Very often, we understand differences in literacy performance exclusively in terms of the skills that individuals bring to the literacy tasks they face. Drawing on a new, highly integrative theory of functional literacy--the text-task-respondent (TTR) theory--this article presents a set of seven literacy skills that are required for everyday literacy tasks. Psychometric analyses have largely validated the skills and provided, for the first time, estimated percentages of the population with various levels of the skills. Implications of these findings for determining strengths and weaknesses in literacy performance are discussed. (Contains 4 figures.)