This article may seem out of place on this website. It is not related to technology or politics, but is a generalized rant of mine. However, this rant is a directed response to misconceptions of the population at large about the problem of dyslexia. I have come to understand that many people simply have the wrong idea about dyslexia, its symptoms, and the true nature of the problem.

This article is a written response to some emails I have received because a couple of my articles being posted on Digg. For those not in the loop, Digg is a popular news website that contains content voted on by the community and submitted by the community. Many emails and outright spiteful attack posts were directed largely at the strange style of my writing.

To many it was a open discourse of ridicule and laughter. I however, did not care about most of the response I received. It is hard to take people calling you a retarded n00b seriously. One post really rubbed me the wrong way, this was a person claiming to be an English teacher. This brought many questions to mind, assuming this person is really an English teacher, he should notice the signs of a dyslexic writer. He chose however to belittle me saying, "This kid should learn to write before running a blog." This either means he is not a good teacher or at the very least, not observant. Which is worse is debatable. Because "not observant" goes hand-in-hand with not caring about your students

This also raised the point that most people do not know what true dyslexia is thanks to Hollywood, TV shows, and common misconceptions. So allow me to continue this discourse onto the common myths and misconceptions and the truth about dyslexia.

Common Misconceptions and Truth About Dyslexia

I am not a doctor, nor do I claim to be one, but I am a dyslexia sufferer. This is not a whining "feel-sorry-for-me" piece you commonly see on the Internet. Instead I wish to present a detailed scientific article covering the truths about dyslexia and also provide an outreach to other persons on the Internet who may suffer ridicule because of misunderstandings.

The first misunderstanding of dyslexia is the most common, that dyslexia people write backwards or reverse letters. This is a very rare form of dyslexia and the form most often portrayed in movies and TV. In reality some dyslexia people do write backwards, but dyslexia more commonly affects word placement and spelling. The idea that dyslexics go around writing DaVinci style when they sign checks is uniquely left to TV shows and movies.

The truth of dyslexia is that it is a SLD, or specific learning difficultly. A SLD is medically classified as a disorder which affects a small group of related cognitive functions but having no effect on other cognitive development. In most medical circles the word dyslexia is frowned upon, but for the ease of discussion I will continue to use it to broadly define the condition. SLD tests are used to determine the cluster of symptoms each dyslexia person has. SLD groups can be varied and I present a short list here.

Reading and Spelling Difficulty - Most people in this group have a hard time reading and will become physically tired while reading. Another common symptom is a dyslexia person will be able to read a word on one page and not read the same word pages later. One classic sign of reading difficultly deals with directionality, confusing b-d, n-u, and m-w letters in words. Spelling difficulty shows up in strange ways, a dyslexia person may be able to spell a word aloud correctly but can not write the word correctly. This also manifests itself when a dyslexic person copies written text from another source and will misspell words they are looking at.

Handwriting Dysgraphia - People in this group exhibit near unreadable handwriting. This deals with visual-motor integration. A dyslexic person will commonly look at a word and grab a portion of it, then will write the portion down and repeat garbing. Often this means spelling and punctuation are wrong. Also a another common trait is that the dyslexic person has unusual spacial placement on the page. Words may be placed tightly together or spaced far apart and may not always follow the lines on the paper. People in this group often have extreme difficulty learning cursive writing.

Quality of Written Works - A person falling in this group often can tell you something better than write it. Written works contain many grammatical errors and spelling errors. Although the person can have an advanced understanding of the language and a large vocabulary, translation to paper is often lacking. (This is what I suffer most.) A person in this group often (if they can) will write extremely well but will reverse word orders in grammar. This can result in subject-agreement-qualifier grammar to be in the wrong places in a written sentence.

Directional Difficultly - Commonly will manifest itself as a problem with letters. Most dyslexics, myself included, have a problem writing the letters b and d. It is common to see that person stop in the middle of a word, then write a letter "b" and a letter "d" on the page somewhere. In the attempt to match the correct letter for the word visualized to be written. This deals with spacial-visual integration.

Logical Order - A dyslexic person will often have trouble learning a sequence of steps. These steps are usually not logical, but are required to be completed in said steps. An example common to dyslexics, is tying shoe laces. Often dyslexics will have a hard time learning the sequence of steps because its visually illogical and most dyslexics will not learn to tie their shoes until their teen years.

Rote Memory (Facts of non-interest) - Most dyslexic people tend to have a hard time memorizing facts from topics that do not interest them. This also works in reverse, dyslexic people will be able to unnaturally learn many facts and nitpicking details of subjects they are interested in.

