 Thus, readers had to be much more cognisant of the context to which the text referred.Over time, the current system of rapid silent reading for information replaced the older, slower, and more dramatic performance based reading, and word dividers and punctuation became more beneficial to text.Though paleographers disagree about the chronological decline of "scriptio continua" throughout the world, it is generally accepted that the addition of spaces first appeared in Irish and Anglo-Saxon Bibles and Gospels from the seventh and eighth centuries.