The previous post related my experimentation with Spreeder.com and how valuable a tool it is and probably will be for the rest of my speed reading life. This post will skim right to the best training tool of all: Acceleread.
OTHER FINDS
There is a number of other interesting pages, videos, and ideas I plan to relate, but none of them were the silver bullet. The silver bullets so far has been Tim Ferris' techniques, Spreeder, and now the most effective one yet.
ACCELEREAD
As with the greatest things, it's hard now to recall how I stumbled upon Acceleread even though it was just a few days ago. I believe I typed "speed reading" in the App Store on my iPhone, as a way of trying to make up for the disappointment of ReadQuick.
Acceleread solves the problem I had while playing with Spreeder. With Spreeder, I had practically all I needed to train the most important techniques and improve comprehension, but no idea how to graduate the level of intensity in a way that would be most effective for my learning. Messing around with Spreeder is fun, but the whole point of this endeavor has been to save time. Feeling like the would-be athlete in an awesome fitness center with no idea how to weight train is a little discouraging, especially when there is the potential for training improperly.
Acceleread has a free 10-lesson (10-day) Guided Course for beginners; and once that course is completed, an Intermediate and then Advanced course will unlock in turn. The interface is superbly clean and easy to use. When you begin, you take a speed test (and you can retest as many times as you want to bear witness to your advancing progress), and based on your present level the app plans the Guided Course for you. This is exactly what I wanted! How extremely lucky. The very fact that this app is not the first thing found on Google when looking for speed reading is the very reason I wanted to start a centralized source of information and shared communication about the topic.
My initial test clocked me at 325 WPM, which is respectable given how slow I was before I had started to train. It was time to dive into the Guided Course!
ACCELEREAD TRAINING SO FAR: LESSONS 1-3
Right away I began the first two lessons on my iPhone. Very effective! 10 minutes of 5 parts, 2 min each, interchanging between two exercises: Word Flash, which is a calibrated version of Spreeder, and Column Highlighter, which helps to teach your eyes to move rapidly across the line with minimal fixation intervals. The sample reading material is great, all open-source classic books of varying difficulty. There's so much in the Library that I find it hard to believe I'll see the same passage twice (which, if I did, would in effect make the training a memory-jogger rather than a true and fresh speed reading challenge, as I commented on the epistemological conundrum in the last post).
The lessons seem to be designed for one a day, which I base only on the message concluding each lesson saying to come back "tomorrow for your next lesson." I emailed the company to ask if this was the intended design, if the day's pause is needed to allow the brain to catch up with its new processing ability. I haven't got a response yet. While I am eager to bore ahead, I'll take the "tomorrow" comment as implicit instruction.
I tried the app on my iPad, and it's even better than the iPhone version! Settings and records don't transfer between iPhone and iPad, so I had to start fresh (which means I get to do the same lesson twice if I repeat it on the iPhone, which I have been doing). The iPad version has much more detail in graphics and statistics, and is an overall better experience. It can all still be done on the iPhone, but I'm glad I have an iPad too.
Yesterday I completed Lesson 3 (first on the iPad, then on the iPhone later in the day for reinforcement). This lesson introduces the Diamond Highlighter tool, which scrolls the passage with varying chunk sizes, from one to five, back and forth to help expand your peripheral vision. You're not allowed to look beyond the centerline. Like Tim Ferris and other speed readers, they emphasize concentrating on technique over comprehension, advising that comprehension will come with time. I am glad to know that this course will guide me to that goal of comprehension and that I'm not on my own!
OTHER ACCELEREAD TOOLS & LIBRARY
Impatient about having to wait to continue practicing, yesterday I started to take advantage of the Training Center tools. Only two of the five are free with initial download. The other three are unlocked with $9.99 in-app purchase. Already very pleased with the product, I happily paid for the full app and love it. Having access to the Column Highlighter alone is worth it! as I will get to.
I had already found the Column Highlighter to be an extremely helpful tool. I noticed after using it that my eyes would flick rapidly across lines of normal text in a book or on the computer without any effort at all, and that I was retaining the information as well or better than before — this is the athlete who prefers to run rather than walk! So I decided to play with Column Highlighter to see how much more improvement I could achieve.
Any tool in the Training Center allows you to pick from the in-app Library of several classics, including Pride and Prejudice, Sherlock Holmes, Dracula, Frankenstein, Great Expectations, and many others. I decided that The Time Machine by H.G. Wells was the best to start with. I started at 400 WPM or so, and variously dialed up the speed to near 700 WPM at one point, still with great comprehension.
And then I finished The Time Machine in a day. Not just in a day, but in very small pockets of available free time! I was amazed. The retention feels strong, and my comprehension was clear, as fast as I could make push it and still follow. The printed book is only about 100 pages, but I could expect to take a week of casual free moments to complete such a thing. In just an hour or so of total time! I look forward to selecting other books from the Library and using their classic material to hone these techniques, while finally reading books I should have read over a decade ago. What fantastic enrichment!
And then before bed I read the 20 printed page essay As A Man Thinketh by James Allen, a New Thought work that everyone should read.
This catches us up with the present. The following posts will chronicle my further progress with Acceleread beginner Guided Course, as well as other events that occur along the way.
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