 In this video, we're going to have a look at some tools that you can use to help you improve your reading productivity. And we will talk about these five areas. We'll talk about the questions of what makes a text readable to improve the amount of time and the effort they've so read it. We'll talk about listening to your text. We'll talk about navigation. We'll talk about various apps you may want to use and the hardware that may also help you with your reading. So first, what makes reading easier? Well, there are three things that can make reading a much more pleasurable and less effortful process. And that is, I have more space, use audio to support your reading, or maybe just only listen to your readings. Now, to understand what it may feel like to get that improvement, have a look at this text. If you were to ask to read it out loud without any preparation, you would definitely struggle. But if you simply add a bit more space to it, all of a sudden, it seems like a much less daunting task. And you can do it much more quickly, but also with less effort. And you will not be as tired. And you will also have more time to focus on what the text is about. And it's the same as if you're driving down a narrow road. So if you're driving a narrow road, it takes a lot more concentration. You have to go much slower. But if the road gets faster, for example, a motorway, then you can go much faster there as well. And the two main things you should always do to improve the reading experience is increase the text size. So as you can see, going from a smaller text to a larger text makes the reading much quicker and much less effortful. The other thing you should do, if you can, is to increase the line spacing. So perhaps anywhere between 25% to 50% increase in the space between lines will make your reading easier. The other things that some people prefer to do is slightly increase the character spacing. So you can go by half a point or you can go by as much as a full point. And if that makes reading easier for you, again, you should take advantage of that if your tools allow it. So there are some places where you can do that. So first, make sure that when you're reading on a digital device, you'll learn how to zoom and you'll learn the right ways to zoom. Don't leave a lot of white space. Make the letters as big as you can. But that also works with a keyboard shortcut on the web. So you can do control plus and that will make all web pages bigger. But the same thing can apply to Microsoft Word. So if you're editing your documents or if you're working with together with somebody on a screen, make sure you go to the View tab and zoom in as much as you can. So for example, there's a Page With option here or zoom in to more than 100%. And that will, again, make it easier for you to write and also read what you are reading and then you'll make fewer mistakes. And there is one thing that people often are worried that they would like to see as much of the page as they can because they want to avoid scrolling or turning pages. But actually, turning pages or scrolling doesn't take any effort. What takes effort is decoding the writing. So even if you can see the letters quite well, still make them bigger because you will be able to read faster and you'll be able to focus all the energy on understanding what it is that you're reading. Now, Microsoft Word even has an option that you can create a much more reading friendly layout at the bottom if you choose the reading view. Now, you can do the same things with websites. For example, here's a screenshot of a blog post. And you can simply use a tool called Instapaper to make it much more readable. Make the text bigger, remove all the distractions from the page as well. So Instapaper is a great tool that you can use to not only make the website easier to read, but also you can send it to your device, such as a tablet or a phone, and then read it on the go. There's another tool that I really recommend, and that is called Reader Mode. And Reader Mode will do the same thing for you on a website, but it will give you even more options than how you can format the text. Well, for example, choose a dark background, even have a ruler, and so on. And so Reader Mode is a very good tool. I highly recommend it. It is free, but there's also some paid options that you may want to consider. And it is not only the very long text that you can help with, but also just simply reading the news. So for example, if you apply Reader Mode to this news item from the BBC, it will look a bit like this. And again, you see that it's much easier to read without any of the distractions. And you can even lean back a little, but you don't have to spend as much effort reading this. There are some other tools that people use to improve their reading speed. For example, speed reading. Instapaper gives you an option to try that. And so there is a speed reading option here Instapaper. If you click on Speed Read, it will simply present your words at a time. And you can read this way. And you can also choose the speed of how those words are presented. Some people really like that, but it is definitely a high investment strategy. And it may not work for everybody. Now the other thing you can do when you are trying to improve the amount of reading you can do is read with your ears. What that means is that instead of just reading as you are used to in silence, you can actually use the various different tools to listen to your text. So for example, in Microsoft Word, under