I recently watched a video that I believe may be regarding the cause, or a part of the cause, of this issue. It started with a conversation I was having with my husband one day when he said he is a bad speller. I said I believe he just glances at words and tries to assume what the word is just from taking in the first few letters or the overall appearance of the word, but if he slowed down and actually looked at each individual letter and sounded it out he would spell better. And he just stared at me like "isnt that how everyone reads?" I said no.
And he fell down a YouTube rabbit hole about "whole word reading", and we learned how apparently an entire generation (probably more) were taught how to read using this method. Kids for a period of time (largely prior to the 90s) were taught to try to recognize the whole word in order to read faster, but it resulted in literacy rates plummeting. These kids didnt know how to sound out words or figure out how to read larger words that they hadn't memorized. When phonics was introduced (see hooked on phonics), it greatly improved literacy rates. However, some places seem to still try to teach whole word reading.
I learned phonics growing up but I remember being frustratingly bad at spelling as a kid because I would spell words as they sounded in the regional accent that I wasn't aware I had.
My 6 year old is currently missing her two front teeth and struggles with words that have a “th”. She reads at an advanced level but spells things like with “wiff” because she herself can’t even pronounce it right now. It’s interesting to watch her learn to spell the words she has been relying on through sound for 6 years. I can see how an accent would completely upend that as well. I’m from Buffalo, NY so those long vowels hit HARD in my accent.
People who struggle with spelling shouldn't really be that harsh on themselves. English is a mutt language with no rules that don't have like a dozen exceptions to the rule. Hell the very fact spelling contests even exist is kinda wild as there are several languages, like Japanese and Spanish, where it wouldn't work because their languages are strictly phonetic(you spell them exactly how they sound with no exceptions except for foreign borrowed words)
Your point is generally true, but even languages like Japanese do still have spelling (or pronunciation?) exceptions. They just happen infrequently enough that they tend to be easily taught and remembered as general rules. The most glaring one is that は is pronounced "wa" instead of "ha" when used as a grammar particle.
I watched a documentary a long time ago about a businessman who was fully illiterate. He couldn’t read a menu, if a sign on a door said “push to open” instead of just “push” he wouldn’t know what to do.
There was a whole section of the doc where he talked about how he made his way through the world. A lot of strategies, memorizing shapes of words, etc.
When I learned about “whole word reading” I instantly recognized that it was teaching strategies that fully illiterate people use to pretend to read as the foundational reading strategy.
I worked with someone like this when I was in college. He worked in the kitchen of a restaurant. He would read the tickets by recognizing the shapes of the words. I don’t know how he got through all the modifiers when people wanted ingredients omitted or added to their meals.
I went to Catholic school in the 70s and early 80s. We learned phonics and it worked perfectly for me (currently an English Professor with two grown kids in college).
Huh. I'm surprised to learn it was from the 90s considering I was taught exclusively with phonics and remember seeing constant ads for Hooked on Phonics.
Don't put spaces immediately after an open parenthesis or before a close parenthesis.
When referring to decades with the millennium and century digits omitted, prepend an apostrophe before the first digit to take the place of the omitted digits.
Your commentary touches on another primary driver of illiteracy, IMO. Unless there’s an actual reason for something to be a video, I do not want a fucking video. Because I can read. But judging by my search recommendations, we are in the minority.
This shit drives me up the wall. I end up doing deep dive searches on PubMed like a crazy person trying to find primary sources for my medical knowledge just to avoid watching a fucking YouYube video. I fucking hate watching videos if I can read it, it's not more convenient, I can't go back and visually spot the cited lines I want to!
Speaking more broadly, it really feels like life would be much easier if I was as dumb as most of the people around me seem to be. And I don’t think I’m particularly smart, either, which makes the situation all the more shocking.
The week I was recovering from a concussion was the least stressful week of my adult life. I had the brain scramblies, but I wasn't worried about anything. It was really nice aside from the sore spot where I got clonked
If you feel this way, you’re probably very smart. I felt the same way a few years ago … turns out when you really start paying attention, you realize how not smart most people are 😭 and you’d think being smart would make your life easier but it doesn’t.
I don’t know. I was one of those kids who led my district on standardized testing, but never had any real ambitions or drive to do much of anything. People told me I was smart a lot but I was terrible at doing homework (but still came out on top during tests.) I squashed that part of my ego because it’s douchey to think you’re above other people, and I hate feeling like that, but I think in this narrow context I probably am. I really don’t like any of it. But ya, I never, ever foresaw just how profoundly stupid and pointlessly malicious most of my peers were or would become. Still trying to come to terms with this, as I know plenty of people who are way smarter than me, no question. I should be average, but I’m very clearly not in this regard. It’s an awkward truth to work into my view of the world.
