Over winter break I decided to venture into my garage to do some much needed purging of old stuff. I came across a huge box filled with all the letters I’d written to my grandparents throughout my life. If the sheer volume of letters is any indication of my love and adoration for my grandparents, it is clear that I loved them a lot. For their 50th wedding anniversary I wrote them a special note along with a colorful drawing (see below). I love seeing things like this because they truly exemplify the writing of a student with dyslexia. I was 11 years old when I wrote this. I obviously wrote it without supervision and what you can’t tell is that I printed it on paper that I had ripped out of my sketchpad and then fed into my printer. I love these little details because they show my true desire to write something from the heart and on my own.
If you explore my writing, you will notice that my use of punctuation is indicative that I had no understanding of grammar, my use of capitalization is random which is something I see all the time with my dyslexic students, and lastly, I spelled the majority of the words incorrectly (including my grandmother’s name) as I had zero knowledge of spelling rules or patterns or of how to decode and encode words. And to top it all off, I asked them not to read it aloud. I remember always feeling so embarrassed by my writing and the complete humiliation that followed when someone read something I’d written out loud.
Quite often, parents of my students send me examples of their child’s writing just like the card I wrote for my grandparents. It is usually followed by comments of concern over how many words are misspelled or misused. I’m posting this precious letter to my grandparents to show that it is quite common to see a lot of mistakes. I will also say that with proper remediation, spelling improves, grammar improves and hopefully one’s confidence climbs; however, even with all of the proper steps taken to help someone with dyslexia, don’t expect perfection. I’ve come a long way since writing this letter. The biggest differences that I’ve noticed for myself are that I spell words correctly more often than I spell them incorrectly and I read at a much faster pace. With that being said, I make spelling errors all the time and it isn’t that I don’t know the difference, it’s that my brain can’t detect them in the moment. This is simply where people with dyslexia will need extra understanding, a lack of judgment, and someone to proofread.