Do you believe you can do something to improve reading speed?

The reason I ask the question is that many people don’t believe it.

For too long they have been reading the same way and think that is "normal" and that any attempt to go faster is unnatural and likely to be a waste of time.

Well I want to prove that you can read much faster (and understand what you have read) by having you experience it.

I discovered this free online tool yesterday that gives you the experience of reading much faster than you have probably ever done in your entire life.

I will give you the link to it at the bottom of this post because I want to explain it first and tell you how to get the best out of it.

When you first get there it doesn’t look much – just this dialogue box in the centre of some huge white space.

You can do a couple of things with it here:

1.  You can paste some text from a document you have to read into the dialogue box OR

2.  You can enter a URL of a web page you want to read.

I am just going to talk about cutting and pasting text here because when I tried it with the URL of a page from my Michael Tipper site the application took a while to read the navigation links and headings before it got to the meat of the page. 

My advice is to copy and paste if you are going to use it to help you read web pages faster.

So when you have pasted in what you want to read (not sure if there are any document length limitations) all you do is press "ZAP it" and you are then presented with this control panel:

As you can see, you can raise or lower the reading speed – it defaults to 300 words per minute (wpm) which is the average reading speed for anyone who has been through a high school education and has never been on a speed reading training course.

It tells you the current speed that has been set and also the length of the document in words per minute.

A nice touch here would be a read out of how long it expects you to take to read a document that long at that speed.

And of course there is the all important play button which is what you need to click on to get the application started.

And when you do you get this:

The words in your document will be presented to you one at a time above the toolbar at the rate you have set.

You can change the settings of the tool by clicking "settings" at the top right hand side of the page.

Here you can change the number of words presented at a time as well as things like the font, text size and alignment.

I suggest you play around with these to find what suits you the best but for now leave the settings as they are for now as you try it out for the first time.

The experience is amazing and you will be startled at just how much you can understand at reading rates far faster than 300wpm.

I want you to go to this tool and try this out so you can see there is some validity in the claim you can read much faster than you do now with NO loss in comprehension (providing you don’t confuse comprehension with memory).

This tool will prove to you that you can at the VERY least double your reading speed just by using the basic settings.

The next stage of course would be to take more than one word in at a time.

Start with 2 then 3 and work up to as many as you are comfortable with.

You might need to reduce the font size so that the width of your groupins stays within your current comfortable width of view.

So find a piece of text you want to go through, copy it and head over to the ZAP it Speed Reading Tool and try it out.

Let me know what you think of the experience by adding a comment below.