I have read almost everything on screen for the past ten years: novels, textbooks, and blogs. I recently realized how little of it was sticking because I was actually skimming more than reading. It was such an ingrained habit that I always fell back on it when the reading got a little slow. I realized that the text that I remembered the most was the text I muttered under my breath as I typed. Going through a couple of different ideas, I landed on typing out what I was reading, every word and every sentence. This leans on Maryanne Wolf's research on "the deep reading brain" (Reader, Come Home) and the cognitive disfluency literature on desirable difficulty (Alter & Oppenheimer 2009).

One choice that I found helpful was making the user track their position in the text and scroll on their own instead of autoscrolling. This speed bump is one that I found to be effective because I usually ended up rereading sections to find my place again.

I am curious to see if anyone else has experienced the same struggle to remember what you've read when just skimming it, and if this website helps the way it helps me. No accounts required.

Built by one person. Feedback, critiques, and suggestions are all welcome. Philosophy page has the citations: https://typewryte.com/philosophy