Speed Reading

How RSVP reading works

Rapid serial visual presentation flashes one word at a time in a fixed spot on the screen. Because your eyes never move, the time normally spent on saccades — the jumps from word to word — and on re-reading lines disappears, which is where most of the speed comes from. The trade-off is that you cannot glance back, so RSVP suits skimming familiar material far better than studying something new.

Using the reader

• Paste text into the box, or give it a URL to pull text from.
• Set a words-per-minute rate. Typical silent reading sits around 200–300 wpm; 400–600 is a reasonable target once the format stops feeling unfamiliar.
• Start, then pause or resume at any point. Stopping returns you to the beginning of the text.

Fetching text from a URL

Given a URL, the reader retrieves the page and keeps the text of its headings and paragraphs, discarding navigation and markup. The fetch goes through a public CORS proxy, so it only works on pages that are publicly reachable — anything behind a login will not load.

Privacy

Everything runs in your browser. Pasted text is never sent to this site's server and nothing is stored between visits, so closing the tab discards it.