It may be helpful to consider the layout of the book and how it may be used. The first two chapters deal with the psychology we need to think about literacy in nitty-gritty, cognitive terms. They tell of the basic architecture of the brain and its basic operating procedures - fundamental processes with resounding names like spreading activation, association, top-down & bottom-up processing, cascading feature analysis. After the austerity of these two chapters, and based absolutely upon them, the book moves out into the world of practical literacy. Precisely because we have understood our cognitive psychology, we can begin to have some instructive fun as we consider our practice. We can root about among some of the most controversial ideas of the day and we can peer at possible futures. We will, finally, be in a position to take a properly informed and responsible look at dyslexia, the arguments around which involve so many different perspectives and demand such frank thinking.

Much of the book is taken up with chapter notes. This is intended to remove some of the drier, educationally relevant but, in this context, more peripheral, issues from the core text so that you may read on through the main narrative or plunge into greater detail or wider interest to suit time and taste.

I am confident about most of the material in my book, but some is more speculative. The first part of the book is about the basic cognitive psychology which matters to the literacy teacher. This is stuff around which there is consensus - it is mostly not controversial. It is entertaining, however, and can be very fruitful, to speculate about controversial topics and I go on to do some of this. These exploratory, and sometimes polemical and iconoclastic, adventures are intended to stimulate thought and promote curiosity.

For example, I repudiate the learning and applying of spelling rules; I take a few tentative steps into the upcoming and important debate around our conscious - the usefulness, or otherwise, of it or the unconscious to literacy; I seek to raise the profile of affect as a prime cause (as well as a prime complication) of literacy difficulties, especially apparently odd literacy difficulties; I denounce ‘spellism’ and urge us all to relax rather than reform; I discuss attribution theory, maladaptive attributions and learned helplessness, which I believe powerfully affect both students and teachers, perhaps especially of literacy. Finally, I look long and sceptically at developmental dyslexia, a diagnosis of which I believe functions, in the real world, as a maladaptive attribution inducing learned helplessness in teacher and taught alike, despite dyslexia being itself unreal. I hope you will enjoy these arguments, and take something from them, even if you do not always accept my conclusions. If I had to say in a single sentence what I felt this book was intended to do I would say that it is to stimulate thought, to bolster scepticism and to offer different viewpoints. I hope you will be able to develop some of the ideas in this book further than I have. These are exciting times and there is much to play for. I hope I have indicated where, and how, some of the games will be played and I hope this book awakens some interest in playing them yourself.

The reader will soon note that I usually refer to students, where I do, in the masculine. Most people I have taught have been. There is no gender-free substitute and I find ‘he or she’ tedious. I shall duck the issue altogether by claiming a convention. The reader will also note that I seem to have a particular someone in mind as I write. This virtual reader is ghostly and insubstantial, even to me, but she does at least have a gender. She is addressed, wherever she is addressed, in the feminine. This is not intended to infuriate anyone (of either gender) and will not, I hope, do so. I like to think there is nothing sinister behind this decision of my unconscious – perhaps it is because most teachers of literacy are, it seems to me delightfully, female. I continue, incidentally, to have a great deal of support and encouragement from many such people, a fact I should like loudly to record somewhere. This seems as good a place as any. I am very grateful indeed for it and to them.