Word By Word Software Reportedly Helps People Read Faster

A new computer-reading program displays one word on the screen at a time, and its creator says most people who use the Vortex software easily read more than 500 words a minute.

Vortex displays each word in the size, style and color the reader prefers - and at whatever speed the reader sets it for. It’s the brand name for the Machine Assisted Reading Software, or MARS, developed by Cliff High, head of Olympia-based Tenex Software Engineering.

Vortex comes preset at a rate of 490 words per minute - about double the average reader’s pace for a book or magazine.

But High says the single-word display makes reading so easy there’s no reason to slow down. Most people are reading faster than that within hours, he said.

High said he got the idea for Vortex a few years ago when he realized he was spending a lot of time reading e-mail. He decided to try to automate the process by “letting the computer do what it does best,” find and display the text in optimal form, while letting the brain do “what it does best,” translate text into meaning.

In an e-mail message, one user told High: “Tried it with e-mail and now want it to do all my documents.”

Another joked: “The top of my head erupted. I love it. I want one for each eye.”

“It’s not just the speed, but the efficiency,” said Stuart Alan, a graduate student and instructor at Florida International University in Miami. “It’s tremendously valuable for keeping up to date.”

While he doesn’t use Vortex for extremely complicated material, Alan said he loves it for pleasure reading. He settles into an easy chair 10 feet from the screen and reads for an hour or so.

People with impaired vision also benefit from Vortex, which retails for $79.95.

“After five years of struggling to use a magnifier, which strained my eyes and left me frustrated and mad, it was so exciting to sit there and really read again,” wrote Marleen Stubson, a legally blind user in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan.

“I sat there with tears in my eyes and read the text over and over.”

Her technology instuctor, Douglas Jacques, said she reads for pleasure at 735 words per minute with no eye strain. And he said he finds Vortex seems to help people comprehend what they’re reading.

“In most speed reading, you do it at the expense of intepretation,” with the eyes moving diagonally across the screen and comprehension keyed more to context than to individual words, Jacques said.

“With Vortex, the actual word-decoding rate goes up as well,” he said.

The physical process is part of why it works so well, Jacques said.

“People say it’s like driving down a highway,” he said. “Instead of the left-to-right movement, you get the idea that the line is straight ahead of you.”

There are skeptics.

At Rider University in Lawrenceville, N.J., literacy expert and education professor Susan Glazer said the eyes’ natural scanning movement is essential to understanding for many people, and that techniques reducing such movement could hinder the process.

The program is being used by a variety of people, including spies, High said - the CIA, NATO, the National Security Council, the British agency MI6, and the U.S. Navy and Air Force.

“Whether government or business supported, your local spy now has to go through more information in less time and with greater accuracy, with most of the reading being done off a computer screen,” High said in a recent Internet news release.

The CIA declined to comment on any agency use of Vortex.

High suggested agents may like the feature that allows readers to highlight chosen words - perhaps “mole,” “cloak” or “dagger.”

The current version of the Vortex program can read any text file available via computer, including books republished in digital form. A version due out this summer will present documents, files and e-mail from the World Wide Web in single-word format.

MEMO: Information and a demo are available on the World Wide Web at http://www.halcyon.com/chigh/ tenax.html