GO FOR IT: Don’t let dyslexia hold you back!

 If I could say one thing to someone with dyslexia who wants to write but is too afraid or embarrassed to start, it is this: GO FOR IT! Ideas are the foundation for any piece of writing, and dyslexia has no impact on ideas. Put whatever is in your head on paper, and we can sort it out from there.

Dyslexia is not just seeing flipped numbers and letters. Its effects can be as varied and unique as each person it impacts. I see its effects in how ideas are expressed or stories are told, but it’s the communication process that needs help, not the ideas. The three fundamentals I most often help writers with, especially those with dyslexia, are organization, flow, and words (spelling, word-choice, and missing or omitted words).

My daughter is dyslexic. When she was little, she hated doing puzzles. She absolutely could not embrace the concept of starting with the edges, which made the experience frustrating and overwhelming, for both of us. Finding things and cleaning her room were similarly agonizing experiences. (Her favorite birthday gift each year was for me to clean her room!) On top of not being orderly on a daily basis, she simply could not follow a process to get the job done. Now, when I say not being orderly, I’m not talking about normal mess—dirty and clean clothes piled on the floor, and so on—I’m talking, for example, about not maintaining organized dresser drawers. Most of us organize a dresser by designating one category of clothing per drawer, like underwear, shirts, or pants. Not this gal. She would have, in one drawer, random clothing, a book, school papers, empty gum wrappers, a CD, a shoe, and a pet rock. No wonder she couldn’t find anything or clean up quickly!

When I review projects, I frequently see similarly jumbled work. As I said, the ideas are great, they just need to be sorted and reorganized so that readers can process them. No big deal. Be it socks or sentences, it’s all about organizing. Luckily, there are people who enjoy and are good at this.

Closely related to organization is flow, and dyslexia can impact this as well. While my daughter is a delightful person to speak with, she shifts topics with amazing ease and no warning and relates stories by starting in the middle or with a random detail. I frequently scramble to keep up, conversationally, and find bizarre pictures forming in my head before realizing that she is no longer on the original topic. A sample conversation: let’s say we are talking about her having taken a trip to the mall, and she says, “You should’ve seen these shorts—they were so cute!” I respond, “How so?” “They had little grinning sharks on them and starfish with smiley faces!” Now, my daughter is twenty, and is shopping for herself, so the description of the shorts indicates a possible subject change. I put my sleuthing hat on and begin, “So, are we still talking about your shopping trip?” “Oh, no! A little boy was wearing them,” she laughs. I continue, “He was at the mall?” “No, no. He was at the beach!” A complete change of topic, scenery and all. Sleuthing complete, I shift gears, and we continued our conversation...about her walk on the beach.

This conversation highlights several things I often see—detail without context, awkward flow and abrupt topic changes, and inadequate introductions and conclusions. Again, no big deal. Not one of these issues has anything to do with the quality of the ideas being shared; the ideas are present and sound, and when the issues mentioned above are addressed, the ideas flow beautifully and become engaging. We simply make sure the big picture appears at the beginning, context supports the details, the flow is natural and transitions smooth and timely, and that the ending exists and is satisfying.

At last we come to words. Words can be slippery; dyslexia makes words extra slippery. While driving to the airport one day, I got a glimpse of this. My daughter blurted out, “John Green isn’t an airport. Well, duh!” That came out of left field. She explained that she was reading road signs. I was still confused, until I saw the next sign—John Glenn Int’l Airport. Wow. In addition to substituting and adding and subtracting words and skipping entire lines while reading, my daughter’s brain follows spelling rules only it is privy to. She could get an A on a spelling test, but when using those same words in sentences, sometimes just minutes after the test, they were unrecognizable.

Dyslexic writers tend to spell creatively, sometimes so creatively that spell check is stumped and mystery words are created. Some compensate for their poor spelling by using simpler words, restricting their vocabularies. Their work also has a larger number of extra or omitted words. Throughout the drafting and redrafting process some words sneak in where they are not needed and some simply disappear. And while I think proofing your own work is hard since we all tend to see what we intended to write instead of what we actually wrote, these basic typos can be caught by reading your work out loud. But when your brain regularly adds, subtracts, and changes words as you read, this method is far from foolproof. Once again, no big deal. The pesky added or missing words can easily be fixed when your work is read by someone else or you hear them read it, mystery words can be deciphered, and helping writers with word-choice is one of the things editors do every day.

Sharing an idea is like giving a gift. You never know how it will be received, but it has the potential to be entertaining, educational, or even life-changing. So, GO FOR IT! Give generously; put your idea on paper, and we’ll sort it out from there.