by AJ George 
Have you ever had to deliver eLearning where, despite your best efforts to eliminate it from a design perspective, there were still big blocks of text that learners HAD to read? Maybe it was a lengthy mission statement or some company policies or perhaps some pretty dry, but essential, text on insurance policies offered by the company.
I've been trying out this tool that popped up in my Twitter feed called Zap Reader. Essentially you copy and paste any text you would like to read faster into the Zap Reader tool and it will "play" the text for you one word at a time (or more-based on your preferences), speeding up your reading, and, allegedly, not compromising any of your comprehension.
The whole idea seemed a bit silly to me, but then I tried it. I read a lot of blogs to stay current on what's popping in the eLearning and technology fields. A LOT! Sometimes, if a post is super word heavy without breaks for pictures or videos, my eyes give up on it before I've even started.
I started pasting some of those text-heavy articles into Zap Reader and I realized that I was flying through them. I set the reader to read 600 words per minute, 2 words at a time and for the most part this worked out well for me.
There are shortcomings, however. Sometimes an article will have unusual names or acronyms I'm not immediately familiar with. In these cases my mind will get hung up on what I'm reading and I miss the next words as they flash up on the screen, pretty much shooting my retention right in the foot. But, for the most part, I find the Zap Reader method to be very effective.
The experience got me thinking. Would it make sense when delivering text-intensive sections of eLearning to flash up one or two words at a time? Could this work? Have any of you tried this? Can you share some samples? I'd love to hear from you.
You should give Zap Reader a try. Copy this whole article in and see how fast you can zip [zap?] through it. Also, check out this infographic by Mindflash for some useful speed reading tips.
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About the author: AJ George is IconLogic's lead Technical Communicator and author of both "PowerPoint 2007: The Essentials" and "PowerPoint 2008 for the Macintosh: The Essentials."
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