Richard Spinelli, A to Z

Richard Joseph Spinelli published seventeen pieces in September 2026, and this site studies them the way a reference work would. Each piece has a companion study in the library. Twenty two recurring ideas follow a single claim through the pieces that carry it. Eight themes and four series group the pieces by subject and by sequence, twenty two glossary entries define his working terms, and four guides suggest orders for reading. This page lists every one of them in a single alphabet.

Why an alphabet and not another menu

Menus follow the logic of the site; an index follows the memory of the reader, who may recall a phrase such as turn week without recalling its section. As Smithsonian’s note on Judith Flanders’s history of alphabetical order¹ puts it, the letters gave readers a framework that did not depend on which subject was thought more important. A Guardian review of Dennis Duncan’s history of the index² adds that a good subject index both condenses a body of work and opens doors into it.

How people read long pages on screens

Eyetracking research from the Nielsen Norman Group³ found that readers fix mostly on the first few words at the left of each line, which is why every entry below starts with its key term. The Hechinger Report’s account of reading studies⁴ found comprehension of long nonfiction slightly weaker on screens than on paper, with skimming one suspected cause; a list that returns a reader to the exact page eases rereading.

Overview pages help only when people can find them. An early Nielsen Norman Group study of site maps⁵ found that few visitors went looking for one, and that the maps that worked were short, static and linked from every page, the model followed here. The reward is time with the writing: in a Pew Research Center study of reading on phones⁶, readers of long articles stayed longest when they arrived through a link inside the same site. Browse by kind through the menus; come here when you know the word you want.