One of the website I visit on a semi-regular basis is digg.com. It’s basically a collection of stories submitted from lots of different people. You can vote on them and the best stories get moved up the list where more people see them. Generally speaking, I scan the headlines and click through only a couple stories each week. Most of it is just mildly interesting.
While there, I was turned on to a post from TopEducationDegrees.com about tools for innovative teachers. The last item on their list is about speed reading. I clicked through to Zap Reader to see what their trick was for speed reading. While surfing around their site, I found a Greasemonkey script for Firefox that adds a “Zap Read This” link to Scripture passages on BibleGateway.com. I gave it a whirl on John 1 and was quite impressed. I went through the entire chapter at 400 words per minute and was able to keep up with it.
Now, it’s not ideal for in-depth studying of the Bible, but it’s certainly a useful tool to get started. Here are some suggestions for how it could be used:
- Quickly read a chapter to place a verse in context.
- Use it to memorize scripture.
- Read a verse several times at varying speeds. Work from fast to slow and back again.
- Read an entire book of the Bible. John has 18,591 words in the NIV. At 400 wpm, you can read the entire book in 47 minutes.
- Read the entire Bible in a little more than a day (593,371 Words in NIV) . At 400 wpm, it would take you 24 hours and 45 minutes. Break into an hour a day and you can do it in 1 month.