In historical/genealogical records I come across this all the time: a person can read but they’re not able to write. I suppose that growing up in 20th century First World the two are just so basically interwoven it’s hard to understand how you can do one but not the other. Other than not having hands, what would prevent a person who can recognize text and spell from being able to create it?
Never actually being taught to make the letters? It takes years for children to learn to write at all legibly, even at the age when they’re most adaptable to new skills.
My son can recognize words but has really severe problems placing the same words on a blank sheet of paper. He has been to a lot of specialists and is extremely disabled with the written language. It is a struggle and he has made improvments over the years, but still has problems. BTW his IQ is about 127 and math gave him no problems at all. His reading skills simply waaaay outstripped his writing skills. Sadly no one has ever adequately explained why, it just is.
Maybe their reading is just enough to get the gist of things, but they can’t write, because they don’t really have a full comprehension. I’m like that with Spanish now. I was fluent back in high school, but not anymore. I can read a bit (and understand spoken Spanish a bit), but only because I get the gist of things and not because I truly understand every word. If I try to write, though, it takes a lot of effort. To write in a way that someone else would understand, I have to come up with full sentences. I just can’t do that well enough to claim I can still write in Spanish.
Put it this way…my neighbors only speak Spanish, and when my dog died, they asked if I was going to bury his body in my garden. I wanted to tell him that I had him cremated and was planning to scatter the ashes in the garden, but I couldn’t come up with the words. In between what words I did come up with and a lot of hand gestures, I convinced them that I had mummfied my dog’s body in my fireplace.
Ummm. No. I could understand enough of their words to grasp the misunderstanding and what they thought I was trying to say. I could not produce enough words strung together coherently enough to straighten things out, or to even let them know they misunderstood. To this day, they think I mummified my dog. Oh well.
It would be the same with reading and writing. I can read things I would never attempt to write.
Reading only requires recognizing words or being able to guess the meaning of some of them from their placement and use.
Writing requires already knowing the words and their proper use and placement, not to mention spelling.
I got nothin’ for the OP but this cracked me up.
It basically comes down to being able to recognise patterns more easily than re-creating them. At one point, I could read 100 or so Chinese characters, but I could only write 16. By the same token, I can recognise what a rose looks like, but I could not draw a recognisable one.
Ask any first grade teacher. Teaching a child to read is very different from teaching a child to write, although there is some relation between the two skills.
Ed
“But sir, why do you wish me to wallop your horse with a parachute?” remains my best translaton of an English speaker mangling Spanish (or possibly French - it was a long time ago). Such a person probably has an easier time writing it than speaking it.
The difference between writing and reading is the difference between what we (former) psych students call ‘recognition’ and ‘recall.’ ‘Recognition’ is what you use on multiple choice tests; you use your knowledge and possibly your skills to choose (or remember) the best choice available. Essay tests, which are ‘recall,’ are much harder. There, the only thing you have to trigger your memory is the wording of the question; otherwise you’re entirely on your won. Some kind of problems you can figure out from scratch, but most are about knowledge that you’ve crammed into your head, and all the cleverness in the world isn’t going to tell you what the capital of Ooky-Pooky land is. However, if you’re given a choice of choosing between George and Bob, you may very well be able to say "Bob! That’s it! :smack: "
It’s kind of the same thing with reading and writing. You may be able to recognize letters when you see them but not be able to remember them well enough to create them on a blank slate, so to speak, particularly if you’re not a big recreational reader.
Reading involves your eyes and your brain. I learned to read at age 4.
Writing involves your eyes, your brain and your eye-hand coordination. I have minimal eye-hand coordination. I learned to write cursive at age 8. To this day, my printing is illegible.
I would imagine that learning the physical skill of writing was a lot more difficult in the days of quill pens, as well.
I understand that learning to write in Chinese remains very difficult, at least in the traditional style.
Hi all…
some interesting theories here that make sense once you hear em.
What about the flip side?
Somebody who can write very well, but has a very hard time reading. I would suspect that is much more rare, but given the mysteries of our mind it would surprise me that that occurs as well.
And I wonder what THAT would say about their (and our own to some extent) thought processes.
Blll
I can enjoy looking at the Mona Lisa but I can’t draw for shit.
There is a specific kind of brain damage (I can’t think of the name of it right now) that results in this. Otherwise, I don’t think this happens.
ETA: It’s in the speech center of the brain. It’s similar to the kind of damage that allows a person to speak language intelligibly but not understand it.