Squirt
It's an inelegant name for an elegant add on to your browsing experience.
So, we all spend a lot of time on the Internet, and a lot of time reading things. Frankly, I enjoy a lot of it, but have to admit that it's time consuming. I find myself scanning, not reading, and losing much of the information I came to a particular site to get. Time.
Along comes "Squirt," a browser plugin that enables you to read any article (long format) page
One
Word
At
A
Time.
Hard to believe, but it actually works.
In website creation, we've been warned over and over not to allow our column width to get much beyond the recommended 90 characters - it's difficult to read, and involves too much eye movement. Plus the very appearance of a wide column is daunting and discourages readers from tackling your page. Of course, many developers ignore this, or use a font that's simply too small for comfort - particularly for older readers.
Squirt eliminates the worry of column width, font size, and add to it unheard of reading speeds.
You have to simply try this to believe it - and even if you don't add it to your browser, you will be amazed at the reading speeds you can attain simply by letting Squirt serve you one word at a time, at lightning speed.
In speed reading courses, readers are taught to scan a sentence right in the middle. Eventually, their brains learn to grasp the meaning of the sentence by simply "reading" just a few words of that sentence. They are even trained to run their finger down the page so that each sentence is "read" one at a time. In fact, this technique has a lot in common with what Squirt does for you automatically. But instead of you training your brain to grasp a whole sentence from a few words of it, you are actually "reading" each word individually, at a very rapid pace, as it's delivered to you.
To install, you simply go to http://squirt.io/ and find the Big Blue Button - drag it to your bookmarks bar, and you're done. Now, if you're on a website that offers articles for consumption - an online news site, for example - you click on the Squirt bookmark while on that site, and it will translate the site to a one-word-at-a-time experience.
All I can say is, try it. Just for the fun of seeing how fast you can read.
Now I am going to test it out by reading my news sites today using this approach, and see if it actually saves me any time.
I can't say that I'd use such an approach all the time, as sometimes reading is to be savored, and more complex writing still requires a sentences to be mulled over. But for 75% of the "news" type reading we do each day, this could just be the answer to the busy person's prayer.
So, we all spend a lot of time on the Internet, and a lot of time reading things. Frankly, I enjoy a lot of it, but have to admit that it's time consuming. I find myself scanning, not reading, and losing much of the information I came to a particular site to get. Time.
Along comes "Squirt," a browser plugin that enables you to read any article (long format) page
One
Word
At
A
Time.
Hard to believe, but it actually works.
In website creation, we've been warned over and over not to allow our column width to get much beyond the recommended 90 characters - it's difficult to read, and involves too much eye movement. Plus the very appearance of a wide column is daunting and discourages readers from tackling your page. Of course, many developers ignore this, or use a font that's simply too small for comfort - particularly for older readers.
Squirt eliminates the worry of column width, font size, and add to it unheard of reading speeds.
You have to simply try this to believe it - and even if you don't add it to your browser, you will be amazed at the reading speeds you can attain simply by letting Squirt serve you one word at a time, at lightning speed.
In speed reading courses, readers are taught to scan a sentence right in the middle. Eventually, their brains learn to grasp the meaning of the sentence by simply "reading" just a few words of that sentence. They are even trained to run their finger down the page so that each sentence is "read" one at a time. In fact, this technique has a lot in common with what Squirt does for you automatically. But instead of you training your brain to grasp a whole sentence from a few words of it, you are actually "reading" each word individually, at a very rapid pace, as it's delivered to you.
To install, you simply go to http://squirt.io/ and find the Big Blue Button - drag it to your bookmarks bar, and you're done. Now, if you're on a website that offers articles for consumption - an online news site, for example - you click on the Squirt bookmark while on that site, and it will translate the site to a one-word-at-a-time experience.
All I can say is, try it. Just for the fun of seeing how fast you can read.
Now I am going to test it out by reading my news sites today using this approach, and see if it actually saves me any time.
I can't say that I'd use such an approach all the time, as sometimes reading is to be savored, and more complex writing still requires a sentences to be mulled over. But for 75% of the "news" type reading we do each day, this could just be the answer to the busy person's prayer.
Comments