To read or not to read!
            
                
Syed Neaz Ahmad looks how our reading habits have changed over the years.

As a child I was overawed and greatly amused by a book in our library at home, The Big Book of Great Short Stories. It was a prized possession for those of us who grew up thinking that one day perhaps we will make into the book. The book by someone who ‘forgot’ to return – the way, I believe, most books are lost. However, I still remember a sentence from its Introduction: “The volume contains stories from authors whose name alone spell charm.” I was spellbound not only by the names, the themes and the plots but also by the spelling of many difficult words.

At school I admired teachers who seemed to remember the entire Oxford dictionary and devoted their time to reading and writing. I had often thought how could they remember the spellings of all those words?

Teaching language is tough and teaching creative writing isn’t easy. Yet most of us keep devising and striking up our own personal methods and examples to achieve our goals. Students not happy to lose a mark or two for silly spelling mistakes are often told by a colleague of mine about a student who went to a foreign country for higher studies.

One day the student was surprised to see his worried father on his doorstep. The father complained that the family had not heard from him for months and wanted to know the reason. On reflection the student found out – being careless about spellings as he was – he had been ‘posting’ his letters in the litter box.

This is not particular to a society, profession or region – people all over the world suffer from spelling disorders known as dyslexia. At 14, Alexander Faludy became the youngest person to win a place at Cambridge since Pitt the Younger. With an IQ of 178, he can deliver verbal dissertations of enormous range and complexity, but can write only two words a minute. Otherwise a lucky lad, he was sent to a correction school.

A girl of five - closely assisted by her teachers and parents - worked for the best part of a year, two sessions a day, trying to memorize the alphabet. Not one letter would stick. Unable to learn through her eyes but possessed of curiously sensible fingers, she cracked it eventually by feeling for wooden letters in a velvet bag, making their shapes then saying them aloud.

However, if you do confuse spellings and drop your letters in the litter box you are in good company! Albert Einstein, the German-born genius was sacked from two teaching jobs for terrible spellings, and once said: “If I can’t picture it. I can’t understand it.” The Renaissance polymath, Leonardo da Vinci, who painted the Mona Lisa and designed machinery had erratic spellings, and scribbled notes backwards from the right to the left. Thomas Edison, the inventor behind the light bulb and phonograph was rather dim in spellings and grammar. He also had learning problems. “I almost decided I must be a dunce,” he said once.

Dyslexia was first branded as “word-blindness”. Some even thought it was downright laziness on the part of the learner. Punished at school, Lord Rogers, the architect says his teachers thought he was just lazy. But as every dyslexic is not a genius, not all those who are lazy spellers are dyslexics.

I remember a smart proofreader who – in his innocent zeal to ‘improve’ the text - had 'corrected' and changed the character of a scientific article. Painstakingly he had changed all reference to ‘nuclear technolgy’ to 'unclear technology'. Needless to say the article went down very well – in the litterbin.

My favorite personal example in addition to ‘letter-litter’ and ‘nuclear-unclear’ is the word Jeddah written in Arabic. You need three letters to write Jeddah - jeem, daal and ha. If you forget to dot the jeem it is read as ha, if you put the dot over jeem it becomes kha, if you dot the daal it becomes za. So Jeddah with the omission, misplacement or replacement of one dot can be read as Haddah, Khaddah or Hazzah. The choice is yours.

They say the proof of pudding is in eating. Extending the analogy one could say the proof of reading is in writing. If finding ‘mistakes’ is easy writing out texts must be ‘easier’!