I sketched this to show solidarity with those of us who find words a challenge. I use ‘dyslexia’ as a carpetbag word to refer to the whole raft of difficulties attached to the written word. For instance, I have little difficulty in reading. But writing is a different matter. I think of it as mild dysgraphia. The first draught of anything I write - as now - is hesitant, lacks rhythm, has many repeated words, misspellings, and all in all is a general lumpy mess out of which I hew and hammer what I really want to say.“Write as you speak!” is a phrase I have heard often. “well, if you sayso. Erum, yeswell, it was while I was…’mm, writing about speech, - sorry I’ll start again.
I think that that those who offer the ‘write as you speak’ kind of advice' must talk differently to the way I do, that is, full of hesitations, blurring, all accompanied by lots of body and facial language - for which there is no written alternative except in the form of stage directions, or the use of punctuation marks. But these are hardly subtle.
I begin a blogpost, as I am doing now in ‘Word’ so that I can check the spelling. When I am reasonably satisfied with what I have written I shall transfer it first to ‘WordPad’ saving it as ‘Richtext’ before moving it on to the blog - where you now read it.
I once met a dyslexic psychologist whose interest was in helping children to read and write. In his experience he found that dyslexics divide into those who avoid the use of the written word at every opportunity and those who are fascinated by them, written or read. There’s a character in Bleak House by Charles Dickens who props up copies of single letters from the alphabet all round his shop. He does this because they puzzle him. I think this is the first example in literature of dyslexia.
My ear is, and always has been, the arbiter when it comes to spelling. The word ‘raspberry’ springs to mind from when I struggled with it in primary school. I had been brought up in Birmingham, in the midlands of England for the first 8 years of my life by a Yorkshire father and a Derbyshire mother. Since going to The Central School of Speech and Drama in London in the early 50s I have had in my head at least four different sound patterns for that particular word. I refer to it especially because it has the sound of my name embedded within it. Had I been taught phonetics, my spelling would have been perfect in all four dialects as, roughly: razbriz, rasbuuriz, rasbarries and the BBC raspberries i.e (approximately) raahspriz.
I once acted as a guinea pig for my partner, a psychologist, who wanted practice in giving various psychological tests. What surprised us both was that I failed every one of the questions put to me in picture form.
We came to the conclusion that the well-intentioned person who had designed the picture questions must have thought that pictures are constructed like formal sentences that can be ‘read’ in only one way. But I look at pictures quite differently. In fact, I sometimes catch myself out trying to read a page of a book in the way that I look at a picture, and cannot, for a split second, understand why I do not understand it! Sometimes I get as much pleasure from the patterns of spaces between words as I do the story itself.
To get a tick from me and not a cross in the test a picture had to have that extra something that cannot be described in words. Otherwise why bother to print a drawing in the first place? Thus it was that not one of the drawings got my tick - except one. That portrayed a table with three legs where four in a three dimensional world would have been required to keep it upright. To that I gladly gave a tick because it was witty and I liked the way the whole picture had been placed on the page. I wonder how many strokes of the cane I would have got in the old days for such silliness.
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