# A dyslexic's description of the problem - a scam? **URL:** \ **Category:** Factual Questions\ **Created:** [October 22, 2009, 5:43pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/a-dyslexics-description-of-the-problem-a-scam/514759 "2009-10-22T17:43:05Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 3
**Author:** ![qazwart](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/q/5fc32e/32.png) [@qazwart](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/qazwart)\ **Post date:** [October 27, 2009, 3:01am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/a-dyslexics-description-of-the-problem-a-scam/514759/41 "2009-10-27T03:01:46Z")
As a dyslexic, I think the best way to describe it is an input/output problem. What you sense and what you are able to output are garbled. Maybe a better way is to say it’s a problem of order and direction. For example, when I was in the second grade, I couldn’t tell you what the beginning sound of a word was. I could tell you one of the sounds of the word, but I wasn’t sure which one was the beginning sound. I couldn’t do rhyming either. It was simply beyond my capabilities. Words that sound alike? You mean like “house” and “sound”? Even later, I had a hard time with letter ordering. For example, I thought spaghetti was pronounced pagesti. When I later learned to read (about the sixth grade), I simply assumed that pagesti and spaghetti were both long thin Italian noodles and that they were somehow different. Other double vocabulary words includes castafrope vs. catastrophe and oniniponent vs. omnipotent. My vocabulary was double of most people simply because my verbal vocabulary and my written vocabulary were two distinct languages. Visually, I was unable to read or even understand a written sentence until I was allowed to use my finger to help keep the letters and words straight. Even once I was able to read fluently, I couldn’t write a sentence until I almost graduated high school. It took me years to overcome many of my difficulties. I didn’t finally graduate college until I was in my thirties. ---
**Author:** ![Alex\_Dubinsky](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/dbc845/32.png) [@Alex\_Dubinsky](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Alex_Dubinsky)\ **Post date:** [October 27, 2009, 4:36am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/a-dyslexics-description-of-the-problem-a-scam/514759/42 "2009-10-27T04:36:58Z")
So is dyslexia a visual hallucination?? You do enough mushrooms and letters will be jumping around backwards too, but somehow I can’t imagine that this is what’s going on. > [@Heart\_of\_Dorkness](#): > > 1. I found that the trick was to not look at what the left hand was doing, and just let it mirror my right. If I looked, I got tripped up. Yes, thinking too much about what they’re doing is what trips everyone up. With stutterers, they spend too much time trying to listen to their own voice. This is a common theme, and I’m trying to figure out if dyslexia is related? Tripping up by trying too hard or thinking too consciously of what you’re doing? ---
**Author:** ![Kintalis](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/k/bc8723/32.png) [@Kintalis](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Kintalis)\ **Post date:** [October 27, 2009, 5:04am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/a-dyslexics-description-of-the-problem-a-scam/514759/43 "2009-10-27T05:04:06Z")
> [@Alex\_Dubinsky](#): > > So is dyslexia a visual hallucination?? You do enough mushrooms and letters will be jumping around backwards too, but somehow I can’t imagine that this is what’s going on. > > Yes, thinking too much about what they’re doing is what trips everyone up. With stutterers, they spend too much time trying to listen to their own voice. > > This is a common theme, and I’m trying to figure out if dyslexia is related? Tripping up by trying too hard or thinking too consciously of what you’re doing? Dyslexia isn’t about trying too hard, or being too self conscious (and neither is stuttering). The ability to read isn’t just a visual function, it’s something that requires a lot of specialized processing - just like recognizing faces. There are just so many things that can go awry with it, whether from genetics, injury, environmental issues, or what have you. ---
**Author:** ![BMada](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/96bed5/32.png) [@BMada](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BMada)\ **Post date:** [October 27, 2009, 6:05am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/a-dyslexics-description-of-the-problem-a-scam/514759/44 "2009-10-27T06:05:20Z")
Can you be cured of dyslexia? I thought i read someone wrote backwards as a child. As a kindergardener I signed my name on pictures i drew with each letter being a mirror image of what it was supposed to be in the correct order and in childish type penmanship so an “E” would look like a 3. I don’t think I’m dyslexic now or dyslexic to the point of writing things in mirror image like when i was a toddler. But am I still dyslexic? never thought to have needed to be checked up on that because my grades were above average after grade two. ---
