When she was growing up a lot of teachers thought she was what used to term ‘backward’ in the UK. A ’slow’ learner. Actually, she’s very intelligent and has degrees in nursing, psychology and computing to prove it.

But her reading is still slow compared to ‘average’ and back then, some 30 odd years ago, it was almost non-existent.

In the end she virtually learned to read overnight. She had a motivation that was incredibly strong: she fell in love with Starsky and Hutch. I’m not kidding. And since there was a Starsky and Hutch magazine with information about her favourite characters on tv she started reading almost overnight. She was about 12, I think.

We didn’t know anything about dyslexia back then, even if the experts did. So we just thought it was the way it was.

I’ve been reading up a little on a website that aims to help treat dyslexia. What I’ve read astonishes me. Seems that one of the keys to overcoming dyslexia – or perhaps even avoiding it in the first place – is to teach children all the vowel sounds in the English language. I know when I was a child I was taught the five, a,e,i,o,u. But when you speak English there are many more actual vowels than that. You can hear them, but we don’t teach them to children. That has got to confuse them. Why is a sometimes eh? and sometimes a (short ah), for example?

Doesn’t really make sense, does it?

Dyslexiadecoded have an online course you can access for free to help train anyone who has dyslexia.

You can get Free Help for Dyslexia by clicking the link.

Here’s their press release

Dyslexia? Now there is Free Help

Now there is free online help for people who have dyslexia or simply did not learn to read well while going to school. It is a click-‘n-learn program. Students and adults may learn decoding, basic reading skills, and advanced reading skills all with the click of a mouse.

The program is called ReadingBySix. It provides a systematic approach to helping people defeat dyslexia and related reading problems. You will notice measurable progress from week to week provided participants are active in their studies and do their assignments. The online courses are virtually free when you give a small donation. If you choose not to donate, they are completely free.

Dyslexia is a distinct learning disability characterized by difficulties in decoding individual words. These difficulties may not show up in other cognitive and academic abilities. Dyslexia results from the confusion caused by the brain’s inability to associate abstract symbols with abstract ideas. This includes associating letters and words with the sounds they represent. The key to defeating dyslexia is learning to decode English sounds.

You are invited to review the website and take a few of the courses for practice and learn how the program works. Then use it to teach your children or students to read. It can be used for preschool, home school, grade school, or high school. Students, adults, and children can use it. It teaches reading 100% of the time and it’s all electronic. If you know of people who need help, please tell them about ReadingBySix: http://www.dyslexiadecoded.com/

Source: Dyslexia Decoded

As I said at the beginning, I wish my sister had access to something like this when she was young. I know she suffered at school because of it. Teachers weren’t always as sensitive back then as they are now.

I read from a very early age so I’ve never understood what it’s like not to be able to. I can’t imagine what it’s like to have a sea of letters swimming in front of your eyes, making no sense, and a teacher treating you as if you’re a simpleton because of it.

I just know that my sister has had to work unbelievably hard to overcome her initial reading problems. What I don’t know, because we don’t really discuss it, is what personal cost to her occurred just because she had dyslexia.

But getting the right word is also important to people selling on the web. I read an article by a web expert and he gave some statistics about the difference a single word made to his client’s campaigns. Now, what made this so interesting to me was that the expert was entirely truthful and said he didn’t really know why a single word change could make a big difference to his client’s sales. I’ve got permission to reprint the article here and I’ve posted it as it appeared originally on his website.

While the article is written from the perspective of a marketer, I think we can learn quite a bit from it too. We’re all probably used to getting hold of a thesaurus and finding a different word to replace one that sounds a little tired. But how many of us actually test the end result? What our readers think a word means may be very different from the dictionary definition. After all, I once had a friend who always used the word ‘altruistic’ in sales meetings and people thought he was being facetious. He used it because he thought it meant mercenary! You can imagine that people were a little taken aback! Funny thing is when I confronted him about it he wouldn’t correct his error. It cost him sales. I wonder how many readers the wrong word is costing us?

Here’s the article. For anyone thinking, or hoping, to sell their writing, there may be an idea or two in here for us.

How One Word Or Even One Letter Can Boost Conversion Rates By Over 400%!
By Eric Graham

Recently I was reviewing the keyword specific conversion rate data of a consulting client of mine. I have been working with this client for a few months now, helping her improve the sales conversion rate of her website and we have had very good results, taking average conversion rates at her site from below 1% to just over 4.3%.

(Your sales conversion rate is simply the number of unique visitors your site receives vs. the number of sales you make. If you have 3 sales for every 100 visits your conversion rate is 3%.)

Now, one of the keys to improving conversion rates is to continually test and measure every detail of your website, marketing and traffic. While reviewing the data from one of her Google Adwords campaigns I stumbled across a few hard to explain results that perfectly illustrate the very large effect small differences can have on conversion rates.

The keyword “piano lessons” had a conversion rate over the last 30 days of 5.09%. The keyword “piano lesson” had a conversion rate of only 1.64%. Both of these keywords had the exact same Adwords title and description, the same average position in the search results and the exact same landing page on my clients website. The only variable is one letter in the keyword… an “s”. Lesson vs. Lessons. That’s it! Yet the plural version of the keyword (piano lessons) out sold the singular version (piano lesson) by over 300%!

Another key phrase that had an even larger variation was “how to play the piano” vs. “how to play a piano”. Common sense would say that these two phrases would convert almost identically… Wrong.

Again, with identical titles, descriptions and landing pages, “How to play the piano” converted at 5.92%, while “How to play a piano” only converted at 1.42%. That is a whopping 417% difference between “a” and “the”!

Short-term variations and fluctuations in the conversion rates of individual keywords or landing pages are common. However, the data on both of these keyword pairs was measured over a full 30 days and several thousand clicks for each keyword. I don’t have any easy answers why adding an “s” to a key phrase or changing an “a” to “the” caused such a difference in conversion rates.

Sure, you can guess at it and draw a few conclusions such as “plural keywords convert better than singular keywords” or “using ‘the’ in a key phrase is more specific and targeted than using ‘a’”. However, these conclusions are just guesses. The only real conclusion you can draw from this case study is that you have to test EVERYTHING!

If one word or one letter can have that big of an impact in an Adwords campaign, then a similar change in your main headline or guarantee can have an equally significant impact.

The lesson here is to test, test, test. What should you test?

• Test headlines.
• Test guarantees.
• Test bonuses.
• Test colors.
• Test sub-headlines.
• Test your copy.
• Test different prices.
• Test layouts.
• Test autoresponder messages.
• Test your USP (Unique Selling Proposition.)
• Test ads.
• Test keywords.
• Test policies.
• Test images and graphic design.
• Test deadlines.
• Test navigation.
• Test your checkout process.
• Test font sizes.
• Test payment options.
• Test EVERYTHING!

Now, when you are testing a change, only test one item at a time. This part is critical. Testing only one change will help keep your results as accurate as possible. If you change 4 items at once and see a 1% boost in conversion rate, it is possible 3 items are helping and 1 is hurting, so your conversion rate boost would have been greater with just the 3 changes.

The bottom line is this…
If you really want to take your website’s sales conversion rate to the next level, you must absolutely commit to a focused and long-term campaign of testing and optimizing every aspect of your site. You never know when a small change is going to give you huge results!

About the Author
Want to improve your conversion rates? Eric Graham is the CEO of several successful online companies. A top authority on eCommerce & Internet Marketing, he’s an in-demand speaker & consultant. Visit www.web-site-evaluations.com today for an in-depth evaluation to boost YOUR websites conversion rate!