Anyone who has honestly read this and some of the other Ending Illiteracy blogs (http://literacy-research.com, http://www.englishliteracyinfo.com, http://HowToReadSoon.com, and https://bccleckler.wordpress.com) trying to understand the content, not merely to find something interesting or amusing to read, may very well be wondering why nothing has been done to carry out what is obviously a solution to our serious literacy problems in English. There are two basic reasons.

The first reason we have not implemented a proven solution to illiteracy in English can be blamed on human nature. People instinctively resist change — even change for the better in some cases. Change requires us to leave what is “comfortable” and familiar for something unknown. Very often people would rather continue the disadvantages of the known than to embrace the advantages of the unknown. If the change has a monetary cost, as it often does, people resist the expenditure for fear that the planned change is not really necessary and will not result in an overall reduction in cost in the future.

Two brief examples will confirm this understanding of the attitude toward change.

As an engineer in a solid-propellant rocket manufacturing facility charged with ensuring that manufacturing procedures would not cause an unintended explosion or damage the product in any way, I often had to convince workers to change their procedures. Even though the engineering group had carefully analyzed each step in the procedure and had scientifically proven that the change was needed, workers were often convinced that the way they were performing the operation was better.

A second example, involving a costly change, occurred in a small town in the West. There was a long stretch of straight highway with a speed limit of 50 mph but on which cars often exceeded that speed. In the middle of that stretch of road there was a cross-street from a residential area. Cars attempting to enter the long, straight stretch of road often had to wait a long time before they could pull onto the road. Residents in the area requested a stop light at the intersection for several years because it was an unsafe intersection. Several incidents ended in dangerous collisions. The town resisted installing stop lights for several years. It was not until someone was killed at the intersection that the town finally installed the stop lights.

In the case of spelling reform, we have the entrenched experiences of thousands of teachers, parents, and companies attempting to teach students to read what is undoubtedly the most illogical, inconsistent, and chaotic spelling of any language. These thousands of people and companies have exerted so much effort and have (in their minds, at least) been so successful in teaching reading despite the difficulties that they are not searching for “a better way.”

The second reason we have not implemented a proven solution to illiteracy is that although what is required is very simple and logical (spell our words the way they sound) the justification for changing the spelling requires the understanding of a very large number of facts that those resisting change are often unwilling to honestly look at. When something simple requires a complicated justification, it is easier to simply say, “That is too good to be true” than to make the effort to decide the truth or falsity of what is proposed.

Our ridiculous spelling causes serious problems, not only the illiterates but also those of us who are literate. Anyone who is truly compassionate about these problems will want to honestly check the website providing the factual justification for correcting our spelling, http://LearnToReadNow.org. Anyone who doubts that correcting our spelling is really necessary is challenged to discover the facts presented in this website.

Most people today want their children to learn to read so they can get a good job. Today, people assume that most adults — especially those who are working at a full-time job — can read. It is an understandable assumption. Almost every American can read a thousand or so simple words they learned in the first three grades in school. Those who cannot read more than about a thousand words are very good at hiding their disability. It is a disability that keeps most of them from holding an above-poverty-level-wage job. Unless they have a spouse who is literate and holds a good-paying job, they are likely to be in poverty. They read so poorly that they do not like to read and seldom try to do so. As a result, as well as being in poverty they are also very prone to being misled by cultists, false religions, and other dangerous anti-social groups. This is a hazard for those who do not read the Bible for themselves.

Because the illiterates are so good at hiding their illiteracy and because the media do not publicize the true extent of illiteracy in America, very few people realize the seriousness of the problem. An analysis of the Adult Literacy in America report — the most statistically accurate and comprehensive study of U.S. adult literacy ever conducted — proves that a shocking 48.7% of U.S. adults are functionally illiterate, defined as being unable to read and write well enough to hold an above-poverty-level-wage job. This is the most reliable and accurate definition of functionally literacy, because employers have a very strong incentive to accurately determine a prospective employee’s ability to read and write well enough to be a profitable employee. All other methods of determining functional literacy are susceptible to unintentional (or even intentional) errors because of the size, time period, and persons chosen as test subjects for the database used and because of the data handling methods, calculation methods, and verification methods used. The analysis mentioned above also proves that 31.2% of these functional illiterates are in poverty and that they are more than twice as likely to be in poverty because of their illiteracy as for all other reasons combined.

All those who have even a little compassion for the many physical, mental, emotional, medical, and financial problems that illiterates must endure every day of their lives — problems that we would consider a crisis if we had to endure them — will want to help publicize the proven solution to ending illiteracy in English. For the sake of an estimated 600 million English-speaking people around the world who are functionally illiterate in English — including more than 93 million in the U.S. alone — you are urged to read the March 23, 2013 blog (the next earlier blog on this website) and to help publicize our humanitarian project of permanently ending illiteracy in English. If enough people know the seriousness of the problem and how easily it can be solved, English-speaking nations around the world can begin the process of permanently ending illiteracy in English!

Illiteracy in English: A Serious Problem YOU Can Help End

This is about an idea so big that small-minded people do not want even to consider it. This is a challenge to you, dear reader: please do not be small-minded — or close-minded. There is a serious illiteracy problem affecting all 1.4 billion English-speaking people around the world — and there is only one proven solution. This article will prove it to anyone willing honestly to mentally engage with the facts presented. Whether you know it or not — whether you believe it or not — the problem explained here has varying degrees of negative effects on every English-speaking person around the world.

To help you understand, I need to use an analogy. I feel like the medical doctor who has a patient with a serious, eventually fatal medical problem for which he has treated the symptoms with an expensive home-remedy for several years. After offering to explain the simple medical solution to his illness, he only wants to know the cost of the cure. I explain the cost of the cure. I explain that his home-remedy fights the symptoms but will never cure the disease – similar to taking cough and pain medicine and decongestants instead of antibiotics to cure pneumonia. He decides that he will continue with his home-remedy because the cost of the cure is almost the cost of three months of his home-remedy.

This is a very close description of what is happening in reading education. We have been fighting the symptoms of the problem in reading education since 1755, and for various reasons only a very tiny proportion of scholars will honestly examine the problem. It is really disturbing to see the enormous amount of time and money and the multiple thousands of teachers, parents, and literacy volunteers fighting the symptoms of reading education in this country — when the solution is so simple, easy, and quick (less than three months for learners). Half-measures may reduce the symptoms suffered by some of the students, one-at-a-time, but they are not doing what is needed to help everyone at once by solving the problem.