**Author:** ![Shot\_From\_Guns](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/ccd318/32.png) [@Shot\_From\_Guns](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Shot_From_Guns)\ **Post date:** [October 27, 2009, 5:22pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/a-dyslexics-description-of-the-problem-a-scam/514759/45 "2009-10-27T17:22:52Z")
> [@qazwart](#): > > Even later, I had a hard time with letter ordering. For example, I thought spaghetti was pronounced pagesti. When I later learned to read (about the sixth grade), I simply assumed that pagesti and spaghetti were both long thin Italian noodles and that they were somehow different. Other double vocabulary words includes castafrope vs. catastrophe and oniniponent vs. omnipotent. > > My vocabulary was double of most people simply because my verbal vocabulary and my written vocabulary were two distinct languages. \*\*So \*\*glad I’m not the only person who did this–I went up to my sixth-grade teacher to tell her that she’d misspelled “derbis” as “debris.” :smack: I also figured out that my “anhillation” was the same as “annihilation” in my AP English class senior year of high school when someone was reading aloud. Fortunately, this didn’t extend to all words–just the ones my brain had scrambled the first time I read them (and kept scrambling thereafter). ---
**Author:** ![CC](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/f1d935/32.png) [@CC](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/CC)\ **Post date:** [October 27, 2009, 11:16pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/a-dyslexics-description-of-the-problem-a-scam/514759/46 "2009-10-27T23:16:15Z")
But, of course, just about everyone makes and has made those same types of transpositions and errors. And lots of kids remain convinced that there are two words, say, bisketti and spaghetti for the same thing for a long time. These mixups are not dyslexia. Dyslexia is a catchall term for a wide variety of significant reading problems, all of which are still somewhat mysterious to researchers. There are a number of studies that simply focus on the definition, itself, in fact. But I guess, also, that the philosophical question that I posed in the OP won’t be addressed. Oh, well… ---
**Author:** ![qazwart](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/q/5fc32e/32.png) [@qazwart](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/qazwart)\ **Post date:** [October 29, 2009, 5:55am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/a-dyslexics-description-of-the-problem-a-scam/514759/47 "2009-10-29T05:55:47Z")
> [@BMada](#): > > Can you be cured of dyslexia? Dyslexia isn’t a disease. It’s how your brain works. However, as you get older, you learn to adapt to your way of thinking and organizing. There might be certain jobs you avoid (I could never be a proof reader, for example), and find areas where you do excel. There are still many adult dyslexics who never learned to read, but I think many of them finally got the knack of it. However, I still get tripped up over various words. I was reading this article about people and their chickens the other day. Apparently these people were not happy with the way their chickens are learning in this school because most of these chickens were reading below grade level. I was thinking, “So what the chicken is reading below grade level? I mean the fact that the school has managed to teach these chickens to read seems pretty good.” Then it suddenly dawned on me that the article wasn’t about chickens, but children! ---
**Author:** ![Nava](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/n/da6949/32.png) [@Nava](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Nava)\ **Post date:** [October 29, 2009, 7:41am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/a-dyslexics-description-of-the-problem-a-scam/514759/48 "2009-10-29T07:41:55Z")
Middlebro’s dyslexia is pretty much limited to b, p, d, q; it’s specifically a matter of having problems with the relative positions of the vertical line and the circle. In his case, the line of attack for helping with the problem was based on helping his spatial awareness in general. Using a typeface where those four letters have additional visual clues helps too (for example, one with the q’s bar crossed). I’ve met many dyslexics whose problem was limited to a few letters, but mistaking the a/o pair and the e/i/u trio is a huge problem, specially if don’t know that you do it: nothing makes sense! I met a man in his 40s who mistook those groups (specially a/o, which seemed to be a complete coin toss), had a master’s and was working on another; he didn’t know he was dyslexic, had heard the word but didn’t know what it meant. His wife was illiterate; their eldest son wasn’t dyslexic but of course every time Dad tried to help him study (by asking questions from the book) it would be a royal mess. ---
