Gary Wolf

January 21, 2016

As an English teacher Kyrill Potapov spends a lot of time working with 12 year old kids who are trying to improve their reading, writing, comprehension, and analytical skills. In this talk, he explores a remarkable method of speed reading, called Spritz, that promises to let you “read Harry Potter in three hours” with full understanding and recall. Could such a promise possibly be true? And, if the claim is true, another question arises. Is such a pace desirable and useful, or rather something quite alien to the activity of reading?

With his students, Kyrill decided to resolve these questions empirically, reading the same material in a book, on a screen using conventional scrolling, and on a screen using the novel method of Spritz, which displays words one at a time at a pace determined by the reader. They found high comprehension at the high speeds permitted by Spritz, but with some cost, which he outlines in this wonderfully clear and interesting talk.