The problem:  it is difficult to learn to read English (as explained below).

The symptoms of the problem:

1. Almost half of English-speaking students in America (and presumably an equally disturbing number of students in other English-speaking countries) never become fluent readers in English. Almost every U.S. adult can read at least a thousand simple words learned in the first three or four years in school, but they cannot read well enough to hold an above-poverty-level-wage job (as proven below). They do not like to read and seldom try to read. Statistics show that almost half of U.S. adults never read an entire book after leaving school.
2. Most of those who do become fluent readers need at least two years learning to read well enough that they can continue to improve their reading skills after reading instruction in school ends. Most reading instruction in U.S. schools (other than remedial reading) ends after third or fourth grade. As a result, as teachers who are familiar with teaching reading to students in other countries know and as members of some “think tanks” such as The American Enterprise Institute know, American students are about two years behind the students of the same age in other industrialized nations.
3. Information in following sections proves the seriousness of the symptoms.

The first step in solving any problem: find what is causing the problem. You can spend an enormous amount of time and money fighting the symptoms of a problem. If you do not solve the problem, however, it continues to occur — undiminished (often increasing) in intensity.

Proof that Learning to Read English is difficult:

The English spelling system is NOT a logical alphabetic spelling system. English spelling is more like Chinese writing in which specific shapes in specific positions represent a word. English spelling uses a specific combination of letters in a specific order to represent a word. This came about in 1755 with the publication of Dr. Samuel Johnson’s well-received dictionary. Dr. Johnson, in effect, froze the spelling of words instead of freezing the spelling of phonemes (the smallest sound used to distinguish between syllables and words in a language or dialect), as a logical alphabetic spelling system is designed to do. In most cases, Dr. Johnson used the words as they were spelled in their language of origin. Words were added to the original Celtic from the languages of every conqueror who occupied the British Isles: Norse, Icelandic, Latin, Anglo-Saxon, German, Danish, and French. Since 1755, as explained in Henry Hitchings book, The Secret Life of Words, the English language has adopted words (and usually their spelling) from 350 additional languages.

A logical alphabetic spelling system should have a one-to-one correspondence of phonemes and graphemes (a grapheme is a letter or a specific combination of letters used to represent a phoneme). To read English, a student must only learn to spell 38 phonemes and learn how to blend them into words. There are 26 letters in our alphabet, so we could spell our phonemes with 26 single-letter graphemes and 12 two-letter graphemes. Instead, in addition to 26 single-letter graphemes, present English spelling uses at least the following: 184 two-letter graphemes, 131 three-letter graphemes, 22 four-letter graphemes, and four five-letter graphemes, for a total of 367 graphemes — when only 38 are needed! When more graphemes are used than are needed, that means that many of the graphemes represent more than one phoneme each. In fact, only five single-letter graphemes (B, K, P, R, and V) have only one pronunciation each. The other graphemes (of any length) have from one to eight pronunciations each. Adding to the confusion, however, all but six of the single-letter graphemes (H, Q, U, W, X, and Y) are doubled in some words and not in others — with no reliable way of knowing which is which. Also, all 26 of the letters in present spelling are silent in some words (reAd, deBt, sCent, velDt, havE, halFpenny, siGn, rHyme, busIness, riJsttafel, Knot, taLk, Mnemonic, autumN, sophOmore, rasPberry, lacQuer, suRprise, aiSle, depoT, bUilt, savVy, Write, fauX pas, maYor, and rendeZvous) with no reliable way of knowing if a letter is silent or not. Also, some English words do not spell all of the sounds in the spoken word or the graphemes do not show the proper order in which the phonemes are to be pronounced.

For Reading: The student or writer must know the pronunciation of as many as 367 graphemes to use — with an average of 2.2 pronunciations each — by memory, for each individual word, because the phoneme that a grapheme represents can (and often does) change from one word to the next. Individual graphemes represent as many as eight different phonemes.

For Spelling: The student must remember which graphemes — and in which order they occur — for each individual word. This is even more difficult than reading because the spelling of each phoneme varies from only (!) four spellings for two of the phonemes (H as in hat and TH as in then) to sixty or more for the U phoneme as in nut! Professor Julius Nyikos of Washington and Jefferson College in Pennsylvania studied six standard dictionaries and found 1,768 ways of spelling 40 English phonemes — an average of 44 spellings each! Furthermore, no one can learn to read using English spelling rules. There is not even one spelling rule that does not have exceptions – and some of the exceptions even have exceptions! A computer programmed with 203 English spelling rules was able correctly to spell only 49 percent of a list of 17,000 common English words. Most adults cannot do as well.

After reading this you may say, “So what? I learned to read.” Here is the “So what:” hundreds of millions of English-speaking people do not. Does that bother you? It should. Their illiteracy costs you and me money and negatively affects each of us — and our nation — in numerous ways that you have probably never considered.

 Proof That a Phonemic Spelling System Will SOLVE the Problem:

Dr. Frank Laubach spent more than forty years going all around the world teaching thousands of adults in more than 300 alphabetic languages (other than English) to read fluently. He prepared primers for 313 languages and even invented spelling systems for 220 unwritten languages. Here is the proof: His books, Teaching the World to Read and Forty Years With the Silent Billion, never mentions even one student that he was not able to teach to read fluently. Dr. Laubach was able unfailingly to teach students to read fluently in from one to twenty days (!) in 95 percent of the languages and in less than three months in 98 percent of the languages! He was able to do this because the languages in which he taught were almost perfect, phonemically — a one-phoneme-to-one-grapheme correspondence. Confirmation of Dr. Laubach’s findings is given by comparison to the amazing findings of Dr. Rudolph Flesch. He stated on pages 167-168 of his 1981 book, Why Johnny Still Can’t Read, that Russian schoolchildren are taught to read 46 of the 130 national languages of Russia — in first grade! There is no reading instruction, as such, after first grade.

