Think about how your eyes travel across a page to reach the end of each line. When they get to the end of that line, they stop – often midsentence – and reverse themselves. Your brain momentarily suspends comprehension while your eyes make their way back to the beginning of the next line, to resume trying to comprehend the sentence as it leaps backward and down across the page.

Reading paragraphs this way takes time, reduces fluency, and injures comprehension. But there is a simple way to change this….

Instead of reading and writing each line of text from left to right, readers and writers alternate the direction of the text on the page with each line. So one line is read from left to right – the ‘traditional’ way – and the next is read from right to left. See the paragraph below:

Doesn’t it make more sense
?siht ekil shpargarap etirw ot
One sentence from left to right;
.tfel ot thgir morf txen eht
Then your eyes don’t waste much time
!enil hcae fo gninnigeb eht ot kcab gnilevart

This would take a little getting used to…but…most of us can throw a ball from our right hand and catch it with our left, as well as throw one with our left and catch it with our right, correct? Even if we can’t…we could with some practice, maybe….

Training our brains to read and write this way would just be a matter of practice and time, and would greatly improve both experiences.

What are your thoughts?