Extremely Messy or Unorganized - This is usually the first out right symptom. Most, if not all, dyslexics are unorganized people. Usually this manifests in messy bedrooms, lockers, desks, and other personal spaces. Studies have shown this to be a mental concept stating that if a dyslexic can not see an item (placed in a desk or drawer), they mentally figure they can't find it.

Math Difficulty - Most dyslexics are gifted in math because they have advanced three dimensional visualization ability. This however is countered by the rote memory problems. Most dyslexics that are not interested in math have a hard time discovering their abilities.

Most people are not related to one group, most likely having a combination of two or three. In most all cases dyslexic people can always tell a story better than write it. This relates to that most dyslexic people can visualize better and have better visual recall memory.

Typically dyslexics have a great number of strengths to overcome the weakness imposed by the problem. Here is a short list:

Artistic Skills - Most dyslexic people have great visual-spacial ability and often can paint, draw, or create images.

Athletic Ability - Some dyslexic people exhibit great physical ability.

Musical Ability - Some dyslexic people have an easy time memorizing music and lyrics. This lays in the logical order of music. Most musically inclined dyslexic people can learn sheet music (only playing it a few times) and learn instruments incredibility well .

Mechanical Ability - Most dyslexic people are attracted to mechanical workings because of the logical order of the mechanical operation.

People Skills - Dyslexic people have a charm and charisma that helps them in interpersonal communications. This is because dyslexics can relate better spoken than written.

Visual/Spatial Skills - Dyslexics often display great visual skills in design and layout.

Vivid Imagination and Intuition - Dyslexics are often extremely creative because of vivid imagination. Dyslexics often like to generate far thinking ideas and often can visualize them better than others. This lends to more dyslexic people doing well in business and management.

Creativity and Global Thinking - See Above

Curiosity - Dyslexic people often make great engineers or scientists, this is because dyslexics often have a great curiosity to discover all facts related to a topic. (See Rote Memory Above).

Some new studies and controversial articles suggest that dyslexia is not so much a disorder as it is a different brain coding. These studies promote the idea that visual brain coding is a evolutionary hold over because humans needed to be more visually aware in the past. I don't know if I buy into this idea but it is interesting.

Dyslexia does decrease the linguistic portions of cognitive thought, however just as a blind person's hearing gets better, dyslexics have a higher visual ability. This is also a root cause of why dyslexics reverse word order. Dyslexics often replace "through" and "though" because visually the correct word might not look right in the visual flow of a sentence. This is also why a word may go missing from a sentence. Mostly because the visual processing of the brain reads the missing word every time the sentence is read.

Explanation of working with Dyslexia

I will now try to explain the difficulty a dyslexic suffers, since I suffer from a bad case of dyslexia. Unfortunately the Internet is a written communication method which can be a barrier for dyslexic individuals. I can not speak for all persons with dyslexia since each can have different symptoms and difficulties, but I can do the best to explain myself.

I do enjoy doing journalism (albeit amateur) on the web, but as a written communication form it is also more difficult than it should be. People who know me personally know the difficulties and the style of the writing, but most online visitors do not. This leads to miscommunication issues (arising from the strange writing style) which results in criticisms of myself and sometimes turns people off from the articles.

My specific difficulties include dysgraphia, directorial difficulties, messy, and rote memory. For one, I tend to write sentences backward. I visualize a sentence in correct order (subject then agreement) but can write the sentence backwards placing the agreement first. However, the real problem is that I can read the sentence over and over and see it correct. The brain goes back to visualization of the sentence when it was originally written. I do have (what is called) a photographic memory and has its base in the visual spacial wiring of dyslexia.

Another difficulty of mine is missing letters. A major example is the word "through" and "though". When I write a sentence I know which word is correct for the sentence and know the difference in each words definition. In my case its a spacial placement, the visual flow of a sentence affects which word is actually written to the page. The visual flow of the sentence is determined by the sight line of the top of the sentence. To understand what I mean, look the at the tops of the letters in this sentence. If you draw a solid, non-breaking, line connecting the the tops of all the letters you end up with a flowing line that rises and falls creating a visual profile of the sentence. This visual profile determines which word the brain actually writes by selecting the word that looks spatially correct. This also affects letters through the selective dropping of letters from a word. (For example, I wrote the word "dropping" as droppong in that sentence. Only on the third time editing this article did I catch it.) The most common example for me is the letters "b" and "d". Both letters are visually the same and only varied by direction, but this variation can spatially effect the sentence. I commonly have to stop writing to grab another piece of paper and write both a "b" and "d" on the page. This allows me to over ride the instinct to write the letter from spacial thought and logically look at both letters to select the grammatically correct letter.

