Mary in KY demonstrated my point ably. It can be done, obviously. It is NOT almost as easy as reading the words

"Contemporary Legends create self fulfilling processes whereby the rumor stories are sometimes acted..."

which is a real, randomly selected passage from a book on my desk, describing a phenomenon folklorists call "ostention" and others might call "copycat behavior": when people act out stories they have heard, thus fulfilling the "warning" of the stories themselves.

If you don't know what you're looking for, and the words are REALLY scrambled, not just with one letter out of place, it will take a while to read a passage, even if the first and last letters are kept in place. It took Mary in KY twenty minutes to decipher Jeff Victor's sentence above. It would take her probably three seconds to read the unscrambled passage.