Pretending you have got to the bottom
of the page when sharing a book!
Thousands of the students I have
seen have had the common experience of sharing a book with someone at school
and having to pretend to have finished when the other person asks...'Have you
finished yet?'
We
rarely admit when we haven't! But we do wonder how on earth the other person
got to the end so fast! Sometimes when we had hardly got a quarter of the way
down the page.
The
strange thing is that no one ever talks about it. When the teacher said.
'It
will only take 20 minutes to read the chapter for homework.’
What
they really meant was
'It
only took me 20 minutes' to read it!’
Most
people took ages to do the reading. At a study at a local College we found that
the reading speed for straightforward text, nothing complicated ranged from 117
to 470 words per minute!
The
people who were the slowest were the people who had the lowest qualifications!
But
that was reading on white. Things were different when the screen colour was set
up for them... personalised.
One
person this week went from 210 words each minute to over 700 words per minute.
Quite exceptional.
There
is nothing natural about reading on a white screen or white paper. But a lot of
good readers on white find it really difficult and slower if they have to read
on another colour!
Font
size is another factor. Most books in schools and colleges are printed in the
equivalent of font size 10 or 11.
When
testing the students, most read best on fonts of 13 plus.
Try
it yourself.
One
student at Lincoln University needed a font of 35! he didn’t have an eyesight
problem, no need for glasses. He just needed a big font. Some people feet need
big shoes for them to walk fast!
Perhaps
websites ought to start with a larger font and then people reduce the size if
they want to? E A Draffen at Southampton University I am sure would agree with
this.
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