I might have said this before: I’m a slow reader.  It can take me weeks to read a weighty novel.  Dense text, small font size and narrow spacing puts me right off.

I like a page that’s easy on the eye.

With plenty of white space around the words.

Something that I can read

in

bite-size

chunks,

if I need (or want) to.

“Like poetry”  I hear you say?

So I understand, to some extent, how pupils with specific reading difficulties feel when faced with page after page of the stuff.  You can see the panic in their eyes each time they turn the page.

I love my work as a teacher and tutor of struggling readers. I love guiding them through the morass: facilitating background knowledge, making it relevant; ‘picturing’ powerful passages as screen shots (with sound effects.  Why not?); finding the poetry in the prose (goes without saying) and all that grows a lifelong love…