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Janitors have been fired because they cannot read an after-hours note with special clean-up instructions. Families have been evicted from their apartment when the apartment owner falsely claimed that the rental contract allows eviction if a crying baby disturbs other tenants; the evicted tenants do not object fearing their illiteracy will be exposed. The taking of medicines poses a danger to those who cannot read the instructions on the medicine bottles. Children who have medical emergencies face life-and-death situations if their illiterate parents have become lost because they cannot read the street signs.

These and hundreds of similar "horror stories" occur all around us every day — most of them without our knowledge because functional illiterates are extremely good at hiding their illiteracy. Illiterates cannot get by in our complex society as well as they should and must constantly endure at least thirty-four different kinds of serious physical, financial, and emotional problems. Many simple tasks we take for granted are impossible for illiterates.

The shocking 1993 report with the title Adult Literacy in America (see http:// nces.ed.gov/pubs93/93275.pdf.) was the most extensive study of illiteracy ever commissioned by the U.S. government. It was a five-year, $14 million study involving lengthy interviews of 26,049 U.S. adults statistically chosen to represent the entire U.S. population. It grouped interviewees into five groups according to their ability to read. The report shows that the? average yearly earnings were: Level 1 (the least literate), $2105; Level 2, $5225; Level 3, $9090, and Levels 4 and 5 combined, $16,311. The threshold poverty level for an individual in 1993 was $7363 per year. Shockingly, 22 percent of U.S. adults were Level 1 and 26.7 percent were Level 2. This indicates that 48.7 percent of U.S. adults had average annual earnings SIGNIFICANTLY below the poverty level, mostly because of their functional illiteracy.

The report of a study done by the same group who did the 1993 study was issued in 2006 showing no significant im-provement over the 1993 results.

We do not see 48.7 percent of U.S. adults in poverty because most households have more than one employed adult and because low-income households receive financial assistance from the government (from our taxes) or from family, friends, and charities.

Benefits of Ending Illiteracy

• You will benefit emotionally if you are concerned that people you know are — or will be — functionally illiterate.
• You will benefit if you object to an average personal cost of $5186 each year as a result of illiteracy for (1) taxes for government programs that illiterates use and for the truancy, juvenile delinquency, and crime directly related to illiteracy and (2) higher prices for consumer goods due to illiterates in the workplace.
• You will benefit if you are employed or if you have financial interests in a business or organization in which you invest time or money. Illiteracy affects all organizations to some extent, some of them seriously.
• You will benefit if our nation improves the trade balance, national relationships, and our national employment by improving communication between nations.

The Solution to Illiteracy

Linguists tell us that Dr. Johnson made a very serious linguistic error in preparing his dictionary in 1755. Instead of freezing the spelling of the sounds of the English language, he froze the spelling of words. Present-day English is thus based upon the spelling of words from the languages of eight nations who occupied the British Isles before 1755.

Professor Julius Nyikos found that there are at least 1768 ways of spelling forty sounds in English! There is not even one invariable spelling rule in English — some of the exceptions have exceptions! As a result, every word in a person's vocabulary must be learned, one at a time, either by rote memory or by repeated use.

Unlike any previous proposed spelling system, NuEnglish is scientifically designed to use the spelling of every sound (1) as it is most often spelled in English, as are 82% of the NuEnglish spellings of the sounds, (2) as people expect a certain sound to be spelled, as in all of the other spellings, and (3) uses a perfect one-to-one ratio of letters-to-sounds.

Students only need to learn the spelling of 38 sounds instead of all 20,000 or more words in their reading vocabulary. It is so simple that present readers of English can learn NuEnglish spelling in about five minutes.

Adoption of NuEnglish will enable about 600 million of people around the world who speak English but cannot read it very well — over 93 million in the U.S. alone — to be able to learn to read English in less than three months. Without adoption of NuEnglish, based upon present statistics, less than two percent of U.S. adult illiterates will ever become fluent readers.