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From: ccrbrian@ucdavis.UUCP (Brian Reilly)
Newsgroups: net.cog-eng
Subject: re: right justification (correction)
Message-ID: <285@ucdavis.UUCP>
Date: Mon, 17-Jun-85 21:53:53 EDT
Article-I.D.: ucdavis.285
Posted: Mon Jun 17 21:53:53 1985
Date-Received: Wed, 19-Jun-85 04:02:35 EDT
References: <556@hou2b.UUCP>
Organization: University of California, Davis
Lines: 49

> i took a psycholinguistics course once and the professor did an interesting
> experiment with us once.  we read some text that had been right justified
> using some algorithm that put the necessary spaces between the words
> uniformly and an algorithm that grouped phrases together and put spaces
> uniformly around phrases.  it turned out that our reading speed and
> comprehension was significantly greater (in the statistical sense) when
> the phrases were grouped together.  this makes sense but its nice to
> see that common sense can be used for practical applications.
> 
> danny chen
> ihnp4!hou2b!dwc

I taught speed reading classes for a reading and study skills company
at a number of colleges, and the goal of the course was to get people
to read in phrases, rather than one word at a time.  Because the number
of fixations the eye can make in a minute is limited ( 1/5 sec. per
fixation and 1/30 sec. between fixations ), one way to increase your
reading rate is to see more words each time your eyes make a stop.
Another way to increase your rate is to skip some of the words :-).

I think it would be interesting if books were typeset using a method
similar to the one you suggest.  I am almost finished writing a booklet
for a speed reading course, and I tried to use something similar to
grouping the words in phrases on a line.

It is actually     two lines at    but it is difficult    like 
possible to read   the same time,  to organize the text   this.

If anyone has a formatting program that does this, I am interested.
However, I abandoned the idea of printing my booklet like this because
the people who read it did not seem to like the text in that format as
much as I anticipated.  When presented with several different formats,
people usually indicate that the two-line phrase method is quite
readable.  Maybe this is not true for longer sections, but I think
it can be effective in advertisements - if someone can read it
faster, they should understand it more easily and if they are
puzzled, they will likely re-read it to figure out what it is that
is making it puzzling.

Anyone else think this is a better way to read?  Or is anyone
interested in a free booklet on reading and study skills? (It isn't
quite done, but will be before June 30th.)

			Brian Reilly

-- 
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     Brian Reilly                    Davis, CA 95616
     U.C. Davis Computer Center      ucbvax!ucdavis!deneb!ccrbrian