The difficulty of learning to read English is NOT because of the difficulty of the language itself, however. The English language is neither among the easiest nor among the most difficult. Axel Wijk states on pages 56-57 of Alphabets for English, edited by W. Haas, that English is a comparatively easy language to learn for foreigners, “… mainly due to its grammatical structure, which is far simpler that those of most other important languages, particularly so in comparison with French, German, Russian, or Spanish.” Sir James Pitman states on page 264 of his book, Alphabets and Reading, “No other major language possesses such a simple grammar and syntax or combines the following advantages: . . .” The first two of the eight advantages he lists, for example, are: there are no arbitrary genders and agreement between adjectives and nouns is unnecessary. The grammar and syntax of English is easier than that of many European languages, for example. In most European languages, students learn to read fluently in less than three months.

Dr. Laubach stated on page 48 of his book, Forty Years With the Silent Billion, “If we spelled English phonetically, American children could be taught to read in a week.” All those resisting change may insist that we prove it on several thousand American children in a public school. Those objecting to a proven solution are effectively trying to “reinvent the wheel.” Dr. Laubach has quite adequately proven that phonemic spelling systems are easy to learn, and it would be a huge mistake to continue expending enormous amounts of time and money when the solution has already been proven. Education researchers may want to do additional research. The reason is obvious. They will be receiving the work and the money spent on the research. Jonathan Kozol, in his book, Illiterate America, asks the obvious question about ending illiteracy, “Why should we spend additional time and money on research when the researchers will only be confirming what we already know?”

 Proof That English Spelling Causes Serious Problems:

An analysis of the Adult Literacy in America report and a 2006 follow-up report prove the shocking extent * of functional illiteracy in English. (All asterisks in this article refer to the “Read More” pages in a website that has a link in the last paragraph of this article.) The Adult Literacy in America report — from a five-year, $14 million study — is the most statistically accurate and comprehensive study of U.S. adult literacy ever commissioned by the U.S. government. The Adult Literacy in America study involved lengthy interviews of 26,049 adults statistically chosen by age, gender, ethnicity, and location (urban, suburban, and rural locations in twelve states across the U.S. and included 1,100 prisoners from 80 prisons) to represent the entire U.S. population. These documents prove that 48.7 percent of U.S. adults are functionally illiterate (defined as being unable to hold an above-poverty-level-wage job), proves that 31.2 percent of these illiterates are in poverty, and proves that they are more than twice as likely to be in poverty because of their illiteracy as for all other reasons combined. The inability to hold a good job is the most accurate and reliable indicator of illiteracy because employers have a very strong financial interest in accurately determining a person’s ability to read and write to make sure that they will be a profitable employee. All other methods are susceptible to unintentional (or even intentional) inaccuracies because of the size, time period, and subjects of the data base used and because of the data handling, calculation, and verification methods used.

Jonathan Kozol’s shocking book, Illiterate America, proves the seriousness of the problem. Kozol describes the serious physical, mental, emotional, medical, and financial problems that illiterates must endure every day of their lives, problems that we would consider a crisis if we had to endure them. Functional illiterates cannot read well enough to perform many of the simple daily tasks needed to thrive in our present complex, technologically challenging life — tasks that those of us who are literate take for granted. An informative website about ending illiteracy in English summarizes the seriousness * of the problem of illiteracy.

In addition to the seriousness for illiterates, illiteracy costs every U.S. Adult — both reader and non-reader — an average of more than $5,000 each year. This cost is (1) for government programs that illiterates use (for example: job training, unemployment payments, welfare, Medicare, and Medicaid), (2) for truancy, juvenile delinquency, and crime directly related to illiteracy, and (3) for the higher cost of consumer goods (about $2,200 of that $5,000) because of illiterates in the labor pool (necessitating higher recruiting costs) and in the workplace. You and I both know that if the first two items were eliminated, our taxes would not decrease — the government would find somewhere else to spend the money — but at least that particular waste of money would be gone.

This pales in comparison, however, to the cost of at least two years of public education wasted by the additional time required to learn to read. The English Spelling Society on their www.englishspellingsociety.org website claims that our present spelling requires an average of three years longer to learn than if our words were spelled phonemically. The 2008-2009 cost, per pupil, (the latest available figures) for public elementary and secondary education in the U.S. is $12,643. For the millions of U.S. students, this amounts to hundreds of billions of dollars wasted. You and I both know that if our spelling was perfected, that expenditure would not stop. Instead, English-speaking students would attend school the same number of years, but they would finally be able to compete with students of the same age in non-English-speaking industrialized nations.

The (often-unrecognized) illiterates among us adversely affect our entire nation. Illiterates not only cause large expenditures for their needs, but also their inabilities harm the trade balance with other nations, and result in outsourcing and many other causes of American jobs being sent overseas as explained by Thomas Friedman’s book, The Earth is Flat.

The Solution to Illiteracy in English:

Based upon Dr. Laubach’s experience, what English-speaking people need is English spelled phonemically. A spelling system known as NuEnglish is phonemically perfect: a one-grapheme-to-one-phoneme correspondence. It has ten beneficial characteristics * that correct all the problems in present spelling. No other known spelling system proposed from the late 1800s to the present has all — or even most — of these beneficial characteristics.

Most people want to know the “cost of the cure” as mentioned in the second paragraph of this article. When people learn the cost of the cure is spelling reform, they may think the cost is too high. This is only until they learn these thirteen important, provable facts:

