He Wrote the Sentence. Then He Couldn’t Read It.
In 2001, Howard Engel picked up his copy of The Globe and Mail and found he couldn’t read it. The letters were there, but they looked like a script he had never encountered, somewhere between Cyrillic and Korean, completely opaque. This was a man with a 14-novel detective series behind him, decades of professional writing, a career that had started at the CBC before turning to crime fiction. Without warning, the page was gibberish.
Then he picked up a pen. His hand moved without hesitation, producing his own name and a full sentence in legible English. He set the pen down and looked at what he had written. It meant nothing to him. His own handwriting, forming his own words, was just as unreadable as the newspaper had been.
Why This Seems Impossible
Most people assume reading and writing are two halves of the same skill, learned and stored together. The thought that one could be removed by a stroke while the other survives intact feels irrational, but the experience of using them in tandem every day turns out to be a poor guide to how the brain actually organizes them. Reading and writing may feel inseparable, but they appear to run on entirely separate neural tracks.
Two Roads Through the Brain, Not One
Engel had suffered a stroke affecting his left occipitotemporal region and the splenium of the corpus callosum. The result was alexia sine agraphia, Latin for “loss of reading without loss of writing”, documented since neurologist Joseph Déjerine first described it in 1892.
Reading requires a dedicated visual pathway: a written word enters through the eyes, passes through a region processing letter shapes, and routes to language centers handling meaning and sound. Damage that route, and the signal never completes its journey. Writing is a different operation, drawing on motor planning, language production, and procedural memory for how words are formed. These circuits are distinct. The stroke severed the first while leaving the second intact, his brain still knew how to produce written language; it had simply lost the ability to receive it visually. The output system was working. The input system was not.
Reading With Your Hand
Engel spent approximately three months at a rehabilitation center working with language pathologist Michelle Cohen. Because his motor system remained intact, he could try working backward through it: by physically tracing a letter’s shape, he could sometimes reconstruct what it was, using the body’s memory of producing letters to substitute for lost visual recognition. This kinesthetic approach, letting the motor route carry the signal when the visual route is blocked, is a recognized clinical strategy.
Oliver Sacks met Engel during his recovery and later wrote about the case in the afterword to Engel’s 2005 novel Memory Book, returning to it in his 2010 book The Mind’s Eye and in “A Man of Letters,” published in The New Yorker in June 2010. Engel himself wrote the 2007 memoir The Man Who Forgot How to Read. He relearned the alphabet and eventually managed to read again, slowly and incompletely, and dictated new novels.
Literacy Is Not One Thing
What Engel experienced is called a dissociation: two functions that appear bound together turn out to be separable when a targeted injury reveals the seams between them. “Literacy” is actually a cluster of distinct processes, perceiving letter shapes, mapping them to sounds, accessing word meaning, planning the physical sequence that produces a word on paper, each with its own neural machinery, each independently impaired or retrained.
Engel was appointed to the Order of Canada in February 2007 and received the Crime Writers of Canada Grand Master Award in 2014. He had co-founded Crime Writers of Canada back in 1982, decades before a stroke gave him an involuntary lesson in just how many separate things a writer’s brain is actually doing at once.