Below are seven big ideas that you should take from this chapter.

1. Having a body of knowledge is important in any field.

2. Disagreement followed by academic discourse enables a field to evolve.

3. Silencing opposing views results in cognitive inbreeding.

4. Academic journals are essential for disseminating new knowledge and for academic discourse within a field.

5. The process used to get scholarly articles published in an academic journal is much higher than that used to get an article published in a newspaper or magazine.

6. Having a body of knowledge that is shallow and disjointed is not optimal for academic discussions or TV interviews.

7. John Stossel does not know what an academic journal is.

Let’s review. A couple of months ago, I recorded an online interview for a dyslexia summit. I also put together and recorded a short video presentation. These were both to be shown at a dyslexia summit. I was to then attend the online summit for a live question-and-answer session. On the day of the summit, I emailed to see what time I needed to be online. It was at this point that I was told that I had been disinvited. And my disinvitation had occurred without so much as a disinviting word. It was a gentle but wordless disinvitations.

Can you imagine such a thing?

The stated reason for my wordless disinvitation was that the writing tone used on some of my digital platforms “is fairly abrasive when speaking about those in other camps in the reading world”. In a previous excerpt, I examined how the abrasiveness of one’s writing tone is determined largely by the cognitive framework held by the reader. I also said that the wordless disinvitation I received was a form of silencing. And any abrasiveness in my writing tone pales in comparison with the continued abrasion endured by teachers and professors as well as the constant attacks on Lucy Calkins, Ken Goodman, and Marie Clay.

In this excerpt, we’ll examine reading camps.

It is very hard to have a serious and substantive discussion about a topic like reading instruction with somebody whose knowledge base is shallow and disjointed. You end up in a teaching role.