I heard a woman say that she’s dyslexic and therefore cannot memorize dialog. While I question even that, it was what she said next that caught my ear. She said, “I write upside down and backwards.” Now, maybe she was told that by someone else. But if not, and if she’s able to see that the letters are upside down and backward, then her perception is not distorted. Furthermore, if she were able to see that, she’d be able to overcome it. She didn’t say that her problem was hand/eye coordination. And while I understand that the term, dyslexia, is poorly understood and has a variety of definitions, I felt that her statement was internally inconsistent and impossible. I’m not looking for a plea for understanding from “dyslexic” dopers, but rather an explanation for how I can interpret her statement as being a truthful description. On the face of it, I want to call BS.
I see upside down and backwards myself [dx was me writing upside down and backwards on the blackboard when they were teaching us to read and write in first grade.]
I can read normally as long as I am not seriously tired, because then I can’t make my mind flip things. My one dumb bar trick is being able to write backwards with my left hand simultaneously with regular with my right hand[as long as it is the same phrase or words]
As to not being able to memorize. that may be true, everybody is different. I have no problem memorizing anything.
dyslexia is not just a visual impairment.
Its a much more in depth issue than that.
She very well may not be able to recite memorized dialog. Dyslexic people often misplace syllables, replace words, etc when speaking.
I see no reason to call BS on what was stated above.
You only maybe see that someone told her that?? I cannot see how she could possibly make it to adulthood writing upside and backwards and not have someone point it out to her.
:dubious: Is that not a pretty common “ability”? As in, I would have thought, nearly universal among those who can write? (And who are right handed.)
Like people with other disorders and diseases, she’s probably got a dumbed down, one-line description of dyslexia handy for when it comes up in discussion. It’s probably something she’s been saying since childhood or her teenage years, and it’s likely meant mostly for people who don’t know squat about dyslexia.
Can you describe or explain this further? How do you know that you see upside down and backwards? What, exactly, does that mean? And does it only occur with written language?
Alternatively, she’s simply not very bright or is not a very good reader, and she has learned to employ that terminology (perhaps aided by confused or embarrassed parents and teachers) as a catch-all explanation that gets her off the hook when she has to reveal her shortcomings.
It is? I don’t think I could write backwards with my left hand with any ease; certainly, not the ease with which I could write forward with my right hand.
I just tried it now and made an utter mess…
Really?!
You did this while writing normally with the right hand at the same time?
Yes. Letters from right hand: pristine. Letters from left hand: unrecognizable beyond the first few. A scribbled catastrophe.
If I really slow down and concentrate, I guess I can avoid writing new letters over old letters and such things with the left hand, though it still comes out much messier than the right hand.
I also tried with just left hand alone, and didn’t do very well either. But I’m guessing you feel doing them simultaneously is easier.
…huh.
Never mind then.
Myself, I get neat-ish letters on the right, sloppy letters on the left, but both sets are legible.
Granted it’s much easier doing it in big letters on a blackboard, which is actually what triggered my original response–my recollection of having had it demonstrated to me how the right hand can kind of “guide” the left hand in coordinated activities like this. (Not really the right way to put it but hopefully you get the idea.) That demonstration was on a whiteboard on the wall.
Anecdote: My high school class’s valdedictorian was dyslexic (but had gone through a whole ton of therapy work for it), and one English class assignment for a quiz was to memorize the introduction to Canterbury Tales, though the recall would be written out rather than spoken. He failed miserably. I didn’t see if he wrote letters backwards, but surely would have been told during his sessions if he had.
My oldest daughter is severely dyslexic. With an immense amount of effort and help she’s been able to work around her difficulties (she’s doing very well and on her way to her PhD (sp?)now), but that doesn’t change the fact that she’s dyslexic.
Note that I’m not, so the best I can do is try to explain how she describes her situation to me.
To me, text on a page is static. It just sits there quietly. To her, that same text is constantly moving. Or as she used to say as a kid “the letters run around.” There is no real difference between a “d” and a “b” - they’re both the same (or more precisely one flips around and becomes the other).
I suspect that when you heard the lady say “I write upside down and backward” she wasn’t referring to that as a skill, but saying that’s the way the letters turn out sometimes. That was certainly the way with my daughter when she was a child. (Now she types everything on her computer and lets spell-check try to figure things out.)
Hand/eye coordination is not the issue.
I’m actually pretty interested in this. The popular level descriptions of dyslexia, and importantly the self-reports of dyslexics, often include details like this, that the letters “run around” or flip around in the visual field or jump from word to word, or that letters appear and disappear. But when I look at what’s reported to be the symptoms of dyslexia (mostly I’m getting this from Wikipedia, to be clear) the theme seems to have a lot more to do with the association of letters to sounds than it does with the straightforward ability to perceive letter forms.
My theory is that non-dyslexics use their near-instinctive (because of training) knowledge of letter-sound correspondences to sort of “nail down” letter forms while they’re reading, actively (though unconsciously) predicting what letters they’ll be seeing and getting it right often enough that the text appears to them to be physically coherent and readable. Meanwhile, my suspicion is, dyslexics, lacking that near-instinctive set of associations, aren’t able to actively unconsciously predict in this way while they are reading, and so are regularly (unconsciously) “surprised” by what they see while they’re reading, and this leads to a subjective experience of the letters seeming to “jump around” and all the other things they report.
Total WAG, based on anecodote and Wikipedia.
There is probably a more accurate description of her problem that she’s probably tired of repeating (like, “I have difficulty memorizing dialog if the only way I’m allowed to learn it is by reading”). I’m not dyslexic but I don’t see any reason to believe that the problem is as she describes it, and makes learning dialog via reading hard.
I have a problem telling my left from my right. Sometimes it’s easy and sometimes it’s hard. There isn’t a lot of rhyme or reason to the problem actually. It’s not like I’m like, “oh if I think its left it must be right instead” – there’s no 1 to 1 correspondance that corrects the error. I find it incredibly difficult to imitate the physical movements of another person who is acting as my “mirror,” and sometimes I find it hard to understand how to make my body do what another person’s body is doing no matter what the orientation. That sounds strange to most people, and it doesn’t mean I can’t learn physical sequences (I study karate actually) only that it takes me a bit longer, and compared to other people, I learn it in an idiosyncratic way.
1.) Seems to make dyslexia entirely about “training”–people who’ve better learned to read don’t have problems, while those who are less familiar do.
2.) Only addresses issues with reading, not writing.
Nothing personal, but from how I’m reading it, your WAG is crap.
Huh, this was a common thing? I thought it was just my sadistic AP English teacher. I still have most of that gibberish memorized.
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I didn’t mean the training is the cause, rather I meant that part of my WAG is that non-dyslexics have the ability to be trained to have this near-instinctive association, while dyslexics do not have this ability.
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I was just talking about reading issues, not writing issues. I wasn’t trying to explain all of dyslexia, I was trying to explain why it might be that dyslexics have the reading issues they do. In any case, if I’m write to discern a “theme” involving sound-letter association in dyslexia symptoms, it’s pretty clear how that’d make it harder to learn how to write as well. To learn to write, it’s best if you have a facility with the skill of “sounding it out” and classifying the sounds in terms of letters. Obviously that would be more difficult for a person who can’t develop a near-instinctive association between letters and sounds.
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Just a note, you actually make the note personal when you say “nothing personal.” Best would have been simply to put your items 1) and 2) and leave it at that.
You didn’t go to high school in south-eastern/eastern Wisconsin, did you? :dubious: