by Amelia Wonderland

Created on: June 10, 2009

Dyslexia is widely misunderstood. It is often associated with poor spelling, reading and letter and number reversal. Well, I have not experienced any of these things not in the way that many people have come to understand dyslexia. I learned to read at the age of four and have generally been a good reader ever since. I developed a knack for remembering letter patterns which has helped me with my spelling. And when I write by hand, I generally do not reverse letters. But yet I am dyslexic and have struggled with it all my life.

Reading

One of my dyslexia foes is comprehension and retention of what I read. I can read a page of sentences and know the meaning of every word (that is if you quizzed me separately on the vocabulary) and yet if you asked me questions about the passage, I would struggle to give an accurate answer. The words just do not seem to flow into my brain in a way that renders comprehension; it's as if they were caught in some holding area. This area gets crowded very quickly only adding to the problem.

When I do manage to derive any meaning, I usually forget it as soon as my eyes leave the page. Some of my first memories of reading difficulties reflect exactly that. I remember once or twice in my history lessons the teacher asked a question, I looked into my textbook, found the answer, read it, and then raised my hand (proud of myself) only to stand up in front of the class and realise that my mind was completely blank. This was embarrassing to say the least. I did not understand why, just after reading the answer, I could not relay it to the rest of the class but after that I hardly volunteered to do anything of this sort again.

Writing

My other dyslexia foe is writing. My first memories of writing difficulties go back to when I was ten or eleven and my literature teacher gave us a task of describing a picture. It was a simple assignment: you look at the picture and describe what you see. However, I found it extremely difficult. Even though I understood the action that the picture portrayed, I struggled to come up with vocabulary to convey it on paper. If you had pushed me for an answer, I would have probably described the picture in some backward way eventually, but at the time the assignment was given, I found it almost impossible to generate the required description.

My writing problems persisted throughout my entire secondary education and because dyslexia was virtually unknown to my teachers, I had to cope with it on

• 1
• 2
• 3
• Next Page >>