How it works
One word at a time, in one place
Ordinary reading spends most of its time moving your eyes, not reading. RSVP — rapid serial visual presentation — holds the words still and moves them past you instead. Every part of it is on this page, and every demo below is the real reader.
01
Your eyes stop moving
Reading a line of text is a sequence of jumps and stops — saccades and fixations. The jumps carry no information at all; they are just travel. Put every word in the same place and the travel disappears.
This is also why RSVP feels strange for the first minute. You are not used to reading without moving.
One dollar and eighty-seven cents. That was all. And sixty cents of it was in pennies. Pennies saved one and two at a time by bulldozing the grocer and the vegetable man and the butcher until one's cheeks burned with the silent imputation of parsimony that such close dealing implied. Three times Della counted it. One dollar and eighty-seven cents.
02
The coloured letter is where to look
Your eye does not land in the middle of a word. It lands slightly left of centre, at what reading research calls the optimal recognition point. That letter is coloured and held in the same column on every frame, so there is one fixed spot to rest on and the rest of the word arrives around it.
You can turn the highlight off in settings if you would rather not have it. The alignment stays either way — that part is the mechanic, not the decoration.
The eye does not read a word letter by letter. It lands once, slightly left of centre, and takes the whole shape in.
03
One, two or three words a frame
A single fixation can take in more than one short word. Above roughly 350 words a minute, one word a frame starts wasting the capacity you have — so you can group two or three. Long words and numbers always get a frame to themselves, because they need one.
Try the 1 / 2 / 3 buttons on the demo. Most people find two comfortable and three hard work, and that is a fact about you rather than about the setting.
Two or three short words fit inside a single fixation. Long ones do not, and are given a frame of their own.
04
You choose the speed
Anywhere from 100 to 1000 words a minute, changeable mid-passage, with no test to pass first. Most people read prose somewhere around 250; a comfortable RSVP pace is usually a good deal higher than that, and finding yours takes about five minutes of moving the slider.
Speed used to be earned here — you took a quiz and the number moved for you. We removed it. Deciding how fast you want to read your own book is not something an app should be holding over you.
A comfortable pace leaves you thinking about the sentence. Too fast and you are thinking about keeping up.
05
Check yourself, if you want to
Every passage in the library has five questions at the end. They are optional, they change nothing, and the result tells you which ones you missed so you can go back to that part. Reading fast and remembering nothing is easy; the quiz is how you find out whether that is what happened.
Documents you import have no quiz yet — writing questions is the one thing we cannot do automatically. AI-generated ones are planned.
Five questions on what you just read. Nothing happens to your speed either way. The score is for you.