A ten-slide series on what it costs when reading goes wrong, in seven parts of ordinary life: commerce, health, everyday life, government, politics, social issues, and social media. This page has every source behind the cards, what each one found, and what each one cannot tell you.
The full text of every card, in order, with the card itself under each one. Select a card to open it full size.
Grouped by card. Each source has a summary of what it found, a scope line saying how far the finding reaches, and a link to the original.
543 undergraduates were asked to join a social network called NameDrop, which did not exist. 74% skipped the privacy policy by choosing a quick-join option. At a normal reading speed the privacy policy should have taken 29 to 32 minutes and the terms of service 15 to 17; the people who opened them spent an average of 73 seconds on the first and 51 on the second. 98% missed two clauses planted in the terms: one about sharing data with the NSA and employers, and one about providing a first-born child as payment.
The FTC alleged that Amazon enrolled people in Prime without clear consent and made cancelling difficult. The settlement set a $1 billion civil penalty and a $1.5 billion fund for refunds, covering an estimated 35 million consumers. The court order requires a clear button to decline Prime and gives, as an example of wording that is no longer allowed, “no thanks, I don’t want free shipping.”
2,110 parents of children eight or younger were enrolled at three pediatric clinics and randomly given different labels and dosing tools. Each measured nine doses. Of the 2,099 parents assessed, 84.4% made at least one dosing error, meaning more than 20% off, and 21.0% made at least one large error, meaning more than double the dose. Dosing cups produced far more errors than oral syringes (adjusted odds ratio 4.6).
395 English-speaking adults at three primary care clinics were asked to read and explain prescription labels. Among patients reading at or below a sixth-grade level, 70.7% correctly stated the instruction to take two tablets by mouth twice daily, but 34.7% could show how many pills that meant in a day.
Across the 31 countries and economies in the 2023 Survey of Adult Skills, adults with low skills earned $20.50 an hour on average, against $25.50 for adults with medium skills, in purchasing-power dollars. Around 30% of adults with low skills were outside the labor market, against around 19% of those with medium skills. Low means at or below Level 1 in literacy or numeracy; medium means Level 2 or 3 in both.
The U.S. figures from the same survey. In 2023, 28% of U.S. adults scored at Level 1 or below in literacy, up from 19% in 2017, and 44% scored at Level 3 or above. The next parts of this series explain what those levels mean.
The researchers collected 560 Miranda warnings from across the United States and scored how hard each one was to read. The warnings ranged from very simple, a 2.8 grade level, to requiring a postgraduate education.
The IRS mailed experimental versions of a reminder to 35,050 California filers who had not claimed the Earned Income Tax Credit they qualified for in tax year 2009. With a complex notice and worksheet, 14% responded by returning the worksheet. With a simplified version, 23% did. When the notice also showed the size of the benefit, 31% did.
The law’s stated purpose is to improve the effectiveness and accountability of federal agencies by promoting clear government communication that the public can understand and use.
Ballotpedia scores the wording of every statewide ballot question. In 2024, 159 measures in 41 states averaged a grade level of 16, about a bachelor’s degree. In 2025, 30 measures in nine states averaged 21, the highest since tracking began in 2017.
3,446 high school students, a sample matched to the national profile, completed six tasks. 52% believed a video that claimed to show ballot stuffing was strong evidence of U.S. voter fraud; the video was shot in Russia. Two-thirds could not tell news stories from ads marked as sponsored content on a news site’s home page.
Viral posts claimed that high-priced cabinet listings on a retailer’s site were evidence of child trafficking. Polaris said the hotline had received hundreds of reports over several days, that none contained information beyond what was already circulating online, and that the extreme volume had made it more difficult to provide support and attention to others who needed help.
In October 1995 a U.K. regulator warned that a newer generation of birth control pills doubled the risk of blood clots. In absolute terms, the authors write, about 1 in 7,000 women on the earlier pills had a clot, and that rose to 2 in 7,000. They attribute an estimated 13,000 additional abortions in England and Wales in the following year to the scare.
An analysis of more than 35 million public Facebook posts with links, shared between 2017 and 2020, found that shares without clicks made up around 75% of forwarded links. Extreme political content, and content that matched the sharer’s own politics, received more shares without clicks. The student study on this card is listed under Politics.
I work in marketing. Part of the job is knowing how people actually read: fast, on a phone, between other things. So when I set out to write about social engineering, the ways people get steered without noticing, I kept running into the same thing first. Before anyone manipulates you there is a document, a label, a ballot, or a feed, and a gap between what it says and what you take from it.
I went looking for what that gap costs, and I expected to find a story about people who cannot read. That is not what the sources show. The students who signed away a first-born child were in college. The parents measuring medicine were doing their best with a cup that makes errors likely. The ballot questions were written at a level most college graduates would find hard.
Literacy matters because every part of adult life runs on documents, and some of those documents are written to be hard. When the IRS rewrote one letter, more people got money they were owed. Writers can close part of the gap. Most of them will not.
So the rest is on us. Predatory people, institutions, and businesses rely on the odds that you will not grasp the full scope of what they are saying. Getting better at reading is how you stop being the easy mark, and making sure your kids understand what they read is part of the same job.
The rest of this series is about what moves into that gap, and how to see it coming.