“Rereading sentences multiple times doesn’t mean you don’t know how to read — it’s what makes you able to read beyond a fourth-grade level. You keep rereading with different cadences until the sentence ‘clicks’”
That simple truth, stated plainly, can be life-changing. It’s a skill that confident readers use every day, and it exposes a misunderstanding that has damaged the intellectual confidence of millions of Americans. Not to mention our system of self-rule that relies upon that confidence and competence. In a political moment where whole communities feel lost, humiliated, or overwhelmed by complexity, this insight isn’t just about reading. It’s about reclaiming a sense of self-reliance.
Many of us who live comfortably in the realm of complex reading forget that we were taught—explicitly or implicitly—that rereading is normal. We know the rhythm of trying different cadences, pausing, backtracking, and re-parsing a sentence until it clicks. We know that real reading is a dance between text and mind, not a race.
Fluent reading is not one-pass reading
Many adults mistakenly think “good reading” means:
- reading straight through
- at a steady speed
- without stopping
- without rereading
In reality, skilled readers reread constantly — often automatically.
Research from cognitive psychology and literacy science shows:
- The average skilled adult reader’s eyes regress (go backward) 10–15% of the time.
- Complex syntax raises regressions to 25%+.
Prosody (cadence, rhythm, stress) is central to comprehension
Prosody is the “music” of reading:
- where you pause
- what words you emphasize
- how you chunk a sentence
- how you modulate your internal voice
When the cadence is wrong, meaning collapses.
Example:
“While the man hunted the deer ran into the woods.”
(This is grammatically valid, but ambiguous without prosody.)
Just reassigning pauses unlocks meaning.
Rereading forces the brain to search for the correct syntactic structure.
“Trying different cadences” is actually the brain testing hypotheses
Reading complex text is a process of syntactic parsing: your brain forms a hypothesis about the structure of the sentence, checks it, and revises it if needed.
Rereading with different cadence =
your brain running alternative parsing models until one “fits.”
This is not a remedial strategy.
It is the strategy of fluent readers. And, not coincidentally, it is the exercise of the foundational skills of critical thinking.
But a huge portion of our fellow citizens were never given permission to read this way. They were taught that “good readers” get everything instantly, and if they don’t, they’ve been left to silently internalize that the problem must be them.
That misunderstanding is not harmless. Not for them. And not for us.
It creates humiliation where curiosity should be.
It produces frustration where perseverance should grow.
And it leaves people ripe for manipulation by those who promise simple answers, simple enemies, and a world where deep reading is never required.
Today we see our “MAGA” brethren accuse Obama, Harris, Democrats, “elites,” and “experts” of communicating in “word salad”, while they accept actual word salad responses from Donald Trump.
When someone labels a sentence “word salad,” here’s what’s happening
The person is:
- reading with a fixed cadence
- not adjusting for clause structure
- not chunking dynamically
- not allowing regressions or rereads
- treating reading as a linear activity instead of a recursive one
- lacking metacognitive awareness (they don’t know what to do when meaning breaks)
The sentence feels scrambled because the reader’s prosody is scrambled, not the sentence.
For us, “word salads” are a rare occurrence – most often a dropped word where the word can often be guessed and the meaning of the mis-transcribed sentence still gleaned. But for them, sentences that didn’t click – “word salads,” are everywhere. Reading is not an exercise in gleaning value – it’s an exercise in giving up, and feeling inadequate.
Good readers use “repair strategies” automatically
Scholars call these comprehension repair strategies, including:
- slowing down
- rereading
- trying different emphasis patterns
- mentally inserting punctuation
- breaking the sentence into clauses
- predicting meaning, then testing against the next clause
Readers who never learned these assume:
“If I don’t get it immediately, it’s nonsense.”
This is a literacy failure, not a comprehension failure.
But without the practice of parsing complex sentences in text, their ability to follow oral complex sentences also suffers. And that’s where this comes from:
"Obama talks like he’s all smart, but he's really just a liar. I know this because Donald Trump told me so, and he makes a lot of sense."
Truly fluent readers—people who read policy, literature, science, history, and journalism—use a set of skills we were never taught to name. Two of the most important are prosody and syntactic parsing.
Prosody is the rhythm, cadence, and “inner voice” that gives meaning to a sentence. It’s how you know which words group together, which clauses modify which ideas, and how the tone changes the meaning.
Prosody is essential to reading. But almost nobody knows the word.
Here’s the paradox:
- Prosody is one of the three pillars of fluency
(accuracy, prosody, comprehension — according to the National Reading Panel)
- It is one of the strongest predictors of good comprehension
(often better than reading speed!)
- It is a concept every skilled reader uses constantly
even if unconsciously
- And yet the average adult has never heard the term.
Why most people have never heard the word “prosody”
Schools emphasize decoding and speed instead of expressive reading
For decades, reading instruction focused on:
- phonics
- vocabulary
- “read X words per minute”
Prosody barely appeared in curricula because you can’t easily test it on standardized exams.
