David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants

“If you have no concept of the sounds
of language—if you take away a letter, if
you take away a sound, and you don’t
know what to do, then it’s really hard to
map the sounds to the written
counterparts,” Nadine Gaab, a dyslexia
researcher at Harvard, explained. “It
may take you a while to learn to read.
You read really slowly, which then
impairs your reading fluency, which then
impairs your reading comprehension,
because you’re so slow that by the time
you’re at the end of the sentence, you’ve
forgotten what the beginning of the
sentence was. So it leads to all these
problems in middle school or high
school. Then it starts affecting all other