View, there is an option to read aloud. And you can use it to read your own writing or other documents that people send you. And as you can see, as it's being read aloud, it highlights Word by Word. There's also at the top, there are navigation options where you can pause. You can jump back by a sentence and jump forward as if you were listening to a podcast or an audiobook. There are the same option is available on the iPad. So on the iPad, you can swipe from the top of the screen with your two fingers. And it will bring up this menu for reading any text that's on the screen. But you have to first enable it. You have to go to Accessibility, Options, Choose Speech, and then Choose Speak screen. And that will then make that two-finger, swipe down two-finger gesture available to you. There are also specialized apps that make it much easier to read with your ears, PDFs, and documents like that. One of the ones that you can use for the iPad is called Voice Dream Reader. But there is also an Android app that's called At Allowed Reader that gives you quite a good experience of reading PDFs and other documents just by listening. And one feature that both of these apps have is that you can crop the page. And that is because if you're reading an academic article, then you don't want to be read out the footers and the headers. So often in the middle of a sentence, all of a sudden we'll read this long section here. So if you crop the whole page, then you can listen to that whole article without being distracted by unnecessary content. So this is just a quick summary of how you can listen to your text better. So first, you should start thinking about listening at a higher speed. And you can listen as high as two times the speed, and you will discover that actually you may find it even easier to concentrate. You can crop the pages as we just saw, but you can also make sure that you learn how to skip back and forth as you're listening to make it easier to navigate while you're listening. The next thing you can do to make a reading easier is to take advantage of all the navigation features. So for example, Wikipedia is a good example. So it always has this table of contents. So make sure that you take advantage of that. And it both gives you an idea of what actually you're going to find in the text, but also a way of getting quicker to different parts of the text. Microsoft Word has a feature called navigation pane. And in navigation pane, you can again see the structure of the course of the document that you can easily navigate. Academic articles often have a structure in different areas. They will have different disciplines. They will have different conventions of how the structure works. But often it may go from abstract introduction, methods, conclusion, discussion, results, and so on and so on. But you may not necessarily always want to read them in that order, because often they're not written in that order. So find out in the tool that you're reading in the PDF where is the access to the table of contents that's available for the article. It's not always available, but if it is, find out how you can do it. So for example, this is what it looks like in Microsoft Edge. This is what it looks like in Zodo, which is a PDF reader for Windows. And again, different PDF readers have different options for this. You can also do that on websites. And this is another screenshot from reader mode. And as you can see, reader mode can enable that you see the outline of the page that you're on. And it makes it easier to jump around that page, but it also gives you a sense of what actually is on that page. Now the one more thing you should do is consider what sort of hardware and software you're using for your reading. Because the things that open your documents by default are always not the best tools for that tool. They will give you access to the text, but they will not give you the best reading experience. So I actually recommend if you do have an iPad or if you're thinking about buying one, that you consider one of these apps that are designed for studying with text or for engaging with academic text. And the one that I personally use is called Margin Note, and it allows you all kinds of navigations, but also gives you an option to create a mind map of what you're reading. And there are other tools in there. For example, there are different reading modes. There are ways to display comments in the margins. There are ways to even create little cards that can help you revise your reading and so on. Another popular document reader in this space is called LiquidSex, so I also recommend that maybe you investigate that. These are not free apps, but they're very accessible. You can even think about using hardware to help you with your reading. So for example, this is an example of a digital highlighter, which you can use with your printed text. And it's called C-Pen. And what it does is that you can swipe it along any line of text in a book, and it will read out the text to you, but also it will copy it into the device, and it will let you copy that, so it's a way of quickly getting highlights from books if you're in the library. This is not a cheap option, but there is also standalone options, even including dictionaries for reading in foreign languages, but there's also a cheaper option where you can use Bluetooth to connect to your phone. So that's just a quick overview of the tools for reading, and in the next video, we're going to have a look at tools for note-taking.