Fact: most of the information we perceive as adults is in written or printed format.

Have you ever considered what it would mean for you personally and professionally if you could read a 400 page novel every two days? or perhaps be able to skim and scan a thick (800 page) technical manual for useful information in just a couple of hours? Get ready for that difficult exam in a few days?

Not only would it give you tremendous benefits at school, work, etc. but your life would become so much richer and fuller.

Does it sound impossible? If it does, read further. If you can already read this quick, why not read even faster?

Have you ever wondered how nice it would be to be able to read as fast as 500 Words Per Minute?

You may say: "I can never do this." You are wrong. You just need to practice reading right.

Essentially, it means three important things:
 

• never go back in the text (minimize the so called regression)

• read all text in fixed width (18 characters, for example), just like a newspaper article instead of trying to read the text word by word or, even worse, character by character. This is called increasing of your fixation width.

• constantly track how fast you can read by counting the number of words in the text and trying to read the passage as quick as you can making sure that you are able to remember as much as possible.

How can you practice the above? Well, try to read newspapers. This will give you the benefit of a nicely formatted text but words will not be counted and there is nothing to prevent regression. It also limits you to articles published in newspapers. Novels, poems, techical articles, online texts are out of reach.

There is a solution, however. Try using ReadRace which is capable ot displaying an ASCII text file (other formats
are also planned) in a one-line-at-time, timed, fixed width fashion. You can set the Word Per Minute (WPM) rate for your texts and also the width of the virtual newspaper column you can grasp in one focus or fixation.

ReadRace features include

• Easy to use

• Platform independent (written in Java)

• Adaptive tracking of average word length in texts (German has an average word length of 8 characters as opposed to English of 5 characters.)

• WPM speeds up to 1000 WPM

• Support for Western European Languages

• FREE - that's right, it is freeware without any limitations. If you want to support its further development, please donate a nominal amount to the author.

• Works on any ASCII text (use Project Gutenberg to retrieve books, reference, etc.)

Download latest version

ReadRace will run on any computer that can run the Java Virtual Machine. You can get the Java Runtime Environment 1.1.x  from Sun Microsystems, Inc. for free. ReadRace does not yet work with Java 2 (JDK 1.2, etc.) After its installation, see the following instructions on how to install and run ReadRace. Many improvements are planned to make ReadRace even more useful and easier to install.
 

Introduction:
-------------

For further information please refer to http://www.readrace.com.
ReadRace is a Java(tm) application that teaches speed reading. It reads any
text file and displays its contents so that a particular fixation width
and words per minute speed is maintained. In accordance with the principles
of speed reading, you cannot skip back in the text (regression), it is recommended that you start out with a WPM rate that is convenient for you and
work your way up gradually to faster reading by increasing WPM.

Installation instructions on Solaris:
-------------------------------------
We assume that you have JRE or JDK already installed and in your PATH.
If you need JRE or JDK, please download it for your platform from
http://java.sun.com
 

mkdir $HOME/ReadRace
cp ReadRace.tar $HOME/ReadRace
cd $HOME/ReadRace
tar xvf ReadRace.tar

Starting ReadRace
-----------------
in a terminal window, type

readrace <Enter>

-- or --

cd $HOME/ReadRace
java Controller

-- or --

cd $HOME/ReadRace
jre -cp . Controller

Installation instructions on Windows 9x/NT:
-------------------------------------------
We assume you already have WinZip or pkunzip. Check www.winzip.com for
the latest version of WinZip.

We assume that you have JRE 1.1.x or JDK 1.1.x already installed and in your PATH.
If you need JRE or JDK, please download it for your platform from
http://java.sun.com

c:
mkdir \readrace
cd \readrace
pkunzip ReadRace.zip
 

java Controller

--- or ---

jre -cp . Controller

Author: Andras Cser <acser@yahoo.com>

For your reference, I have enclosed a screenshot of the program.

Enjoy! - and try to support continued development of this program by sending a suggested donation check of USD $15 to

Andras Cser
POB 331, Bedford, MA 01730-0331, USA
or just drop me an email and/or postcard.

Thanks,
Andras <acser@yahoo.com>

Last updated: Dec 10, 1999