The title of this volume is The varieties of orthographic knowledge I: Theoretical and developmental issues. The authors have met this charge so well that the reader may be overwhelmed by the varieties of orthographic knowledge and despairing of any hope for consensus. Yet there are at least three points of consensus among the authors. First, in studying reading, phonological processing skill has been over-emphasized at the expense of orthographic processing skill. Second, orthographic processing can be operationalized and assessed separately from phonological processing. Third, although orthographic and phonological processing can be dissociated statistically, they are conceptually intertwined.