**Author:** ![Alex\_Dubinsky](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/dbc845/32.png) [@Alex\_Dubinsky](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Alex_Dubinsky)\ **Post date:** [October 29, 2009, 4:17pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/a-dyslexics-description-of-the-problem-a-scam/514759/49 "2009-10-29T16:17:31Z")
> [@Alex\_Dubinsky](#): > > > [@](#): > > > > 1. I found that the trick was to not look at what the left hand was doing, and just let it mirror my right. If I looked, I got tripped up. > > Yes, thinking too much about what they’re doing is what trips everyone up. With stutterers, they spend too much time trying to listen to their own voice. > > This is a common theme, and I’m trying to figure out if dyslexia is related? Tripping up by trying too hard or thinking too consciously of what you’re doing? Noone with personal experience has addressed this hypothesis of mine. > [@Frylock](#): > > 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. I think more than being “surprised” by the letters as they’re reading, dyslexics take too much time _caring_ about the letters that they’re reading. Normal people, famously, look at the beginning of a word, its end, its shape, and hardly notice if you scramble the letters in the middle. ---
**Author:** ![Indistinguishable](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/i/90ced4/32.png) [@Indistinguishable](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Indistinguishable)\ **Post date:** [October 29, 2009, 5:41pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/a-dyslexics-description-of-the-problem-a-scam/514759/50 "2009-10-29T17:41:36Z")
> [@Alex\_Dubinsky](#): > > Normal people, famously, look at the beginning of a word, its end, its shape, and hardly notice if you scramble the letters in the middle. Snuods lkie a rceeneefre to [this](http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/000053.html) fuoams, and unlllibake, but ttalloy fsale, uprenoutspd, suiuoprs, uaeillmtty bslesaes hoax of a sudty. ---
**Author:** ![gonzomax](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/e8c25b/32.png) [@gonzomax](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/gonzomax)\ **Post date:** [October 29, 2009, 7:02pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/a-dyslexics-description-of-the-problem-a-scam/514759/51 "2009-10-29T19:02:06Z")
You guys don’t get the respect you deserve you need a mantra. DYSLEXICS of THE WORLD UNTIE ---
**Author:** ![Shot\_From\_Guns](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/ccd318/32.png) [@Shot\_From\_Guns](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Shot_From_Guns)\ **Post date:** [October 29, 2009, 7:36pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/a-dyslexics-description-of-the-problem-a-scam/514759/52 "2009-10-29T19:36:24Z")
> [@Indistinguishable](#): > > Snuods lkie a rceeneefre to [this](http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/000053.html) fuoams, and unlllibake, but ttalloy fsale, uprenoutspd, suiuoprs, uaeillmtty bslesaes hoax of a sudty. You misspelled haox. ---
**Author:** ![Indistinguishable](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/i/90ced4/32.png) [@Indistinguishable](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Indistinguishable)\ **Post date:** [October 29, 2009, 7:39pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/a-dyslexics-description-of-the-problem-a-scam/514759/53 "2009-10-29T19:39:45Z")
Also “this”. (And the URL in that link is malformed as well!) ---
**Author:** ![Alex\_Dubinsky](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/dbc845/32.png) [@Alex\_Dubinsky](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Alex_Dubinsky)\ **Post date:** [October 29, 2009, 11:31pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/a-dyslexics-description-of-the-problem-a-scam/514759/54 "2009-10-29T23:31:07Z")
Oh, graet, well a ralmibing blog psot will cetarnly put the nial in _that_ mtyh. WTF are you talking about, the principle is obviously true. > [@Indistinguishable](#): > > Snuods lkie a rceeneefre to [this](http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/000053.html) fuoams, and unlllibake, but ttalloy fsale, uprenoutspd, suiuoprs, uaeillmtty bslesaes hoax of a sudty. Why don’t you write in Wingdings, maybe that’ll prove your point. ---
**Author:** ![Indistinguishable](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/i/90ced4/32.png) [@Indistinguishable](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Indistinguishable)\ **Post date:** [October 29, 2009, 11:59pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/a-dyslexics-description-of-the-problem-a-scam/514759/55 "2009-10-29T23:59:39Z")
The principle is “obviously true” to the same extent that a precisely opposite principle saying “All that matters is that you get the internal letters correctly, but you can replace the first and last letters with whatever you want”, or principles like “All that matters is that you keep every other letter correct, and don’t turn vowels into consonants or vice versa” is obviously true. It’s been over-formalized to sound like a more specific observation than what it really is, and spread with the falsely claimed imprimatur of a non-existent academic study to sound like a more certain law of psychology than it really is. I’m not sure what you mean by your reference to Wingdings. You said normal people hardly notice if you scramble the letters in the middle of a word. For very carefully constructed examples, particularly with such small words as that there isn’t a large space of scrambled possibilities in the first place, this may be true to the extent that one easily re-interprets small typos of many kinds. However, in my post, I did nothing but the scramble the letters in the middle of words. Was it hardly noticeable? ---
