I have long suspected I had dyslexia. As a child I always got the b’s and d’s mixed up. Sadly, my southpaw, great reader DS is doing the same thing.
I don’t remember struggling with reading, but I do remember being put in the turtle class and surprising my teacher one day when I came to school late and landed in with the rabbits and kept up with them. Part of my problem was reading out loud, I just couldn’t do it, and this is how the teacher tracked my reading progress.
But someone directed me to this web-site and article and I swear, this person was writing about my life.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A27074-2005Feb15_5.html
Here are some excerpts from the story:
"Poor spelling may well be the last remnant of dyslexia that a person has otherwise compensated for," she says. "But it's something we haven't looked at directly."
Am I about to learn that something is amiss with my brain? I have some of the symptoms of dyslexia: horrible spelling, serious difficulty remembering names and numbers … But I'm missing the big one -- profound reading trouble. I read for pleasure every night of my life. We don't have cable.
And this: "You had the underlying threads of dyslexia, but you've compensated for it really, really well. When you have time, you do well. But when you have to do things very quickly, it's not automatic. Your autopilot, for spelling and for reading, just isn't there."
As a youngster I was probably getting just enough information and pleasure from reading to push through some amount of dyslexic drag. And the more I read, the more compensatory tricks my brain wired into itself until I became fluent, at least under relaxed conditions. It's only when the heat is on that my reading goes a little wobbly and, even more often, my spelling collapses in a heap.
It's probably one of the lesser beaten tracks to a career of deadline writing.
I wonder if my being left-handed plays into it as well? I always felt like I was struggling uphill, I would love to know it's just because my brain is wired a little differently than your average bears.
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4 comments:
I have a theroy that it's a sign of creativity when you can spell one word three diffrent ways in the same paragraph. To bad creativity doesn't count when I play scrabble :-)
Hay, leftys are Ok, you need to tell Karen how two make it so I kan right comments too her. It was Mark Twain who said to the effect that "it is the sign of a weak mind to only come up with one way to spell a word". I agrie won hundred precent! I think that I mey have lisdexia alos.
I have always said that spell-check is one of the best inventions of my lifetime!
But, I like the creative angle as well! ;)
rock on bad speller! i am one too. but hey that means we rock on other things!
i am also bad about using the shift key!
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