1. At present, only slightly more than half of the students become fluent readers. Most of those who become fluent need at least two years to learn to read well enough to be able to keep increasing their reading vocabulary until they become fluent readers.
2. Learning to read a phonemically perfect spelling system will be extremely easy. Present readers can learn the ten simple NuEnglish spelling rules in less than ten minutes and read NuEnglish at almost the same rate as they read present English spelling. Persons attempting to read NuEnglish material — even before learning the spelling system — were able to read aloud with only an occasional two- or three-second stumble over some of the words. Present readers can easily return to present reading rates with a couple of months of experience in reading NuEnglish.
3. With proper instruction, the better beginning readers will be able to read NuEnglish fluently in a week, as Dr. Laubach stated. All but the most mentally handicapped will certainly be able to become fluent readers of NuEnglish in less than three months. A month or two after becoming fluent in NuEnglish, beginning readers will be able to read at the same rate as readers who are fluent in our present chaotic spelling system — or more likely: somewhat faster.
4. No overall statistically significant improvement in reading education in English has been made since our ridiculous spelling system was frozen in 1755. All those who object to attacks on our spelling by claiming that “English is a beautiful language” or “We should not attack our ‘mother tongue’ ” need to get serious! How many immigrants or beginning readers would call English a “beautiful language” while struggling to learn to read our present illogical, inconsistent spelling?
5. A phonemic spelling system has been proven effective by Dr. Laubach’s work in more than 300 alphabetic languages, as explained in the section, “Proof That a Phonemic Spelling System Will SOLVE the Problem,” above.
6. Although English-speaking nations have tried a multitude of ways to solve the problem since 1755, correcting our spelling by freezing the spelling of the phonemes instead of the words is the only solution that will ever work.
7. In the long run, correcting our spelling will save money rather than costing! We will not have to replace the reading textbooks every five or six years when the “new and improved” teaching method comes out that addresses the symptoms of the difficulty of reading without solving the problem causing the difficulty. We will only replace textbooks when they physically wear out; and the reading textbooks will be much smaller and easier to prepare. Most of the content can simply be children’s classical literature (much of which has exceeded the copyright date) transposed into English spelled phonemically by use of a computer program.
8. All reasonable objections * to spelling reform have been thoroughly debunked by reputable, respected scholars.
9. Numerous benefits of finally correcting our spelling system far overbalance any objections (even the unreasonable ones) that persons resisting change may have.
10. Dozens of scholars for the last 250 years or more have recommended spelling reform.
11. Thirty-three nations, both smaller and larger than the U.S., both advanced and developing nations, have simplified their spelling.
12. The need for a higher literacy rate is greater than ever in our increasingly complex world. Very few of today’s jobs do not require literacy. International trade is making most jobs increasingly competitive.
13. 13.   Appropriate to unlucky thirteen, however, here is the kicker: comprehensive spelling reform has never been attempted in English! There are two significant reasons why this is true: (1) there are several reasons why most people do not know * the seriousness of the problem — as you now know, if you have read the “Proof That English Spelling Causes Serious Problems” section above.  (2) Most people, familiar only with the difficulty of learning present English spelling, have difficulty understanding that students can quickly, easily learn to read * with a perfect phonemic spelling system. For those who may have disbelieved the facts about the seriousness of the problem or the ease of implementing the solution, the website below addresses both of these reasons. Due to the seriousness of the problem of functional illiteracy in English, you are challenged to prove to yourself whether what is presented here is factual or not.

What Must Be Done to Ensure Success in Ending Illiteracy in English:

No humanitarian project — no matter how worthy — can succeed unless enough people know about it. Publicity is essential for the success of almost any project. There are more than 1.3 billion English-speaking people around the world. An estimated 600 million English-speaking people around the world — more than 93 million in the U.S. alone — are desperately hoping that you and I will help them end their functional illiteracy in English. All that is needed to begin the process of definitely and permanently ending illiteracy in English is to publicize the proven solution to illiteracy. If enough people know about the seriousness of the problem and the ease of solving the problem, the problem will be solved. Otherwise, how can anyone claim to have any compassion whatsoever for the problem?

Bob Cleckler, has been working passionately since 1985 to help end illiteracy in English. A careful, honest evaluation of his ending illiteracy in English website will take only six minutes. The proofs in six of the “Read More” pages mentioned above are as follows. The shocking extent * of functional illiteracy in English (page 2), why we do not know * the extent of the problem (page 3), the seriousness * of the effects of illiteracy (page 4), the characteristics * of NuEnglish (page 8), how to quickly, easily learn to read * NuEnglish (page 10), and objections * to spelling reform (page 11). There is a “Media Page” link on our website, in the left-hand column, with an informative video about our humanitarian project. There are five blogs on ending illiteracy, all of which are available by clicking “IMPORTANT LINKS.” Gary Sprunk, M.S. English Linguistics, prepared the NuEnglish.org website that has the Respeller, a computer program — with a database of more than 617,000 traditionally spelled English words — that will quickly transpose up to 25 pages of traditional spelling into NuEnglish. Cleckler wrote the latest version of his award-winning book, Let’s End Our Literacy Crisis, in 2012. To allay any suspicions that his passion is only to make money on his book, rather than an earnest desire to help hundreds of millions of people, this second revision is a 265-page e-book in PDF format that is available at no cost or obligation of any kind in the left-hand column of our website. It has 164 pages of text, 8 Appendixes in 46 pages, 178 extensive notes and references, a Glossary, an extensive bibliography, an index, and other features. This book proposes a plan for implementing NuEnglish, and it will answer any of the questions that our website does not answer.

There are two basic ways a person can read a non-fiction book. You can scan here and there to decide what the book is proposing or revealing — to see if you really want to spend valuable time to read it carefully or not — or you can systematically read, in order, all the evidence presented to decide if what is proposed or revealed makes sense. If the subject is important — as the seriousness and extent of English functional illiteracy definitely is important — the more systematic method of reading is necessary to make an exact evaluation.

In order to help end our literacy crisis, please let an estimated 600 million English-speaking people who are functionally illiterate in English (including more than 93 million in the U.S. alone) influence you to carefully evaluate at least the 164 pages of text of the breakthrough, award-winning book, Let’s End Our Literacy Crisis, Second Revision, a 265 page e-book published late in 2012 and available at no cost or obligation in the left-hand column of our ending functional illiteracy in English website, containing (among other things) 46 pages in eight appendices, 178 extensive reference and end notes, a glossary, an extensive bibliography (including some books which were not quoted or paraphrased in the text), and an index. This website gives a good introduction to our humanitarian project of permanently ending illiteracy in English. The home page of our website gives five brief statements of the problem of learning to read English and six brief statements of the proven solution, which can be read in six minutes. Each of these statements is proven in the “Read More” pages following each statement. Those who do not want to read for six minutes can click on the “Media Page” near the top of the left-hand column and watch a video interview which will explain our project for ending illiteracy.

I do not know how the well-known internet source of celebrity contacts determined that certain celebrities are interested in education, literacy, and/or Dyslexia, but after spending about $25 each to buy and mail a book which can definitely and permanently end functional illiteracy in English to all the celebrities named below, I really wonder if any professed interest in these subjects is merely for any Public Relations value it may have. The assistants of less than ten of the 73 celebrities listed below were polite enough to at least send me a letter saying that, in effect, their celebrity was much too busy and important to take the time to read 162 pages of a 5 in. by 8 in. paperback book and write an endorsement (or to even place a check mark beside one of the two suggested endorsements). All the other celebrities totally ignored my request for an endorsement.

In all fairness, of course, most of the celebrities may not have even seen the book. Most, or all, of these celebrities have “screeners” who open all of their mail so that the celebrity does not have to waste time on something that might be “junk mail.” Most screeners are not willing to take the chance of harming their chance of continued employment by annoying their boss by giving them something that there is even the remotest possibility of being considered junk mail. It is easier to just throw “unsolicited gifts” in the trash. After all, most celebrities get many gifts from their fans which are more obviously desirable than a book.

If you personally know any of the celebrities listed below — or if you know anyone who knows one of them personally — there is a simple action you could take which would help an estimated 600 hundred million English-speaking people around the world who are functionally illiterate in English (including more than 93 million in the U.S. alone) and help yourself avoid more than $5,000 each year in the U.S. as a result of the illiterates among us. You can get an introduction to the humanitarian project of Literacy Research Associates, Inc. and NuEnlish, Inc., two non-profit educational corporations, on our website about ending functional illiteracy in English. In the left-hand column of this website is a link for obtaining the second revision, 265-page e-book, .pdf format version of the award-winning book, Let’s End Our Literacy Crisis, which is available at no cost or obligation of any kind. If you would carefully examine this breakthrough book, which details how we can end our provably real and serious literacy crisis, and if you agree with what the book proposes, please urge the celebrity — if they are interested in education, literacy, or dyslexia — to examine this breakthrough book. Do not urge them to read the book unless you have read the book carefully enough to know that what it proposes will solve our serious literacy problems. They will know whether you are convinced of the truth of what you are telling them.

These are the celebrities that supposedly are interested in education, literacy, and/or dyslexia: Alex Trebek, Andre Agassi, Angelina Jolie, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Ashley Judd, Bill Cosby, Brooke Shields, Carlos Santana, Charlize Theron, Cher, Christopher (Ludacris) Bridges, Deepak Chopra, Denzel Washington, Dolly Parton, Dr. Phil McGraw, Earvin (Magic) Johnson Jr., Elizabeth Taylor, Faith Hill, Garth Brooks, Gary Sinise, George Lucas, Geraldo Rivera, Goldie Hawn, Halle Berry, Itzhak Perlman, J.K. Rowling, Jamie Lee Curtis, Jay Leno, Jeff Bridges, Jeff Goldblum, Jessica Lange, Jimmy Buffet, John Travolta, Jon Bon Jovi, Jose Carreras, Julie Andrews, Justin Timberlake, Kate Winslet., Keanu Reeves, Kurt Russell, Lindsay Lohan, Lou Diamond Phillips, Maria Shriver, Matt Dillon, Michael J. Fox, Michael S. Dell, Mick Jagger, Mike Myers, Neil Diamond, Nolan Ryan, Oprah Winfrey, Phil Collins, Princess Beatrice, Rob Reiner, Rupert Murdoch, Samuel L. Jackson, Selena Williams, Sergey Brin, Sharon Stone, Sylvester Stallone, Tom Cruise, Tom Green, Tom Hanks, Troy Aikman, Valerie Harper, Warren Buffet, Wayne Gretzky, Whoopi Goldberg, William H. Gates, William J. Clinton, Wynton Marsalis, Yao Ming, and Yo-Yo Ma.

I remember learning in high school about how a nation’s wealth is directly linked to its literacy. Today, with more and more people in America unable to read, I have become a big advocate of aggressively teaching basic reading skills in school. It is important that children do not slip through the cracks, unable to read, because there are almost no jobs they can do without the ability to read. I think the spread of illiteracy should provoke people, those with the means, to try to develop solutions, so that everyone may have the chance to succeed later in life.

Despite, or possibly because of, our great leaps in technology, children are becoming less involved with the good old-fashioned 3 Rs, reading, writing, and arithmetic. Texting and writing online have become more about abbreviations. Spelling, punctuation, and grammar skills have almost become lost arts. The current propensity for spelling words with a simplified, more-phonetic combination of letters and numbers has developed into a very real lack of writing skills for much of today’s youthful generation. Writing in abbreviations has evolved into a language of its own. Much of today’s electronic communication is a “dumbed-down,” less-precise way of communicating, which cannot help but result in less-precise, less-profound, less-valuable ways of thinking. Parents, today, face an enormous challenge in bringing children back to the basics. And with technology bringing speech-recognition into so many electronic devices, even automobiles, meeting the challenges of surviving in an increasingly competitive, technological world requires careful attention.

A combination of more time-consuming pleasurable activities — radio; television; movies in theaters, on DVDs and on electronic devices; musical concerts or recordings; computer games; social networking; cell phones; internet browsing and searching; newly developed sports; profitable teenager jobs — which did not exist before the early twentieth century, as well as many negative distractions (newly developed drugs, gang activities, bullying, and broken homes and poverty due to easier divorce laws) along with the “dumbing-down” of electronic text messaging, has added to the decline in literacy. All of these reasons pale in comparison, however, to the difficulty of learning to read English caused by the illogical, inconsistent, and chaotic spelling system. This may be hard to understand by those who are familiar only with English spelling. Dr. Frank Laubach, who spent more than forty years teaching thousands of adults around the world to read in more than 300 alphabetic languages other than English, was able to teach his students to read fluently in from one to twenty days (!) in 95% of the languages in which he taught — because these languages were almost perfect phonetically: the words were spelled the way they sound. Dr. Laubach stated on page 48 of his book, Forty Years With the Silent Billion, “If we spelled English phonetically, American children could be taught to read in a week.”

Two non-profit educational corporations, Literacy Research Associates, Inc. and NuEnglish, Inc., have developed a perfect logical and simple spelling system called NuEnglish, such as Dr. Laubach recommended. As a result of the difficulty every one of us have had in learning to read, we erroneously look at learning any new spelling system as a huge undertaking. The truth is that present readers can learn the ten simple spelling rules for this spelling system in less than ten minutes, after which we will be able to read anything in NuEnglish with only a few two or three-second stumbles over some of the words. We will be able to progress from reading aloud only slightly slower than normal to reading silently at our present reading rate with only two or three months of familiarization.

Here is the most valuable, truly invaluable, aspect of this spelling system, however: The better beginning students (who have not learned to read English yet) will be able to learn to read in one week, and all but the most mentally challenged students will be able to read in less than three months — the same as Dr Laubach’s students did in ninety-eight percent of languages in which he taught. Most present students need at least two years to learn enough words to enable them to read well enough to keep increasing their reading skills after fourth grade in school, after which all but remedial reading instruction ends. And almost half of American students never become fluent readers. They may remember about a thousand simple words they learn in the first three or four grades, but they are functionally illiterate. They do not like to read and seldom do so. They cannot read and write well enough to hold an above-poverty-level-wage job.