**Author:** ![Zoe](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/z/a4c791/32.png) [@Zoe](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Zoe)\ **Post date:** [October 30, 2009, 7:45am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/a-dyslexics-description-of-the-problem-a-scam/514759/56 "2009-10-30T07:45:41Z")
When we are very young, a lot of imprinting and wiring of our brains takes place without our even being aware of it. If something doesn’t get wired quite like it is supposed to, that can have very important consequences later in life. Research at Peabody College (George Peabody College for Teachers) in the 1960s indicated that there is very often a direct link between whether or not a baby learns to cross crawl and whether or not she or he later develops dyslexia. Cross-crawling is moving the left arm and the right leg in synchronization and vice versa. **Hello Again** , I was nodding when you typed: > [@](#): > > 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. That’s very common. And why is it only a sometimes problem? I don’t know either. Parents and grandparents should make sure those babies learn to cross-crawl! Thomas Edison is an example of someone who learned to manage dyslexia reasonably well. That just boggles the mind! ---
**Author:** ![Alex\_Dubinsky](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/dbc845/32.png) [@Alex\_Dubinsky](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Alex_Dubinsky)\ **Post date:** [October 30, 2009, 9:36pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/a-dyslexics-description-of-the-problem-a-scam/514759/57 "2009-10-30T21:36:29Z")
> [@Indistinguishable](#): > > It’s been over-formalized to sound like a more specific observation than what it really is That may very well be an excellent point. But still, it seems if “normal” readers are confronted by letters that are actually scrambled up (and backwards?), it’s not a terrible problem. They don’t spend much time reading letter-by-letter. It’s too bad noone else has weighed in on the hypothesis that dyslexics just try too hard when reading, get nervous, lose their short-term memory, jot their eyes back and forth, analyze words letter-by-letter, and have just a very bad experience when reading. ---
**Author:** ![Alex\_Dubinsky](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/dbc845/32.png) [@Alex\_Dubinsky](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Alex_Dubinsky)\ **Post date:** [October 30, 2009, 9:37pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/a-dyslexics-description-of-the-problem-a-scam/514759/58 "2009-10-30T21:37:31Z")
P.S. Wingdings is a font in windows. ---
**Author:** ![Shot\_From\_Guns](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/ccd318/32.png) [@Shot\_From\_Guns](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Shot_From_Guns)\ **Post date:** [November 2, 2009, 3:36pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/a-dyslexics-description-of-the-problem-a-scam/514759/59 "2009-11-02T15:36:48Z")
> [@Alex\_Dubinsky](#): > > It’s too bad noone else has weighed in on the hypothesis that dyslexics just try too hard when reading, get nervous, lose their short-term memory, jot their eyes back and forth, analyze words letter-by-letter, and have just a very bad experience when reading. I think it was pretty well addressed by the examples of dyslexics simply processing things differently (e.g. in terms of orientation). The kind of problem you describe wouldn’t carry over to other kinds of spatial reasoning. ---
**Author:** ![pan1](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/e495f1/32.png) [@pan1](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/pan1)\ **Post date:** [November 2, 2009, 8:11pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/a-dyslexics-description-of-the-problem-a-scam/514759/60 "2009-11-02T20:11:22Z")
> [@CC](#): > > But, of course, just about everyone makes and has made those same types of transpositions and errors. And lots of kids remain convinced that there are two words, say, bisketti and spaghetti for the same thing for a long time. These mixups are not dyslexia. Dyslexia is a catchall term for a wide variety of significant reading problems, all of which are still somewhat mysterious to researchers. There are a number of studies that simply focus on the definition, itself, in fact. > But I guess, also, that the philosophical question that I posed in the OP won’t be addressed. Oh, well… The questions in the OP have been addressed: 1. Her awareness of her problem is not the same that as her being aware when the problem is occuring. She knows she frequently sees things upside down and backwards - but when it’s happening she is not sure if her perception is right or wrong at the time. 2. She doesn’t see/write everything upside down and backwards. She said it too simply and you interpreted it too broadly. If she auto-corrected, she’d be correcting when the dyslexia didn’t misshape the information as often as not. If she’s dyslexic she sees things flipped, backwards, rotated, and out of order but not in any one consistant way. She’s already compensating just to function near normally. 3. Several people have pointed out that dyslexia is often accompanied by other spatial issues, not all visual. Mixing up words in memorized dialogue is a common disorder among dyslexic people. As is malapropism. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/a-dyslexics-description-of-the-problem-a-scam/514759.md?page=2)