Long Words Are Easy. It's The Little Ones That Undo Reading.

You'd expect the long, complicated words to be the hard ones. Often it's the opposite.

Someone who thinks in a visual way can read dinosaur, or helicopter, or trampoline, because those words have something to connect with. An object behind them. Something they can see and a picture the mind can hold onto.

However, roughly half the words on any page aren't like that. Was. Of. The. And. If. Were. There's no picture for was. Nothing to see when you read of. For a visual mind, these words don't connect to anything, so the brain hits a small blank, right in the middle of the sentence.

A colleague of mine describes them as speed bumps that I have talked about in an earlier article. Every one of these little words is another small jolt that breaks the flow, causes disorientation or confusion, right when you're trying to piece the sentence together. And when half the words on the page are speed bumps, reading stops being a smooth road and becomes something you brace your way through.

So people adapt. The mind finds its own way around it. Not a decision anyone consciously makes, just the only way forward that doesn't mean stopping dead every second line. You stop trying to read every word properly and start guessing, taking a word's shape, its length, a letter or two you recognise, and filling in the rest.

This, however, is the part that catches so many people out. The guessing works, for a while. It gets you through, well enough that nobody notices. It's the small connecting words, and the bigger abstract ones, where the whole thing quietly falls down. For a lot of adults, this has been happening for decades, with no one ever quite sure why, themselves included.

Once you know to look for it, the signs are everywhere. A flat, monotone reading voice, because all the effort is going into pushing through the blanks and there's none left for expression. Losing your place right after a run of little words. Reading the same word two ways in one paragraph. A tiredness that arrives after even a short read, because hitting a blank every second line is genuinely hard work. And very often, avoiding reading altogether.

That last one is everywhere in adults, and it's easy to miss, because they have become so good at working around it. The partner who quietly handles all the paperwork. The colleague who always seems to end up with the reading. The people who do the banking and the forms for someone they love, not because they have to, but because they understand how hard it is, and they are glad to make it easier.

I met a woman in her eighties recently who showed me photographs of her textile work. Six foot pieces, extraordinary, so beautifully made you could hardly believe they were done by hand. Tiny pieces of fabric handwoven to create a masterpiece. Yet she has always struggled to read, and muddled the street number of the restaurant we were meeting at. Her whole life she has been led to believe she is dumb and stupid. She is anything but.

And then, just yesterday, it came even closer to home. I was at a screening of a documentary, and a name I recognised appeared in the chat. I wondered if it could be my own brother. Then his comment came up. I'm in my sixties, and I've always been led to believe I was dumb and stupid.

He is one of the kindest, cleverest people I know, brilliant with his hands, and he found his own way through, tutoring apprentices in his trade. Sixty years of carrying a story about himself that was never true, and I didn't fully know until I read it on a screen.

That is the real cost of this going unseen. Not the reading itself, but the story people build about themselves out of it.

This has nothing to do with how much effort they put in or how clever a person is. It's a visual mind meeting a page full of words with nothing to attach to.

What helps isn't more of the same. It's giving those blank words somewhere to land. Learning how to attach a picture, even an invented one, to the words that don't naturally have one, so was and of stop being speed bumps and start being words the brain can actually hold.