A language model that learns a new fact by fine-tuning can repeat it but cannot reason with it: taught that a person is a citizen of a new country, it still cannot say, without chain-of-thought, who the head of state of that person's country is. This two-hop curse is widely treated as a reasoning deficit, and the strongest knowledge editors answer it with synthesized reasoning data. We show that the reasoning is intact and the writing is wrong. Fine-tuning writes a new fact as an answer to be said, whereas the second hop reads the bridge ("that person's country") as an entity, from the middle layers on: patching the model's own representation of the entity into the bridge at those layers largely restores the second hop, yet after fine-tuning the bridge there is no closer to the new entity than before the edit. We therefore propose read-equivalent writing (Legible): one loss term makes the bridge phrase, at the layer where the second hop finishes reading it, match the model's own reading of the new entity, and keeps the same relation's other subjects unchanged. Phrases and targets come from the edited model itself, and no multi-hop training data is used. Across Qwen2.5, Llama-3 and Qwen3, Legible (I) composes learned facts more often than the model composes its own knowledge, on MQuAKE's two-hop-curse questions; (II) reaches 1.8-2.6x the bridge accuracy of CaKE, whose reasoning data composes no better than plain fine-tuning, and has the best average over composition, accuracy and locality against four families of writers; and (III) lifts the curse on RippleEdits, on the benchmark of Balesni et al., who named the curse, and at 14B.
Visual-text compression renders long contexts as images and is engineered around how much of the text a vision-language model (VLM) can recover. Yet recovered text is not usable text. VLMs can transcribe the text in an image word for word and still fail to answer from it; given back their own transcript, they answer nearly as well as from the original text. We call this difference the read-use gap. Recognizing and using visual text have different resolution requirements: Qwen3-VL-8B's recognition saturates at 15-pixel characters while use catches up only at 24 pixels, and scaling from 2B to 32B raises recognition without narrowing the gap. Putting the evidence into words closes it: thinking VLMs recite the evidence in their thinking, and their own transcript, written without seeing the question, recovers most of what thinking adds. In a preregistered held-out test, the gap ranks how much eight VLMs gain from their own words over pixels (Spearman $ρ$ = 0.86), which recognition rates do not. We propose ALOUD, which spends visual resolution on finding and recognizing evidence and language tokens on using it. Without keeping the source text, it doubles the accuracy of a frozen Qwen3-VL-8B on long documents compressed 5x and 10x: at 5x, from 27.7% to 54.8%, near the original text's 58.5%, with a context smaller than the compressed pages themselves. For less than the cost of reading the original text, it leads at equal budget every method that does without it, at every level, and beats AGAR and VERA, which paste the original text back; at 5x it also beats LensVLM-9B, which is trained and keeps the original text. Visual-text compression is limited not by how much text a model can recover, but by how much it can use.