It explains why I kept meeting kids who told me in no uncertain terms that they hated reading and couldn't understand why anybody would do it, voluntarily. It explains so much.

This is heartbreaking.

This DOES definitely explain why all my life I kept meeting kids who just ... didn't really seem to be able to read. Kids who were twelve or so and still read like they were six-year-olds, stumbling, halting, clearly only half-sure what the words on the page were.

are all things you do when you're not good at reading! It's what you do when you're struggling! You know you're getting more fluent when you *stop* doing this! In no universe does this describe what skilled readers are doing, and anyone who'd thought for five seconds would have realized that!

Because if you start learning another language, you realize right quick that skipping over the hard words and coming back to them at the end of the sentence, guessing at what they might be based on context, and using the letters you recognize to tell you what you're looking at

"To our surprise, all of our research results pointed in the opposite direction," Stanovich wrote. "It was the poorer readers, not the more skilled readers, who were more reliant on context to facilitate word recognition."

YOU ALL NEED TO STUDY OTHER LANGUAGES. ANY OTHER LANGUAGE. DOESN'T MATTER.

HOW. HOW DID THIS MAKE SENSE TO ANYONE. I realize I was one of those kids who just sort of ... learned to read because the books were there, but I could still tell you that this is simply not how reading works. Anyone who can read proficiently ought to be able to tell you that!

"In the paper, Goodman rejected the idea that reading is a precise process that involves exact or detailed perception of letters or words. Instead, he argued that as people read, they make predictions about the words on the page using these three cues..."

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAGH WHAT. WHAT. WHAT.

Related to this: I met a guy recently who works with dyslexic students, and he said that around 1 in 10 people has some level of dyslexia. It's usually mild enough to not be detected, but they are struggling. Really explained the way some people read and write online, and made me much more patient!

They certainly do contain multitudes.

Absolutely, I understand!

I can't speak for anyone else, but this sermon spoke to me in exactly the way I needed today, and I think that's a sign of some Inspiration. Thank you, Father.