In another thread, furr says that one of the tricks that helps him/her overcome the challenges of dyslexia is to type in all lowercase without punctuation, something I’d never heard of before. furr also mentioned other methods, like the use of colored type, which I’ve heard of in conjunction with glasses with colored lenses, IIRC.
I’d like to learn more, particularly about the lowercase and punctuation thing, from furr and any other folks who have some knowledge of dyslexia, first hand or otherwise.
About being dyslexic (which I am). It seems there are many types or variations. I read that most people who are dyslexic also often have ADD. Just so you know, incoherent posts can be a result of a bad day in the life of a dyslexic fool like me. Some days you could be tired or distracted and just have a difficult time putting what’s in your head down on the computer screen. I was always VERY discouraged to read, which means my vocabulary is crap. Now I have learned to enjoy reading. BTW, I can only speak for me.
I don’t know of all the methods that furr used. I’ve never read anything about using all lowercase, I suppose it could make things a lot simpler. About the colored text, does she mean ALL text colored, or just different colors to represent different moods or meaning?
When I took a course on reading instruction, I was told that it’s easier for people to read lowercase. The reason is that some letters have extensions above or below the line, making them more distinguishable. Uppercase letters are all the same size.
This reasoning applied to young children who are first learning to read. After that point, of course, most reading is in mixed case anyway.
Don’t know how helpful it will be, but…
I taught kids with all sorts of learning problems for 10 years. Not all of my students were diagnosed as dyslexic–IIRC, it’s a medical term rather than an educational one. (At least in my schools, when I taught.)
I worked with high school kids (maybe that’s why I never worked with filters, colored lenses, etc–except for one student who used a special paper I bought for him), and we focused on figuring out two things:
What works to help the student read/understand, and
What works to help others read/understand what the student produces.
Consequently, I saw all sorts of adaptations happening in early drafts of student work…lowercase, creative spellings, papers turned sideways to help with letter alignment, etc. At that stage, whatever worked was acceptable. Final drafts (there might be several steps in-between, of course), however, had to be acceptable by standard measures…up to par for a non-LD student of the same expected achievement level.
In other words, if a typed paper was due, I expected it to be typed accurately, regardless of what it looked like in its first incarnation.
like any problem/disability (i hate that word btw) how people cope or learn around it is highly individual, but there seem to be a few hard and fast ways to help with writting/reading.
lowercase seems to be one of those rules. i had my dyslexia confirmed later in life, and it was one of the few of the ‘tricks’ suggested to me by the tester. i found it worked, giving almost instant results as far as being able to read without the usual skipping and jumping all over the page.
as far as i can figure out/have been told… uppercase letters break the flow of the eye. reading along a line the brain knows thats g looks like ‘g’… suddenly you have ‘G’ its not the same shape it causes confusion. i know that when im writting by hand having to stop and remember what shape a capital letter is makes me loose my train of thought very quickly.
why make my life even more difficult by having to remember twice as many shapes and i really need.
so pretty much anything that slows or interupts the eyes flow over the text can cause problems. punctuation can be one of those things. on a more basic language understanding level many but not all dyslexics have problems with where punctuation goes.
personally i find that if i do just let myself put punctuation wherever i think its needs to go i get a sentence which makes not sense whatsoever. i embrace the idea that a little is better than more.
grammatical rules are aslo extremely hard to learn for many dyslexics, they seem simple but research suggests that due to the way we code words into the memory that they loose there meaning and become just shapes, its hard to apply grammatical rules to shapes.
for me a posting boards is an informal quick and simple form of communication. yes i can take two hours to write a post, get it spell checked and have my partner read over it for mistakes and grammatical errors but i save that kind of annoying work for my thesis, where things do have to be right.
dyslexia isnt an exact science, its mostly just glorified guess work and almost all learning specialists will tell you to try out all the tricks, pick the ones that seem to work for you and run with it.
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