Speed Reading III

Automation process brings about an increase of speed in every activity and reading makes no exceptions. There are various domains that require you not only to be able to go through pages fast as lightning but also understand content. Luckily, specialized applications like Speed Reading III give you the possibility to determine how fast you can read, hoping to increase your skill.

It does not take a rocket scientist to get acquainted with the application's features, nor do you need a sophisticated configuration to run it. It roughly takes around 2 Mb of space on your hard disk drive and the amount of system resources used is of little consequence.

When the application runs, you are only a matter of seconds away from putting the process in motion. Choosing a desired document or one of the presets gets you up and running.

The application's core function is not that of increasing you comprehension capabilities, but in the end have you read a little faster. This is explained in the welcome screen, where you also select a text source, either from the available presets, or a TXT file from your computer.

You can choose from four different speed levels, each equipped with an adjustment slider for the number of words per minute you consider readable. Selected text becomes visible one line at a time and depending on the speed set earlier, it moves forward.

However, you are limited to a text the size of the main window's height, considerably limiting it's features. This flaw cannot be bypassed by dragging the edges to make the window bigger. Moreover, the TXT file you practice on must not contain paragraphs, otherwise you end up reading the same few sentences over and over again.

Taking everything into consideration, we can say that Speed Reading III only gets half the job done. The concept is neat, but by the end of a session you don't really know whether your reading skill increased or you just remembered the text from repetitive reading, due to the limited content you can practice on.