In reality, (for me) spell checker is the worst thing ever to use. Spell checker commonly fixes words based on an algorithm that interprets letters input to the closest match in a fixed list of words. The words are mathematically compared and the closest matches are given as options to the user. This is a problem because of close visual-looking words with dramatically different meanings that can be accidentally interchanged by visual misreading. When I write an article it can take up to one week to edit it and remove all grammatical mistakes caused by dyslexia. In the end, due diligence in editing is far better than spell checker.

I do not want to focus only on the bad, but would like to bring up a positive point. I have extreme rote memory, this means I can learn facts of interest very well. This allows great knowledge of topics of personal interest, the downside is that things that do not interest me are hard to learn. In my case the ability to learn all aspects of a topic is a gift. So for all the difficulties in writing an article this gift allows me to write a through upstanding piece to communicate many facts to others. In the end, is dyslexia really handicapping?

Overcoming Dyslexia

Overcoming dyslexia is not so much a twelve step program as it is personal knowledge of oneself. No one method works for all, this leads to mishandling in the public education system. "Know Thyself", is not an ideal held high in the American public education system as they prefer a "one size fits all" approach to every problem. The misconceptions about dyslexia rule the policies of the public education system and fosters the idea that dyslexics are handicapped people.

For myself, overcoming dyslexia is a endeavor in editing what I write. I get called out when I hurry to write something, because hurrying gives me less time to edit and usually ends up slightly unreadable in places. I know that not (literally) combing each word over leads to unreadable errors in grammar. Again for each person with dyslexia, the answer to overcoming it is always, "Know Thyself".

In my opinion, dyslexia is not really a handicap, but an extension of the blind person phenomenon. Science has shown that blind persons develop better hearing and have higher development of other senses to overcome the loss of sight. So dyslexia is an extension of visual ability to overcome a lack of linguistic/grammatical ability. So is it really a handicap? In this dyslexic writers opinion, there is significant evidence to the contrary. Any handicap or disadvantage can be leveraged as an advantage, it only takes understanding and effort to overcome.

Outreach to Dyslexics and Others

Allow me a moment of discourse... Dyslexia is a commonly misunderstood condition that often carries a stigma to the public at large. As any learning or handicapping condition is undesirable to public opinion and often ignored, misunderstood, or undetected by parents it can leave many dyslexics left behind. In early childhood dyslexia is commonly mistaken for lack of intelligence and our modern "low standards" public education will pass over it.

This article was not only written for dyslexic individuals, but for the public at large. I admit one agenda of this article is to outreach to other wise unknowing parents of young children. Does your child exhibit two or more of the symptoms or habits I described above? I employ you to ask yourself a single question devoid of all misconceptions and with an open mind. Could it be Dyslexia??

I say this because early detection is the key to helping a child learn to overcome the problem. I did not have this luxury, but I hope my gift of deep understanding and explanation can help others learn of the problems and advantages posed by dyslexia.

Conclusion

I admit the writing of this article was a thin line between a knee jerk reaction and an intelligent commentary to open discussion on dyslexia. I stated in my opening that one key reason behind the article was the comments of a "claimed" English teacher on Digg!. I have to assume that this person really is a teacher, (because on the internet you can say anything behind a monitor) and is a shining example of all that is wrong with public education in America. If a teacher can not even identify a common learning disability than he is not fit to step foot in a classroom to teach students. He called me a stupid kid that "should learn to write before trying to run a blog", I am sorry I have to assault your sense of educated. I am not a kid, I am a computer programmer. I don't run a "blog", this website has been in existence (varying forms) since 1994.

I have been active in the Linux community since 1991 and have contributed to many open source projects. This means that if you have used the Internet today, you have used technologies I have helped to create. (Considering that Linux and Apache is a leading web server configuration and I have contributed code used in both projects.) But do I expect this teacher to understand the complexities of operating system design or advanced C programming? No, I do not. However, you claim yourself a teacher and I do feel that identifying learning difficulties is in the scope of your job, and you yourself said I used advanced vocabulary and still you reverted to insult. Thank you for providing me an example to prove what is wrong with American education.

Random "teacher's" insults on Digg! aside, this article was a piece I felt I needed to write in the attempt to help people overcome common misconceptions about dyslexia and to outreach to people who may not know much about it. It is my best intention to help people by sharing information on my experiences. I always recommend talking to medical professionals, as I can only explain to a point. I am not a doctor, but just the outreach of someone discussing a topic can always help.

-Adam