If it can’t be bubbled in on a scantron, it gets neglected.
Prosody is more familiar to musicians and linguists than to readers
Most people learn the term through:
- poetry studies
- linguistics
- music theory
- speech pathology
But never in normal reading classes — even though it matters just as much here.
Many adults believe reading is a silent, linear activity
Prosody challenges that belief.
Prosody says:
You are actually hearing the sentence in your mind.
Most people don’t realize this.
Because the process is subconscious, they’ve never had a label for it.
Teachers often use simpler words
Teachers talk about:
- “reading with expression”
- “good phrasing”
- “chunking the sentence”
- “don’t read in a monotone”
…without using the technical term.
So the concept is taught — but the vocabulary for it isn’t.
Without prosody, comprehension collapses
Imagine reading this sentence:
“The old man the boats.”
Without prosody, it appears nonsensical.
With the correct cadence and phrasing:
“The old [people] man the boats.”
(“Man” is a verb.)
Suddenly it makes sense.
Prosody unlocks the structure.
This happens constantly in real reading — but because people don’t know the mechanism, they assume the problem is the sentence, not their parsing.
The irony
Millions of people struggle with reading fluency because nobody ever taught them:
- that text has a rhythm
- that rhythm is learned
- that you can practice and improve it
- that rereading with different cadence is normal
- and that the skill they lack has a name: prosody
Naming a thing makes it visible.
Seeing it makes it learnable.
Syntactic parsing is the mental act of breaking a sentence into parts, testing different structures, and finding the correct one—often requiring rereading.
Strategies include
Rereading aloud (or subvocalizing)
Changes the cadence and recruits auditory cortex.
Marking phrase boundaries
Skilled readers chunk text into meaningful units.
Pausing at syntactic breakpoints
Matching rhythm with grammatical structure boosts comprehension significantly.
Reading at a variable speed, not constant speed
Good readers slow down for complex clauses, speed up for familiar patterns.
Using “syntactic awareness”
Noticing markers like:
- subordinate clauses
- appositives
- relative pronouns
- parenthetical structures
Rereading with a different interpretation hypothesis -
Expert readers do this automatically, but not effortlessly. They reread, re-parse, and adjust prosody until the meaning clicks. That process is not a sign of weakness; it is the sign of a self-sufficient thinker.
But millions of Americans, they were never told or never learned that this is what real reading looks like. They grew up believing that reading should be linear, monotone, and instantaneous—and that if they couldn’t understand something on the first pass, the failure was theirs.
That lie has consequences far beyond the classroom.
When people don’t know that rereading is normal, they begin to think complex texts are hostile. When they aren’t taught prosody and parsing, they experience long sentences as “word salad.” When they have never been told that confusion is a normal stage of comprehension, they internalize confusion as personal inadequacy.
And personal inadequacy—especially when unacknowledged—creates resentment, mistrust, and emotional vulnerability.
This is one of the quiet, overlooked forces beneath the MAGA movement. The issue isn’t that “MAGA voters are stupid”—that’s prejudicial and counterproductive. The issue is that many were deprived of the tools of fluency, and left to believe the confusion meant incompetence.
That combination—low reading confidence and high shame—makes people uniquely vulnerable to:
- simplistic slogans
- scapegoating
- conspiratorial explanations
- anti-intellectualism
- leaders who promise easy answers instead of complex truths
When someone feels they cannot parse the world, they seek refuge in certainty, not because they are irrational, but because they feel unequipped.
That is why sharing the truth about rereading, prosody, and syntactic parsing is not just a kindness. It’s a form of civic repair.
When a person realizes that rereading is what competent adults do…
When they learn that prosody is the tool that makes sentences intelligible…
When they discover that parsing is a skill, not a gift…
The shame dissolves.
The suspicion dissolves.
And the door to independent thought, and actual competence begins to open.
A citizen who feels capable of understanding complexity is a citizen who cannot be easily manipulated.
A citizen who knows how to slow down, re-parse, and reread is a citizen who can engage with policy, news, science, and history without feeling overwhelmed.
A citizen who understands prosody—who knows how to hear meaning in the mind—is a citizen who can decode rhetoric, resist emotional manipulation, and judge ideas on merit rather than fear.
Rebuilding democratic stability requires strong institutions, but it also requires strong readers—citizens who know that comprehension is not instant, that struggle is normal, and that meaning is something grown through effort, not delivered through slogans.
So when you share this insight with others—especially those caught in movements powered by resentment and confusion—you are not lecturing them.
You are giving them back a tool that should always have been theirs.
Rereading is not a flaw.
Prosody is not optional.
Parsing is not a luxury.
These are the foundations of comprehension, competence, and self-reliance.
And if we want to heal the country, we need to help more people reclaim those foundations. If we want us all to be truly “in the same boat,” we need to share with them the “secret” key to competence that has set them apart and left on the outside.