An amazing new website describes our humanitarian project of permanently ending functional illiteracy in English. If you have any compassion whatsoever for an estimated 600 million English-speaking people around the world who are functionally illiterate in English (including more than 93 million adults in the U.S. alone), you are challenged to honestly examine this website. The home page can be read in six minutes. It has five brief statements about the problem and six brief statements about the solution. All eleven of these statements are conclusively proven in the “Read More” statements following each statement. If you are not in a mood to spend six minutes reading, you are challenged to click on “Media Page” near the top of the left-hand column and watch a video. Both the video and the home page give a good introduction to our humanitarian project. Some perceptive observers have labeled our present age as “The Age of Scepticism.” Some of the more sceptical readers will not be moved to action by the website. The website may not provide all the incentive to action needed. Even the most sceptical reader, however, will see the tremendous need for ending illiteracy and the details for doing so in the 265 page e-book second version of the award-winning book, Let’s End Our Literacy Crisis which is available free of cost or obligation of any kind in the left-hand column of the home page. A print version of the first revision of this breakthrough book is also available to help end our literacy crisis.

Although there are several reasons, if you ask almost any parent why they want their children to learn to read they are almost certain to tell you it is so they can get a good job. Did you know that in today’s world many high school graduates cannot even read all the words on their diplomas and that more than 48 percent of U.S. adults read so poorly that they cannot hold an above-poverty-level-wage job? This is proven by a study commissioned by the U.S. government.

The Adult Literacy in America report is from the most statistically accurate and comprehensive study of U.S. adult literacy ever conducted. The report was released in April, 2002, and a follow-up report by the same researchers was released in 2006 which confirmed the findings. More than 26,000 U.S. adults, statistically chosen by age, gender, ethnicity, and location (from urban, suburban, and rural locations from twelve different U.S. states and 1,100 prisoners from 80 prisions) to represent the entire U.S. population, were given lengthy interviews. An analysis of these two reports proved that 48.7 percent of U.S. adults could not read and write well enough to hold an above-poverty-level-wage job. The inability to read well enough to hold an above-poverty-level-wage job is the most statistically accurate and reproducible definition of functional illiteracy — all other methods of determining the extent of functional illiteracy can be influenced (either deliberately or accidently) by the size, time-period, and method-of-obtaining the data base used.

The Adult Literacy in America study also proved that 31.2 percent of these functional illiterates were in poverty and that they were more than twice as likely to be in poverty as a result of illiteracy as for all other reasons combined. An estimated 600 million of the more than 1.3 billion English-speaking people around the world — including more than 93 million in the U.S. alone — are functionally illiterate in English. If this does not constitute a literacy crisis, what does?

You may think that solving the problem is a job for the educational “experts,” but ending English functional illiteracy, like solving any problem, must begin with a widespread understanding of both the problem and the solution. The last 90 years or more of educational history constitute proof that the educational experts are not going to make the revolutionary changes needed to permanently solve the problem of English functional illiteracy. An honest examination of the website linked here will provide all the understanding you need to begin a grass-roots program of solving English functional illiteracy. Once you have that understanding — if you are truly compassionate — you will be eager to spend a few minutes to help solve the problem as carefully detailed in the breakthrough book, Let’s End Our Literacy Crisis, Second Revision, which explains the simple, proven method of permanently ending our provably serious literacy crisis. This prize-winning book is available at no cost or obligation of any kind as a 265-page e-book in .pdf format in the left-hand column our English functional illiteracy website linked above.

If you never listen to another thing that anyone tells you about illiteracy, please — at least this time — accept the challenge to take six minutes to read this website about English functional illiteracy and — if you are at all compassionate  about the serious problem of illiteracy — please read this award-winning book explaining how you can help end our provably real literacy crisis. You, your family and friends, and the entire English-speaking world will benefit if the proposal in this breakthrough book is adopted.

Please do not think you can merely scan through the website or book and reach the best conclusion about helping end our literacy crisis. With anything less than a careful, honest evaluation you will be potentially depriving an estimated 600 hundred million English-speaking people around the world of the help they so desperately need in learning to read. If you believe this is an exaggeration, it is only because you haven’t read all the vital facts presented. If you have read this far, here is some good news: the website you see upon clicking “English functional illiteracy” above offers the Second Revision of Let’s End Our Literacy Crisis as a 265 page e-book in .pdf format in the left-hand column at no cost or obligation of any kind.

The Proven Cause of Illiteracy

The amount of functional illiteracy in English is much worse than almost anyone realizes partly because the media has given very little attention to this very serious problem. Analysis of the most statistically accurate and comprehensive study of U.S. adult literacy ever conducted proves that 48.7 percent of U.S. adults are functionally illiterate, defined as being unable to hold an above-poverty-level-wage job. The lifetime work of Dr. Frank Laubach has led to development of the only proven way of permanently ending illiteracy in English.

Jonathan Kozol’s published his shocking new book, Illiterate Americain 1985. Kozol wrote about 34 different types of serious physical, mental, emotional, medical, and financial problems of the many illiterate people he knew and loved. He stated that if most of us had to endure the problems that illiterates must endure every day of their lives, we would consider it a crisis. I decided to use my research skills as a chemical engineer to see if there was a solution to the problem. I spent more than a year reading every book I could find on the subject of my research. I read dozens of books from the large Marriott research library at the University of Utah.

In these books, I discovered the primary cause of English illiteracy. The very first step in solving any problem is to find what is causing the problem. Otherwise, you can spend a lot of time and money fighting the symptoms of a problem without solving the foundational cause of the problem. A good analogy is fighting the symptoms of pneumonia with cough medicine, decongestants, and painkillers and not taking antibiotics to cure the disease. We have been fighting the symptoms of the difficulty in learning to read for over 90 years now.

Although there are obviously many reasons why any one student does not learn to read, there is only one problem affecting every student. Books by Dr. Frank Laubach made the primary cause of illiteracy very clear. Dr. Laubach spent almost his entire adult life teaching thousands of adult illiterates around the world how to read. He taught in more than 300 alphabetic languages other than English. He prepared reading primers in 313 languages and even invented spelling systems for 220 languages that were unwritten.