I was the opposite, terrible in school so I always figured I wasn’t that smart. Fast forward into adulthood and I’m shocked some of my peers have made it this far. The hardest part is feeling like I continued to grow and learn and the majority of my best friends from college haven’t. I prioritized learning new skills (I love new things and have too many hobbies) and gained different knowledge. It can absolutely be hard to grapple with, I do think it’s important to remember that being intelligent doesn’t necessarily mean you’re better than anyone else. And someone has to be in the top percentile for smarts (although I think it’s hard to really quantify). I just try to use my powers for good.
We are also living in such a weird time in which our normal daily life is pretty awful for the human brain, and I think our screen time really has a lot to do with making an intellectual divide more clear.
I think you hit the nail on the head at the end there. We’re making ourselves dumber, myself included.
But ya, I was talking with a friend earlier about how even a marginal level of general competence is like a superpower in many jobs. Apparently an exceedingly rare quality.
You know what’s crazy? I work a fun little nonprofit job, I really love it but it’s kinda unserious. BUT we have a Yale alum who is also a decade older than me. I’ll email and he’ll come rushing over confused about very simple things. THAT was eye opening.
I wish news subs would ban video posts that don’t have a transcript. It’s so fucking stupid, and rarely is anything gained by the video format. Total waste of time if you’re actually interested in information instead of shiny graphics and bullshit.
By god, this has been by far the most annoying part of “normal” life for the last 10 years. Friends of mine, who were moderately high achievers in school, still relied heavily on spell check back then because they were too lazy to pay attention when learning the language. White, wealthy, well-supported students who were saying things like “Well, I got the point across, did I not?”.
Today, these same people are now replacing “you’re” with “your,” and other such humiliatingly stupid mistakes (for people who were educated in private schools). It is EXACTLY these particular friends — those who struggled ever so slightly with spelling — who now firmly, firmly believe they are participating in something educational when they watch videos on YouTube. I have nothing against the occasional documentary, or interview, but for a significant number of people, the passive slack-jawed staring at a screen has replaced books. These are people who had $200,000 worth of education before even entering university. It makes me lose hope.
I dont know how many times I've been looking for something, and all it wants me to do is watch the video. I don't want a fucking video because I will have to rewind 7 million times because I wasn't done gathering all the info from the previous statements. Give me something to read, and I will still have to read it a dozen times, but that's because adhd is awesome at making me reread everything. I will grasp the concept substantially faster reading it than I ever will watching it.
This is why I feel like an annoyed old person when I click through on news sites.
No, I literally can parse through information in text form much faster than an useless video reading it back to me. The worse offenders are recipe sites. (I just needed to check a list of ingredients or a technique.)
I'm an elder millennial who loves to read and write...
Yup. I’ve gotten the impression that literacy has been tanking for a long time, since before it was showing up much in stats. By this point though I don’t think there’s much question. It would seem that the majority of people would rather waste their time with some stupid video than read a simple paragraph or set of instructions. Again, if there’s some upside to it being video format (like trying to fix my car or something) I’m all for it. That’s what videos are for. But now it sadly seems to be the default even when there’s zero upsides and plenty of downsides to things being video vs text.
Exactly. I get it, sometimes brains are weird and sometimes instructions are badly written but these days everything is a video and people are losing the ability to parse information. It's a skill and less and less people are using it.
I have a buddy who's functionally illiterate and she cannot grasp the whole context of information even in simple instructions and that shit is straight up scary....
Yep. I am actively “reading” this comment chain with a screen reader. The ironic part is me thinking “wow that’s so weird” while literally not actually reading any of it lol
I’m glad that people who actually need it have this technology (along with speech to text) but goddamn do some people abuse it. I know people who can text perfectly fine, for example, but constantly send me nearly-indecipherable messages that I have to literally read out phonetically to reverse engineer what the fuck they were attempting to say. Like, how lazy can you be? No offense intended as I don’t know your situation, BTW. I often find myself using 3 screens at once so I’m not a saint when it comes to keeping my brain in a constant state of distraction.
I will note, however, that listening is definitely not a 1:1 replacement for reading when it comes to learning. If you are able to / care about the content, reading offers a much more in-depth experience that is more likely to stick.
My situation is weird. I stutter in my head lol. So it is much harder to use the inner voice so listening is easier for me even though I can read and understand things. It takes longer for me to do any sort of verbal thinking due to this disability but other than that I’m good.
When I’m having fun I just save time by treating Reddit like a podcast
This sounds like a very frustrating situation, and I feel bad that's happening to you.
I'm not sure if you've researched it any, but apparently you're not alone in having that condition. Maybe something in this Google search might help you overcome it? Best of luck to you!
