I had a lovely surprise this week: I found my copy of Filling out forms by Wendy Stein, published by New Readers Press in 1979. It’s quite a thin book, almost a pamphlet, and it was hiding between much larger books in a shelf I hadn’t checked for a while.
It’s long since out of print – the most recent edition is 1986. Since I mislaid it, I’ve tried several times to get another copy but without the exact title and author I couldn’t locate it.
Filling out forms is for people who are learning to read
As their name suggests, New Readers Press specialises in books for people who are learning to read as adults. It is the publising arm of ProLiteracy, a non-profit that advocates for and funds improvements in adult literacy, and creates learning materials to help with those aims.
- New Readers Press
- ProLiteracy
New Readers Press still offer books for adult learners, although sadly no longer publish one on forms. The nearest I could find is Control Your Money from 2015 (no author specified), which so far as I can see from the online preview is similiar in style to Filling out forms. Both are workbooks organised into lessons, with space for learners to write in the book as they work on exercises. You can get a sense of the style from the online preview of Control Your Money, which has a useful (if somewhat daunting) chart for readers to fill in about getting the facts on a loan.
- Control Your Money New Readers Press
My favourite exercise in Filling out forms is the magazine subscription card. Do cards like these still drop out of every paper magazine, as they used to? I don’t know, but seeing this one was a nostaligc moment.
More seriously, Wendy Stein devotes seven chapters to helping her readers to tackle a range of the forms that they will encounter in everyday life, including banking, at work (“on the job”), voting, and (especially important in the USA) health insurance.
The social security form is