Dr Laubach’s books, Teaching the World to Read and Forty Years With the Silent Billion, document a truly amazing fact about the languages in which he taught. His books never mention being unable to teach any of his students to read fluently, but take careful note of this: He was able to teach adults to read fluently in from one to twenty days in 95 percent of the languages and in less than three months in 98 percent of the languages!

The problem in English written material, however, is not with the language itself. The English language is neither among the easiest nor among the most difficult. Axel Wijk states on pages 56-57 of Alphabets for English, edited by W. Haas, that English is a comparatively easy language to learn for foreigners, “… mainly due to its grammatical structure, which is far simpler that those of most other important languages, particularly so in comparison with French, German, Russian, or Spanish.” Sir James Pitman states on page 264 of his book Alphabets and Reading, “No other major language possesses such a simple grammar and syntax or combines the following advantages:… ” The first two of the eight advantages he lists are: there are no arbitrary genders and agreement between adjectives and nouns is unnecessary.

The grammar and syntax of English is easier than that of many European languages. In most European languages, students learn to read fluently in less than three months. Here is the reason: Dr. Laubach was able quickly to teach his students to read fluently because 98 percent of these languages had an almost-perfect phonemic spelling system. That is, they spelled words the way they sound. A perfect spelling system has only one grapheme for each phoneme. A grapheme is a letter or digraph (a two-letter grapheme) that represents a phoneme, syllable or word. A phoneme is the smallest sound used to distinguish between syllables or words in a language or dialect.

The Effect of Illogical, Inconsistent Spelling

Before examining the effect that a less-than-perfect spelling system has upon beginning readers, a close look at the outcome of using an illogical and inconsistent spelling system is definitely in order.

Analysis of a report released by the U.S. Department of Education in April 2002 titled Adult Literacy in America proves this is true. The follow-up report released in 2006 confirms it. The Adult Literacy in America report is from the most statistically accurate and comprehensive study of U.S. adult literacy ever conducted. It is a five-year, $14 million study involving lengthy interviews of 26,049 adults statistically chosen by age, gender, ethnicity, and place to represent the entire U.S. population. The study used interviewees from urban, suburban, and rural locations from twelve different U.S. states and included 1,100 prisoners from 80 prisons to represent the entire U.S. population.

Analysis of this report proves that 48.7 percent of U.S. adults are functionally illiterate, proves that 31.2 percent of these functional illiterates are in poverty, and proves that they were more than twice as likely to be in poverty because of their illiteracy as for all other reasons combined. With 31 percent of functional illiterates in poverty, that means that about 15 percent of all U.S. adults are in poverty, which is in close agreement with recent estimates of U.S. poverty.

You may be wondering why you have not heard such shocking statistics. There are several reasons, only a few of which are listed here. There were very few media reports on this study, and the reports that appeared, in effect, minimized the seriousness of the findings. Most people have underestimated the amount of illiteracy because illiterates are very good at hiding their illiteracy. You may not see much of the evidence of poverty because most families have more than one employed adult; because low-income families receive help from government agencies, family, friends, and charities; and because of the natural separation that occurs between people in different economic groups.

Why Learning to Read English is So Difficult

The reason it is so difficult to learn to read English is very simple: English is not a logically designed alphabetic language. English is more like Chinese writing that uses specific shapes in specific positions to represent a word. English uses a specific combination of letters in a specific order to represent a word.

Despite the difficulty our spelling causes for beginning readers, especially for immigrants, apologists for the present method of teaching reading will tell you that most English words are phonemic. That is true only if you allow more than one spelling of the phonemes. If the 38 English phonemes needed to learn to read can each have only ONE specific spelling, only about 20 percent of English words are phonemic. More than one spelling of the phonemes requires a huge amount of memorization when each phoneme is spelled in as many as 60 or more ways and the spelling of each phoneme varies from one word to the next.

As a result, the only way to learn to read English is to learn each new word in your reading vocabulary one-at-a-time by rote memory or by repeated use of the word. Almost every American can read at least a thousand simple words they learn by memory in the first three grades in school.  In order to be a fluent reader, however, one must be able to recognize 20,000 words or more by their spelling. Many fluent readers have reading vocabularies of more than 70,000 English words. Recognizing a correctly spelled word by its spelling and by its context is much easier than remembering the correct spelling when trying to write the word. Even many fluent readers are very poor spellers.

Professor Julius Nyikos of Washington and Jefferson College did an extensive study of six standard desk dictionaries. He found 1,768 ways of spelling 40 phonemes! We need only 40 ways of spelling 40 phonemes — one each. If he had used unabridged dictionaries he would have found even more. Other apologists for our present spelling will say that you can learn to read using spelling rules. The truth is that there is not even ONE spelling rule that does not have exceptions. Some of the exceptions even have exceptions! A computer programmed with 203 English spelling rules was able correctly to spell only 49 percent of a list of 17,000 common English words. Can we honestly expect the average human to do better?

In English, a syllable can be a vowel all by itself. Each syllable has only one vowel, but a consonant — or several consonants — can be before and/or after a vowel. All English words can be pronounced by learning only 38 phonemes and there are 26 letters in the alphabet, so 26 of the phonemes could be spelled with a single letter and twelve of the phonemes could be spelled with a digraph. Instead, in English there are at least 184 two-letter graphemes, at least 131 three-letter graphemes, at least 22 four-letter graphemes, and even four or more five-letter graphemes.

In fact, more than half of all English phonemes are spelled with graphemes of two or more letters. There are at least three vowel phonemes and one consonant phoneme spelled with five letters. The most familiar is in the word weighed, in which five letters represent the A phoneme. That sound is spelled with only the letter A in words such as fading. Most English words have two or more syllables, and with multiple letters used for a single phoneme each syllable in a word can have a very complex combination of vowels and consonants.

If each vowel and each consonant in these syllables always represented the same sound, there would be nothing in the logic of these syllables that would be beyond the abilities of most four- or five-year-olds, but they do not. The real confusion comes since one grapheme often represents many phonemes when reading, and many graphemes are used to spell most of the phonemes.

Although only 38 are needed, there are at least 367 different letters or letter combinations used as English graphemes with an average of at least nine pronunciations each. Some of the graphemes are used to spell seven or more different phonemes. Only four of the 26 letters — B, K, P, and V — have only one pronunciation. Adding to the confusion, however, all four of these letters are doubled in some words and not in others; all but six of the 26 letters are doubled in some words.

