In her comment piece (TES, March 2), Maggie Snowling acknowledges in passing that poor reading is a symptom of dyslexia (in English). So would it not make more sense to establish which aspects of English cause this difficulty and tackle them, rather than spend enormous sums, year after year, on dealing with the symptoms? Might our exceptionally high level of dyslexia not be linked to our continued deliberate use of wrong letters in many words, such as the vowels in “many”, “any”, “pretty”, “busy” and “other”? Must we carry on doing so? With orthographies that don’t allow such abuse of the alphabetic principle, dyslexia is much rarer.

Masha Bell Wareham Dorset