Every Monday, when he does the “Headlines” segment on the Tonight Show, he states “I’m dyslexic”. Yet he reads long paragraphs without any problem. Why does he say that? Does he think it’s funny? It isn’t.
it’s a joke
lighten up man
It’s not a joke. He’s listed on every dyslexia site as a famous person with the problem.
I’m dyslexic and I can read full paragraphs with no problem.
Can’t spell for shit, my goal is to get a word close enough for spell check. I also twist shit up if I just glance at it rather than concentrate on it. Though / thought country / county are a couple of examples of words I twist up.
Also it was years after I learned to print that I understood that the slant in an N goes this way \ not this way /. Opposite problem with Z.
I haven’t watched it for a while, but I never remember hearing this
Dyslexia is not illiteracy. Dyslexics can learn to read very well, it just takes a lot more effort and practice, and sometimes special techniques and strategies.
I’m not a regular viewer of “The Tonight Show”, so couldn’t he have help from staff as well? (Is it pre-planned?)
I’m dyslexic, and while I couldn’t read even a birthday card with the pressure of people watching me do it, I could easily memorize a block of text and just use the first line on a prompter to keep my place.
Actually I find paragraphs much easier than a single line of text. The other lines sort of keep things in place, but one line all by itself gets jumpy.
Billboards are a nightmare.
It’s one reason he has always used cue cards instead of a teleprompter. Or, at least, he did back the last time I heard him mention it–his cue card guy would sometimes be shown. But that was before he got the the 9:00 show, so it’s been a while.
And of course the show is preplanned. How can a show that has writers not be preplanned?
No talk shows use teleprompters. The cameras are too far from the stage, and the host has to switch cameras frequently.
Apparently Craig Ferguson uses a teleprompter for something (I know his monologues aren’t entirely scripted so maybe it just shows his outline). According to IMDb, someone named Lynette D. Nelson is its operator.
Good point. Craig does stand very close to the camera for his monologue. Other talk shows have the camera too far from the stage, though.
I’ve noticed that the cards with the “Headlines” clips on them are larger on one side than the other. Making the text larger is a coping technique for dyslexia. Using color overlays also helps some people.
My daughter is dyslexic, and hated to read when she was younger. However, I had her tutored, and also worked with her a lot, and now she really loves reading.
She has even taught herself Japanese out of books. And she does read Japanese (kanji and romanji) in both books and manga.
Dyslexia, in both type and severity, is a very subjective condition. I am dyslexic. Not all of us see letters flipping around like an insane eye chart. (I mean, I don’t, but my girlfriend in high school did.)
I had two teachers talk to me or my parents about the possibility of my having a learning disability - probably some issue with phonemes rather than dyslexia - due to my inability to spell, but it was never really pursued because they were under the impression that you can’t have an LD and get reading comprehension scores several grade levels higher than average.
At any rate, I have to look to see if there’s an R every time I encounter country or county, and though I’ve learned to spell a lot of words through memorization and other tricks (such as realizing that their has the word “the” in it, many words like license that have a c and s have the c first, and the straight parts a and e face each other in the name Michael) I still haven’t found a way to figure our pre/per words, because sounding them out doesn’t help. Precent? Percent? Preform, perform… Both sound plausible enough. I had problems figuring out if words are spelled with Ds or Ts, or Cs or Ts as well, though by now I’ve memorized most of those.
So I think it’s perfectly possible for Leno to have come up with ways to cope, too.
(Isnret tstaesels jkoe hree)
In his book “Leading with my Chin” he talks about his dyslexia. He didn’t get good grades and his high school advisor told him straight out that college wasn’t for him. Having a learning disability was/is no joke for him.
I’ve noticed that Jay has a noticeable lisp too. He’s said in his book that his degree is in speech therapy. It makes me wonder if his lisp was much worse when he was a kid.
I spent many many years telling my parents I knew something was wrong with me (this was before the internet), explaining to them that I can read 10 pages of a book and have no idea what I read, telling them that I can’t concentrate on my homework etc…At some point I ran across something about ADD and started reading up on it. I explained it to my parents and begged them to take my to a psychiatrist. Nope, they said, you can’t possibly have ADD, sure you have a hard time concentrating on homework, but plug in a video game or get a model rocket and your eyes won’t leave your work for 6 hours straight. You just won’t concentrate on things you don’t want to do.
That seemed reasonable. Years later I found out that Hyper-Concentration is one of the symptoms of ADD. I got my own psych when i learned that, got on meds, learned to study, watched grades improve.
Anyways, my point is, just because someone doesn’t exhibit the symptoms you believe to be relevant to the problem, or hell, if they do things that are the opposite of what you believe they should be doing (Jay Leno says he’s dyslexic but I see him reading just fine) doesn’t make it true. Not everyone exhibits every symptom for every problem. Not everyone has the same severity and most importantly, most people without the issue really don’t know much about it other then what they’ve heard on TV.