There is an average of at least 44 spellings of each of the 38 phonemes. The worst example is the U vowel phoneme as in the word nut that can be spelled in at least 60 different ways. If that is not nutty, please tell me what is. That is why spelling correctly is even more difficult than learning to read.

More than one pronunciation of graphemes or more than one spelling of phonemes requires a type of logic that most children do not develop until they are eleven or twelve years old. Before that age, students have difficulty thinking of the same letter or letters in more than one combination at the same time. So they just have to be helped to memorize (or learn by repetition) the spelling of new words.

Most of us are not familiar with spelling systems in other languages, so we do not realize the comparative difficulty of learning to read English. Most of us learned to read as a child and have long since forgotten (or proudly dismiss) the difficulty we had. Our eyes skip easily over a multitude of traps for beginning readers.

As most teachers will tell you, reading is the foundation of all learning. Reading ability is required for class work, homework, and testing for nearly every subject in school. Based upon more than 40 years of teaching students of phonemic languages to read fluently, Dr. Laubach stated on page 48 of his book Forty Years With the Silent Billion, “If we spelled English phonetically, American children could be taught to read in a week.” Although present educational and political authorities may have a financial interest in believing that this is overly optimistic, it would be a serious mistake to discount Dr. Laubach’s findings and his advice.

Other than remedial reading, most instruction in reading ends after fourth grade. With our present inconsistent and illogical spelling, most U.S. students need at least two years to learn to read well enough to be able to keep increasing their reading skills after fourth grade — and almost half of the students never become fluent readers. Statistics prove that almost half of U.S. adults never read an entire book after they leave school. If English spelling were as simple and logical as most other languages, the better students could learn to read in one week and all but the most mentally challenged students could learn to read in less than three months — for many students, much less than three months.

The Obvious Solution to Illiteracy in English

What is obviously needed is a simple spelling system for English that has only one grapheme for each phoneme. After many years of examining every proposed spelling system for English that could be found (1800s to present), there is only one known proposed spelling system that has that characteristic. This proposed spelling system, called NuEnglish, has eight other beneficial characteristics.

Each of the many proposed spelling systems has its own list of beneficial characteristics. None of them, however, has all the beneficial characteristics of NuEnglish. Based upon Dr. Laubach’s many years of experience, adoption of such a spelling system is the only proven way permanently to end English illiteracy.

More than 93 million adult Americans read so poorly that they do not like to read and seldom try to read. They read so poorly that they cannot hold an above-poverty-level-wage job. Although they can read about a thousand words, they are functionally illiterate. Along with an estimated 500 million English-speaking adults around the world who are also functionally illiterate in English, they desperately need help to avoid the problems, pain, and suffering their illiteracy causes.

In addition, functional illiteracy costs every adult American–readers and non-readers — an average of more than $5,000 each year for government programs used by illiterates, for truancy, juvenile delinquency, and crime directly related to illiteracy, and for the higher cost of consumer goods due to illiterates in the labor pool and in the workplace.

When people learn that spelling reform is being proposed, they may think of one or two objections to changing the spelling. Numerous respected scholars, however, have thoroughly debunked every reasonable objection to spelling reform. They have also described the many benefits of making the spelling of our words as easy to learn as those of other languages.

It does not take a genius to know that it is much easier to learn the spelling of 38 phonemes — and how to blend them into words — than to learn by rote memory, or by repeated use, every word in your reading vocabulary. By learning to read quickly, English-speaking students can finally compete with students of the same age in other languages by studying most subjects about two years earlier.

It is not well-known by the public, but American educators who are familiar with reading education in other nations and members of some of the think-tanks such as The American Enterprise Institute know that most American students are two years behind students of the same age using logical alphabetic languages. American students have ranked near the bottom in three or more recent scholastic competitions with more than twenty other industrialized nations.

Although educational authorities have made some improvements as a result of the 1983 education report titled “A Nation At Risk,” there have not been any overall statistically significant improvements in the teaching of reading for ninety years or more. Dozens of reports on educational problems have come out since 1983, but most of these reports have not received the media attention they desperately need.

There are roughly 600 million people around the world hoping someone can help them escape from English functional illiteracy. All that is needed to begin the process of ending illiteracy in English is to publicize the proven solution to illiteracy. Despite all the naysayers and all those who oppose change — even change for the better, to believe we cannot significantly improve the teaching of reading is to underestimate our human ability to solve our problem of illogical and inconsistent spelling instead of merely fighting the symptoms of the problem, as we have done for almost a century now.

Two non-profit educational corporations, Literacy Research Associates, Inc. and NuEnglish, Inc. have developed the perfectly phonemic NuEnglish spelling system. NuEnglish has only one grapheme for each phoneme and eight other beneficial characteristics, described on our website NuEnglish Characteristics. No other known proposed spelling system has all of these characteristics. NuEnglish is so simple that present readers can learn the ten simple NuEnglish spelling rules in about eight minutes. Our company website,  http://NuEnglish.org has a Respeller computer program which will quickly transpose about 25 pages of traditional spelling into NuEnglish with the click of a button.

At least 25 other nations — both smaller and larger than the U.S., both advanced and developing — have simplified their spelling. Let’s End Our Literacy Crisis, Second Revision, provides enough facts to convince even the most confirmed skeptic and is available as an e-book at no cost or obligation on our http://LearnToReadNow.org website. It is an award-winning 265-page e-book with 164 pages of text, 8 appendixes, 178 extensive notes and references, a glossary, an extensive bibliography, an index, and many tables and graphics.

I have been passionately fighting this problem for many years, and I KNOW — as an absolute fact — that what I am proposing will not only solve the problem but will also be surprisingly easy to carry out. I also know that anyone who honestly examines all the facts will agree. Our website provides the proof for everything stated in this blog. If each reader of this blog will tell at least three others about our http://LearnToReadNow.org website, enough people will soon know the seriousness and the ease of solving the problem, and the problem will be solved. Although what I have said may raise more questions than it answers, most of your questions will be answered by a careful reading of our website. My book, Let’s End Our Literacy Crisis, which is available free on our website, should answer all of your questions.

This very important blog concerning ending English functional illiteracy with a very much more efficient method of teaching fluent reading can be accessed with this link. It is not posted here because of Search Engine Optimization downgrade of duplicate posts.