 Advocates of whole-word instruction believe that being able to recognize a large number of sight words gives students a better start to learning to read.Recognizing sight words automatically is said to be advantageous for beginning readers because many of these words have unusual spelling patterns, cannot be sounded out using basic phonics knowledge and cannot be represented using pictures.For example, the word "was" does not follow a usual spelling pattern, as the middle letter "a" makes an sound and the final letter "s" makes a sound, nor can the word be associated with a picture clue since it denotes an abstract state (existence).