Facebook feeds were unanimous: Spritz could be life-changing.

“OMG I need this!” gushed a typical response. Think how many more Facebook exclamations you could post if you weren’t wasting all your time moving your eyes between words like a chump.

Spritz

“Quit teasing and release the app already!” one man demanded on the app’s Facebook page a few weeks ago. Others have offered to be beta-testers. Still others have predicted a new world order:

“There are only a handful of times when one can remember when a piece of tech totally changed the world and those in it. May I be so bold as to suggest, that this could be one of those times??”

Could it be??

***

This is actually the second coming of speed reading. In the 1950s, a schoolteacher named Evelyn Nielsen Wood discovered that she could read at a much faster pace than the normal 250-300 words per minute by sweeping a finger along the page as she read, reading entire groups of words at a time, and by avoiding sub-vocalization, or saying each word mentally.

These techniques helped Wood reach 2,700 read words per minute, she claimed, and it was these principles she espoused in Evelyn Wood Reading Dynamics, her speed-reading business. The comedian Steve Allen hawked the program in TV commercials, and over the years multiple iterations of White House staffers signed up. A generation of lawyers and bibliophiles flocked to speed-reading classes that sprang up in community colleges and on mail-order services.

By the 90s, though, the speed-reading craze slumped again. Perhaps because its students found the method to be harder than it sounded, or perhaps because those early Clinton years were simply a chiller time.

Things have changed once again, though. We now read an average of 54,000 words a day by some estimates, roughly the length of a novel. Meanwhile, media companies have cruelly conspired to make “longform” cool again, so now everything you actually want to read is twice as long as it needs to be.

“Did you read that?!” the hipster bookworms on Portlandia shout at one another before shoving pages of a magazine in their mouths, thereby admitting that to stay well-read these days you’d have to physically consume articles, not unlike a human flatbed scanner.

Some forms of what we call “speed reading” are actually skimming -- the reader saves time by not reading every word on the page. And skimming might be useful, in some cases. If you’re pressed for time, it might be preferable to skim the entire text rather than to read linearly through just part of it. A 2009 study found that skimmers did not remember very many details, nor could they make inferences from the text. But they did remember the story’s most important ideas better than those who tried to read normally but didn’t finish the piece.

Wood, the speed-reading entrepreneur, ardently believed that fast readers were good readers.