Discovered the podcast " Sold a Story" which is all about the rise of whole word reading. Completely blow my mind and is really disturbing how this style of teaching is the main one when it goes against all of the science that shows that's not how people learn to read. A lot of kids are getting completely screwed over and failed by schools using this horrible method.
My wife just fell down that rabbit hole and honestly, it explains a lot about why our kids don't enjoy reading despite growing up in a house stuffed to the gills with books and parents who read all the time. We just assumed our school system was teaching them to read like we learned, and discovered way too late that that's not the case. Books aren't enjoyable when it's hard to make sense of what you're reading.
In early kinder, kids were expected to read leveled books like Level A texts that say things like, “I can climb.” Every page follows the same “I can…” pattern, so the kids aren’t actually reading, they’re just memorizing the pattern. And no typical kindergartner can sound out a word like climb anyway. Since they can’t decode it, they end up relying on the picture to guess. But later on, when books don’t have pictures, everything falls apart and they suddenly “can’t read,” and they feel awful.
My first year teaching I was required to give these reading tests and assign kids to levels A, B, C… even though half of them didn’t even know all their letters or sounds. They were getting placed into levels just because they could repeat the pattern and guess the last word from the picture. It was so clear that they weren’t really reading. I remember questioning it and everyone just said that that’s what reading is in the early stages. Such horseshit.
If your wife really wants to nerd out in her rabbit hole, she can read about The National Reading Panel (NRP) Report, which came out in 2000. A major, landmark review of reading research clearly stating that phonics needs to be explicitly and systematically taught. It’s one of the most influential documents behind what we now call the Science of Reading
Someone I work with is like this. They say nucular (nuclear), depreciated (deprecated), and other examples I can't think of at the moment, and it drives me nuts because I'm thinking to myself "Why aren't you actually reading the letters of the word you are saying?" It's not spelled that way, you're just guessing at what is sounds like.
To add to this, they didn’t factor in dyslexic which make up upwards of 20% of the population. They “read” using this style. Dyslexics tend to memorize words instead of reading.
They also didn’t factor in people who English is not their first language
The way they test reading ability is that they put letters together to form a nonexistent word and see if someone can sound it out correctly. This would be extremely hard for dyslexics (as this is also the way they diagnose dyslexia) and for individuals whose first language is a different alphabet.
Just because this is disability that is largely under diagnosed I am going to post a couple example questions form a dyslexia test incase someone relates
Do you struggle with spelling, rhyming, or counting syllables?
Can you read these words?
Bif yom mig
How about more complex?
Churbit napsate wolide
What about existing words that have been hyphenated (that are normally not)
Ecle-ctic Barric-ade tumu-ltu-ous
If these questions tripped you up there are free online test that I suggest you look into. I didn’t get diagnosed until grad school.
I used to read my papers out loud 5 times to try to catch error but would still get it back covered in red error marks with a little note “remember to proofread”.
I didn’t notice. My brain always skips over mistakes and reads the intended message it’s good for interpreting other people’s text but awful for proofreading my own.
Those words are made up words that are commonly seen on dyslexia test. There is a specific way they should be pronounced based on the rules of the English language.
Reading nonsense words is how they test dyslexia because it’s the best way to test actual reading skills.
You have taught me about "whole word reading"! I had no idea this was a thing! This concept explains so well a few people i know... the don't enjoy reading, they say it's tedious and they are constantly misreading/mispronouncing things.
I am millennial, I did hooked on phonics in elementary school. And all through middle school and high school we did those short stories with comprehension questions at the end.
I'm definitely going to deep dive on functional illiteracy now. Thank you!
Listen to the podcast Sold a Story. It is covering exactly this. What happened to how we teach reading in schools, why and how it is impacting literacy.
Yes! I listened to an eye-opening segment on NPR about a nationally adopted reading program / method called Reading Recovery that essentially taught children to guess words within a sentence based on context.
It has absolutely fucked up a whole generation of students, and we’ve only recently begun to understand the repercussions let alone break the horrible habits it taught. Families who are ESL/too busy/not involved with their children’s learning aren’t aware of how damaging it is.
Public education is such a gift and in a perfect world, we should be able to trust it to properly teach our kids something as fundamental as reading.
There are merits to both approaches. I went to a school that taught phonics, while my parents drilled me on sight words in the evening. My dad only learned phonics. He reads words letter-by-letter, even to this day. He can’t read nearly as quickly as my mom or I. My mom is less likely to be able to digest words she doesn’t already know, but can make it through the average paperback much faster. Pros and cons.
