Have you ever been studying for an entire night and it just won’t stick? It’s frustrating. Reading comprehension and memorization is, after all, a skill — and this also means it is something you can improve. Luckily, it has become much easier to do this in recent years. I’m specifically talking about two websites that are incredibly useful for premeds and anybody hoping to boost their reading speed and retention rate: Spreeder and Anki. Let’s go through them one by one.

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What’s Spreeder?

Spreeder is a free online reading website designed to improve your reading speed and thus also improve your comprehension. The premise is simple: most people while reading engage in subvocalization which is a fancy word for repeating what you’re reading in your head. This inner voice paces you and keeps you at a certain speed, sometimes even distracting you.

What Spreeder does is limit subvocalization by flashing words quickly on your screen. Your brain has little to no time to repeat the words. Initially, I must admit, I was a bit skeptical — how can you retain anything if you’re reading so fast? When I tried it out myself, I realized the exact opposite. Even after doing a few runs of the program myself, I found that I was soon recreating this new reading speed even without the computer in front of me. I was reading faster but, surprisingly, I was also retaining everything just as fast. It really is remarkable.

I would suggest trying it out for yourself before making judgements. Start at the default speed (or lower if you are a slower reader) and bump up the speed from there. Soon, with enough practice, you’ll see results that will show whenever you read. Given that premeds need to do a LOT of reading, skimming becomes something of a necessity — and since much of premed studying involves memorization of facts, and retention of concepts and systems, this is particularly useful for anybody studying the physical sciences.

Anki

Anki has nothing to do with speed reading, but it has everything to do with retention, specifically memorization. Anki is a flashcard program and it is multi-purpose — from learning a language, to studying biological names, to even learning guitar chords. It’s rich in how useful it is.

Anki prides itself on a few things:

• The program can be synchronized with your other devices for easy access.
• Flexible customization from card layouts to the timing of how quickly you want to memorize.
• You can embed many types of media including videos, images, scientific markups, notes, etc.
• Fully optimized to handle card decks of over 10,000.
• Your data is safe in its open source coding.

As a premed, you constantly asked to memorize material. Why not do it as quickly and efficiently as possible?

The Verdict

Both of these programs were a pleasant surprise when I discovered them. I have seen online flashcards on other websites, but Anki perfects this practice by giving you flexibility. Spreeder is more innovative in this respect, but speed reading is slowly catching on and becoming more popular.
My verdict? Go out a try it. You have no reason not to really, they’re both free!