Individual operating computers accelerate the reading of a manual

The purpose of this study was to examine the effects of individuals operating computers executing several MS-DOS commands to increase the speed of reading the related manual. The experimental group was instructed to read, at their own pace, each sentence of the manual paragraph presented on the screen. After reading each paragraph three times, they were allowed to independently operate the computer. The control group followed the same procedure but did not actually operate the computers. The analysis of the reading time, per character, by sentence type - analogy, cause, rule, example, and new term - revealed that the experimental group read each type of sentence faster than the control group. In the experimental group, only the speed of reading in the cause- and rule-type sentences was significantly faster at the second and third trials. These results suggested that the practice of operating computers could have a substantial effect on the process of reading manuals, particularly as regards accelerating reading speed.