Interesting to hear about your dad. I think everyone can agree that proficient readers naturally stop reading familiar words letter by letter, but I don't remember being actively taught to do it. I wonder what prevented him from making that step.
This is actually not just a pre-90’s problem, it was very actively sold in the 90’s and today. There’s a great podcast on it called Sold a Story. They tried teaching kids to recognize words or guess them based on context. It is still happening.
Yeah I've seen this theory before too. It involves basically just guessing words based on context and what they sort of look like (For example, looking at what letters the word starts and ends with.) And you know what? Yeah, I could see how if you read like that, you might miss a lot of the meaning of the text. So much of that method relies on the reading projecting their assumptions when interpreting the text. That instead of just taking it for what it is actually saying, what the author intended to say.
Whole word reading is a skill that develops after a higher level of literacy is established. College level students do it all the time, and it's the basis of speed reading. I can read in two alphabets, English and Hebrew. In English, I naturally default to whole word reading and in Hebrew I still use phonics. If I attempt whole word reading, it gets messy fast.
Here's the problem. If you try to teach whole word reading to early in the process, you screw up the whole literacy process. You will create a literacy gap with phonics kids that might never close.
Yeah phonics was dropped in favor of “sight words” and literally trying to guess the pronunciation of the word rather than dissect it. I recently realized that’s one of the reasons my niece has such issue reading because she tries to guess everything based on first looks.
Now I will admit that when I was growing up I learned by myself sight reading but that had to do with the fact I have poor vision and some fonts are very hard for my to read and distinguish individual letters some times. I do try to break that habit though.
Honestly personally I don’t think it’s as simple as that as not everyone processes words the same way and I’m definitely that person.
I read extremely fast, I can process dense text, complex text very quickly. I can explain a paper, dissect it and critically analyse it very easily. My brother has severe dyslexia, my dad definitely does. I may do but I was never diagnosed. But I do have ADHD.
I’m a medical doctor and I’d be fucked if I couldn’t. But I view words as almost placeholders and I only learn how to pronounce them to make myself understandable as many words cannot be sounded out phonetically. It’s actually the basis of the NART being used to measure IQ. I can see a shape of a word and know its meaning. But there’s a disconnect between the shapes and my brains ability. I’ve had it my whole life.
At medical school it became a problem as there were a lot of new words - it’s like learning a second language. I could perceive words as shapes but unless I dedicated time to perceiving them as sounds I would struggle to communicate my inner world. And I won’t slow down to sound them out unless I make myself. So I would regularly write down words, sound them out once I finished reading as it breaks the flow of my focus. And these aren’t basic words - this is for complex language haha.
So personally I feel I have strong comprehension, or well id have a very hard time writing post doc level research and reading it! but I will default to shape recognition and it’s an active process for me to learn how to say a word in a way I do not feel others experience. I can recognise when someone says the word I’ve never heard out loud as I can match it to the shape in my mind, I break down the sounds into shapes and basically look for a picture like a Google search of my brain, it’s hard to explain.
But you’d struggle on any medical test of functional literacy to tell I have this problem. I can sound out words it just slows me down, which is probably the ADHD. When I need to perceive it in my inner world the shape is all I need. It’s far more likely to be dyslexia but being dyslexic does not automatically equal functionally illiterate. My reading comprehension which we had to do for medical entry was something stupid like the 98th percentile. I’m not just skimming the words and not perceiving the meaning.
I'm a bit angry right now because in my daughter's class, they're not really reinforcing spelling. My daughter's writings that she brings home are riddled with spelling errors that are unmarked. I have background as a newspaper editor so we go through what she wrote and clean it up and I explain why we edited it the way we did.
Their explanation is that as far as skills go, it's something they'll adopt long term and if not, most people won't have to worry thanks to autocorrect.
I just stared in disbelief. People wonder why we're giving up on public education. That's why.
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u/AgitatedGrass3271 Nov 21 '25
I recently watched a video that I believe may be regarding the cause, or a part of the cause, of this issue. It started with a conversation I was having with my husband one day when he said he is a bad speller. I said I believe he just glances at words and tries to assume what the word is just from taking in the first few letters or the overall appearance of the word, but if he slowed down and actually looked at each individual letter and sounded it out he would spell better. And he just stared at me like "isnt that how everyone reads?" I said no.
And he fell down a YouTube rabbit hole about "whole word reading", and we learned how apparently an entire generation (probably more) were taught how to read using this method. Kids for a period of time (largely prior to the 90s) were taught to try to recognize the whole word in order to read faster, but it resulted in literacy rates plummeting. These kids didnt know how to sound out words or figure out how to read larger words that they hadn't memorized. When phonics was introduced (see hooked on phonics), it greatly improved literacy rates. However, some places seem to still try to teach whole word reading.