in letters that I wrote...In the street, I had been the most articulate hustler out there -- I had commanded attention when I said something. But now, trying to write simple English, I not only wasn't articulate, I wasn't even functional." Little was also vexed by his difficulty in reading: "Every book I picked up had few sentences which didn't contain anywhere from one to nearly all of the words that might as well have been in Chinese. When I just skipped those words, of course, I really ended up with little idea of what the book said." He was motivated to turn this around for himself, and so requested some tablets, pencils, and a dictionary from the prison. After rifling through the dictionary's countless pages, amazed at the number of words he didn't know and confused about which he needed to learn, Little turned to the first page of entries and started slowly and painstakingly copying each and every one of them by hand, "down to the punctuation marks." It took him a whole day to inscribe one page, after which he read the words back to himself over and over again. Malcolm woke up the next morning "thinking about those words -- immensely proud to realize that not only had I written so much at one time, but I'd writ-ten words that I never knew were in the world. Moreover, with a little effort, I also could remember what many of these words meant. I reviewed the words