the engine makes any kind of text look and read like non-rhyming poetry, implying that poets figured this technique out centuries before anyone actually codified it.

Re:Slower reading speeds?

[Bamafan77]

WTF? This is how I've always done speed-reading...

Everyone claiming to speed read is probably just scanning text. True speed reading (1000 words per minute with high comprehension) is basically a myth [slate.com].

Re:Dr. Seuss

[smallfries]

Maybe I'm bucking the trend so far, but I found the reformatted versions harder to read than normal text. You're right about their bad comparison - but comparing their "poetic" formatting against normal text on a webpage (not their example) makes me think that ther technique makes it harder to read.

Their "revelation" about how the eyes scan a page is well known and understood in page design and layout. Also, the idea that the brain has to remove "clutter" from the surrounding words is false. The brain uses the pattern of the text above and below to help the eye scan back to the beginning of the line quickly. Also the brain interprets the surrounding text to get an earlier chance to parse what is coming. The line underneath is processed before it is consciously read, kind of a warm-up run.

Sadly I can't remember where I read this, or find a reference to it...

Re:Dr. Seuss

[dgatwood]

No joke. For those of us aural thinkers, this is the most annoying presentation possible. You stop in the middle of a phrase. If they diced it up by phrases, it wouldn't be bad, but hearing the words "I think" followed by a pause while your eye scans down to the words "I can" in the next line.... It's worse than children's books. It is absolutely horrible for me to read those samples.

Here's a version of that paragraph rewritten in this style. Tell me if you have a harder time reading it.

No joke.
For those
of us aural thinkers,
this is
the most annoying presentation
possible.
You stop
in the middle
of a phrase.
If they
diced it up
by phrases,
it wouldn't be
bad,
but hearing the words
"I think"
followed by
a pause
while your eye
scans down
to the words
"I can"
in the next line....
It's worse
than children's books.
It is
absolutely horrible
for me
to read those samples.

Don't get me wrong, block text is hard to read, but this can be improved significantly through using fonts that are large enough to read, using a serif font to provide additional clues about letter shapes, leaving more space between lines, and limiting your paragraphs to no more than about three or four lines of text. You don't have to insult the intelligence of the reader to get a point across...
like my post
seems
to do,
but really
doesn't.

Let's write chinese

[DescData]

This reminds me of something my taiwanese sister in law used to say. She claimed that the chinese form of writing is more efficient because a person can glance at a large amount of information and just "get it". Maybe I should not have been so dismissive. Maybe by distilling an idea into just two graphic 'characters' you have something dense that you can concentrate on/focus on. For all the flexibility of western language, it spreads things out.
Just my thoughts,

Re:Dr. Seuss

[treeves]

It works quite well for me, actually.

The problem is, when it gets implemented on many websites, there will be loads of ads on either side of the text, completely distracting and ruining any advantage offered by the text format.

At least that is my fear based on my expectation that this method wouldn't work well when I read the summary. Whenever I see narrow columns of text now it's surrounded by distracting ads that make it more difficult to read.

Re:For me, the vertical text was awful

[jdray]

The GP's reformatted paragraph didn't take into account the line indentation that the article showed.  I think part of the trick for them is to make the "carriage return" shorter, making your eyes have to travel less distance to get to the next piece of the sentence.  Note how, in the article, the lines that started indented were short, so that the distance from the end of them to the beginning of the next line, which was indented less, still wasn't much?  This keeps the text from creeping across the page as it goes down.

Also, if you try to read
    something that
  is randomly
broken
     along indeterminate
   points in a sentence,
then it will be
   much harder to
read than if it has

      been dissected into
   parts that pay attention
          to the natural
     breaks in the language.

I'm not sure that should have been rated "funny".

[MickLinux]

I tend to read about 2-3 times faster than most "good" readers I know.

I'm not sure that should have been rated "funny". I actually find the block text to be easier to read than the poetry-style lines. First of all, the color interferes with my ability to keep the whole sentence together. My brain actually ends up sticking the black text together in one group, and the red text together in another group. That really slows me down.

So I started thinking about why I read block text so fast.

Let's go over that last "funny" post. Yeah, it was written in the style of tongue-in-cheek quips, but I'm not sure the guy was joking.

Maybe it's just me, but I don't discard the extra 'noise' that I get from reading. I read roughly every second or third line

Okay, I read approximately one phrase (line) at a time. When I'm speed reading, I don't bother to understand the words of that line until my eyes are already on the next line. It feels like I'm reading every second or third line, but I'm actually hitting every one.

build up a composite image of the paragraph, tokenise it in parallel

I then attach a significance to the phrase, and approximate what the relation of the phrases are, according to ifs, ands, and buts, as well as punctuation.

and then parse it from that.

Then I discard the lines that seem relatively unimportant, giving me a basic summary of the paragraph. From this, I fit the other sentences back in as needed. What that means, realistically speaking, is that I look at the paragraph, identify the main topic, and glance through it as needed to understand the specifics.

It's a much better fit with how the optical system works than how people tend to describe reading, and possibly why I read a lot faster than most people I know. This new system slows my reading rate a lot.

Which is what I've experienced, too.

Re:For me, the vertical text was awful

[Petrushka]

It's not indeterminate. It looks like they're breaking at commas and verbs, and highlighting the finite verbs (including auxiliary and modal verbs). Trouble is, that won't work for many kinds of sentences. For example, the summary reformatted would start as follows:

== quote==

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.

== end quote ==

The first sentence ends up as block text anyway, and I find the wildly varying lengths of clauses make the third sentence difficult to read too. I'm really not impressed, especially as they're going to have to pull some fancy tricks with AI to get the app to recognise verbs properly.

For example, a dumb programme would probably misidentify "tug" in the fourth sentence as a verb, "ignore" as a finite form when it's actually an infinitive, and probably also mistakenly highlight "is ... reading" in the fifth sentence as an auxiliary-plus-participle combination, when it's actually verb-plus-gerund.