For the first time, the story of how and why we have plumbed the mysteries of reading, and why it matters today. -Reading is perhaps the essential practice of modern civilization. For centuries, it has been seen as key to both personal fulfillment and social progress, and millions today depend on it to participate fully in our society. Yet, at its heart, reading is a surprisingly elusive practice. This book tells for the first time the story of how American scientists and others have sought to understand reading, and, by understanding it, to improve how people do it. Starting around 1900, researchers-convinced of the urgent need to comprehend a practice central to industrial democracy-began to devise instruments and experiments to investigate what happened to people when they read. They traced how a good reader-s eyes moved across a page of printed characters, and they asked how their mind apprehended meanings as they did so. In schools across the country, millions of Americans learned
