My first impressions of Rapid Serial Visual Presentation

This evening, I stumbled upon Rapid Serial Visual Presentation (RSVP), which is technique intended to let you read text at a much higher speed than would normally be possible. The concept is extremely simple – only one word is displayed at a time, moving through the text at a fast pace. Aside from the speed, the other obvious advantage is that it’s suitable for a device with limited screen space, e.g. a mobile phone.

I’ve dabbled very briefly with various speed reading techniques in the past. It’s always been a very brief dabble on the grounds that they’ve all involved a significant investment of time, effort and sometimes money to achieve an improvement in speed that’s unknown at the outset. Given that I read extremely quickly anyway, I’ve never seen the point. This time around, first impressions were that little effort was involved, and the technique was so simple and obvious there was no way I would be needing to get my wallet out, so I decided to investigate further. (Interesting that of the three invesments mentioned, time, which is surely everybody’s most valuable asset, appears to be the one I value least – proven not only by that decision making process, but by the fact that I’m writing this.)

A quick internet search revealed various vendors who had other ideas about the wallet part, but there was no way I was paying anything for some RSVP software, when I could easily knock up a workable implementation in 10 minutes. As luck would have it, before getting the compiler out, I came across a neat looking open-source application called Dictator, and spent the the 10 minutes downloading and installing that instead.

To try it out, I grabbed a copy of The Picture of Dorian Gray from Project Gutenberg, a couple of my lengthier posts from this journal, and a 32 page design document I reviewed/edited last week. These were deliberately all “works” I was familiar with, since my first goal was to see if the thing was any use at all, rather than worry too much about issues of comprehension. With these texts at hand, I set up Dictator so it filled the screen with one giant word, and set about ‘reading’.

I figured that coming to this cold, I would need to train myself somewhat, so I set the speed to a measly 200 words per minute, and hit the spacebar to start the action. The low speed was my first mistake. One of the points of RSVP is that the rapid speed inhibits the natural tendency to sub-vocalise when reading, yet at my chosen 200WPM I realised almost straight away that not only was I sub-vocalising (which I don’t do much when reading normally anyway) but I also seemed to have plenty of time to think about what I was doing in between the words. On realising this was a total waste of time, I ditched the training idea and went back to the start with the speed cranked up to 600.

At the higher speed, things were starting to get interesting. Now there was no way I could possibly sub-vocalise, nor was I fully aware of the process of reading, but I was definitely doing it. Something odd was happening though – it seemed all the texts had been re-written in the style of a poor non-native English speaker, who had left out pronouns and such willy-nilly. Knowing this couldn’t be the case, I thought perhaps the software was deliberately dropping these words (of course I didn’t RTFM – in fact, I don’t think there is one, hurrah) and set about examining the various menu options, where I found the answer.

Dictator has two modes, Constant and Dynamic. The former is what my 10 minute implementation would have done – at 600WPM, a new word is displayed every 10th of a second. Dynamic mode, the default, is more refined, and modifies the timing on a word-by-word basis according to various factors including word length, appearance of a comma or full stop, and whether the word is a “connecting word”. By default, the connecting words were given a shorter time, which meant I wasn’t registering them at all. I tried switching to Constant mode, which wasn’t too bad, except that beyond a certain word length I couldn’t recognise the word fast enough, so the occasional long word imposed an unnecessary limit on reading speed for the rest of the passage. Also, Wilde’s ridiculously lengthy and convoluted sentence structure, while not totally incomprehensible, did not make for a pleasant reading experience. Here’s an example from near the start of chapter 1:

From the corner of the divan of Persian saddle-bags on which he was lying, smoking, as was his custom, innumerable cigarettes, Lord Henry Wotton could just catch the gleam of the honey-sweet and honey-coloured blossoms of a laburnum, whose tremulous branches seemed hardly able to bear the burden of a beauty so flamelike as theirs; and now and then the fantastic shadows of birds in flight flitted across the long tussore-silk curtains that were stretched in front of the huge window, producing a kind of momentary Japanese effect, and making him think of those pallid, jade-faced painters of Tokyo who, through the medium of an art that is necessarily immobile, seek to convey the sense of swiftness and motion.

I mean Crikey O’Reilly. Is that really a sentence? I thought I was bad. Actually, a 10-stretch for armed robbery is a sentence, and possibly a less tedious one. I’ve often wondered if in that era, they actually thought it was big and clever, or were perhaps involved in some kind of competition, to try their utmost to write in such a way that you need to make notes mid-sentence to remind you what the hell has happened by the time you reach the next full-stop, assuming you haven’t fallen asleep or slashed your wrists with boredom before you even make it to that point. Also, I can’t help but picture Wotton in a haze of smoke with his mouth stuffed full of fags. (Important note for US-English speakers – the word has a very different meaning in the UK – apologies for the image. Also a full-stop is a period. I’m not doing this US/UK translation thing any more, you’re on your own from now on.)

Anyway, before I got distracted, I was having two problems with Constant mode  – long words, and long compound sentences. I switched back to Dynamic mode, and made a few adjustments to the settings – specifically, you can adjust the weighting given to the various factors, so I made both word length and commas have a greater effect, and bingo, everything was going much better.

I can’t say I have comprehension approaching the 100% mark at this early stage, but I think the potential might be there. I need to look at that and the maximum speed side of things now, but this epic post is only first impressions after all. If anyone’s actually read this far, I suggest you look into RSVP for yourself before coming back for part 2, unless you have plenty of time on your hands.