People who know how to read--that is, people who use small phonetic samplings to predict the author's meaning--have no trouble reading it because the context enables us to predict what the next word should be.
However, many people who presumably "can read" are unable to figure it out because they don't actually read. They identify individual words without context over and over until they finally remember enough of the words in a row to figure out what is being said. For those people, the example above is impossible to read. It's nothing more than a very long "jumble," the puzzle that got pulled for Arianna Carlin's column. An astonishing number of people have this kind of reading problem. They're the ones who can read a passage out loud quite well but have no idea what it said when they're done. In order to understand any written material, they have to read it repeatedly.
I've just spent the past semester training to teach those students how to read. The results are staggering, but the process uses a different model for reading: not teaching word identification but predictive strategies instead.
