Spritzing presents reading content with the ORP located at the specific place where you’re already looking, allowing you to read without having to move your eyes. With this approach, reading becomes more efficient because Spritzing increases the time your brain spends processing content without having to waste time searching for the next word’s ORP. Spritzing also enhances reading on small screens. Because the human eye can focus on about 13 characters at a time, Spritzing requires only 13 characters’ worth of space inside our redicle. No other reading method is designed to help you read all of your content when you’re away from a large screen. But don’t take our word. The following video compares traditional reading to Spritz and is a real eye-opener when it comes to the efficiencies that are gained by placing words exactly where your brain wants them to be located.
More here from Spritz Inc. on their speed reading technology. It's worth looking at a demo of the Spritz speed reading aid in action in this article. By placing each word of the text you're reading in a position so that the key letter of each word is located at the same point, your eye doesn't have to move across words on a page. It turns out that eye movement in traditional reading is inefficient. Allowing your eye to stay fixated in one spot increases your reading throughput (though it sounds lazy; don't make my eye have to move even a few millimeters, it's so taxing!).
I took a speed reading course when I was in 6th grade, I was taught that the key to speed reading was to consume blocks of words at a time and to stop yourself from subvocalizing (that is, sounding out the words silently in your head as you read). You can try a number of tricks to cure yourself of that habit, one is to hum to yourself while reading. That blocks your ability to subvocalize.
Spritz's approach to speed reading is a bit different. Rather than scanning groups of words at a time, you're reading one word at a time. I can't imagine reading that way, but everything new seems odd, and every time I find myself rejecting the new I feel like Grandpa Simpson so I'm curious to try this out.
UPDATED: Professor John Henderson is skeptical of Spritz's claims.
So Spritz sounds great, and even somewhat scientific. But can you really read a novel in 90 minutes with full comprehension? Well, like most things that seem too good to be true, the answer unfortunately is no. The research in the 1970s showed convincingly that although people can read using RSVP at normal reading rates, comprehension and memory for text falls as RSVP speeds increase, and the problem gets worse for paragraphs compared to single sentences. One of the biggest problems is that there just isn’t enough time to put the meaning together and store it in memory (what psychologists call “consolidation”). The purported breakthrough use of the “ORP” doesn’t really help with this, and isn’t even novel. In the typical RSVP method, words are presented centered at fixation. The “slightly left of fixation” ORP used by Spritz is a minor tweak at best.
Two other points are worth noting. One is that reading at fast RSVP rates is tiring. It requires unwavering attention and vigilance. You can’t let your mind wander, ponder the nuances of what you’re reading, make a mental note to check on a related idea, or do any other mental activity that would normally be associated with reading for comprehension. If you try, you’ll miss some of the text that is relentlessly flying at you. The second point is that the difficulty of comprehension during reading changes over the course of a sentence, paragraph, and page. Our eyes engage in a choreographed dance through text that reflects this variation in the service of comprehension. RSVP makes every step in the dance the same. Or, to stretch an analogy, imagine hiking along a forest trail. Each step you take determines your overall hiking speed. Some steps require a longer pause to gain footing on loose stones, and others require a longer stride to step over a protruding root. Would it be effective to run on the trail? Worse, would it be a good idea to tie a piece of rope between your ankles so that each step was constrained to be exactly the same length? Surely this would lead to some stumbling, if not to a twisted ankle or catastrophic fall!
