If you are interested in the reading wars, please see a review I just put on Amazon.com for Frank Smith’s “Understanding Reading,” one of the most influential books of the last 50 years.

To this day, I never meet anyone who understands what the reading wars are all about. The Whole Word people keep the debate so murky and sophistical, you’re lucky if you escape with your sanity (or your wallet or your children).

In this Amazon review, I came up with a simple way to clarify Whole Word’s nuttiness.

Stop and think about how difficult it is to memorize numbers. Phone numbers, for example. How many could you retain if your life depended on it? Even 100?

Point is, recalling “Whole Numbers” shows you the difficulty of memorizing “Whole Words.” That’s what Whole Word does—it reduces learning to read to memorizing thousands of number-like designs. For the new reader, English looks like this: sjfgjp tsbfg hthwl xnsk hwhty. For all practical purposes, it also looks like this: 38685 352661 375707 26646 464 8278 664.

For the brain, this is very hard work. And guess what. The same bad thing happens in all cases: REVERSALS. 4581 or 4518? xnsk or xnks? All options look reasonable. Such reversals are quite normal when we struggle to recall a number. But when kids can’t get the letters straight it’s called dysfunction, it’s called dyslexia!

Seems to me, an entire bogus industry has been built on this non-problem. Geniuses invented the alphabet to make memorizing words easier. What kind of people would discard this great advance?

Also see “30: The War Against Reading” on Improve-Education.org.