


Read Faster

Some people devour words, reading books and articles at a breakneck pace. I am not one of those people. I am a slow reader. I mentally articulate every word, making reading a slow, if enjoyable, process. I have long lamented how my thirst for knowledge has never been served by my ability to drink it in. A nifty app called Spritz might just be an answer for my drinking problem.

Spritz is an app and browser extension that takes text and puts it into a dialogue box. The box shows each word, focusing on the “Optimal Recognition Point” or ORP, which is basically the physical location where the brain imbibes a word’s meaning. Spritz highlights that ORP–usually the middle letter in a word–and your brain to take in the rest of the word naturally. By keeping the flashing words in a box, your eyes don’t fish around the page for words. Spritz claims reading is 20% information processing and 80% eye movement. Words can be flashed at paces ranging from 40-1000 words per minute.

We are a bit leery of Spritz’s “Science” page, which introduced a number of pseudo-science, made-up terms like ORP. But casting aside the need for legit data about reading comprehension, having used Spritz on a number of longer-form web articles, I found I was able to power through text very quickly. In particular, the lack of eye movement made reading less strenuous.

The main application for Spritz is online text, where adding the “Spritzlet” is as easy as dragging a url into your bookmark bar. Spritz is pre-installed on the new Samsung Galaxy S5 and the Galaxy Gear 2 smartwatch and there are several apps for iOS and Android that use the Spritz technology, though it does not work with the Kindle app and other places we think it’d be ideal (sounds like they’re working on it). Even if it’s just for powering through digital content at a quicker clip, Spritz looks like it could be very useful tool.