Last Updated on October 10, 2023 by Editorial Team
What are your first reactions to seeing the picture above? Certainly, you will feel like throwing the book away at once, or you will rush to an ophthalmologist to check what has gone wrong with your eyes. Now, compound this effect on a daily basis each time the words or letters appear in front of you. What you can imagine is a brief introduction to the answer to the question of what reading and writing may feel like to a dyslexic person. Actually, difficulty in reading and writing is just one of the many Dyslexia Examples of types.
Dyslexia, as you all know, is a learning difficulty disorder. The brain is not able to make the shape of words and letters the way it should making it almost impossible for the dyslexic person to read or write like a normal person does.
If you come across a copy that shows the following signs, you are looking into the work that a dyslexic might have done:
- Mixing up a sequence of letters
- Very poor handwriting
- Distorted words and numbers
- Different spellings for the same word
- Missing out the letter
- Adding extra letter sometimes, for example, writing ‘whent’ instead of ‘went’
- Writing mirror images of letters means writing b for d and p for q and vice versa
In short, a copy full of red marks from a teacher. Mentioned above are some of the dyslexia examples pertaining to the writing pattern.
Coming to the reading part, here is what the dyslexia examples of reading look like:
- Very slow reading
- Struggling to utter the word
- Not able to reiterate when asked what the child just read
- Missing out words or letters while reading
An empathetic approach towards such children may help in knowing what kind of feelings they go through. Some of the feelings that dyslexics shared in research interviews or confided in parents are discussed in the following sections.
1. Feeling of punishment
We, human beings, are known for the capability to write and read. It is a higher level of literacy or conventional literacy. The natural instinct of a human child will be to scribble and draw. It is emergent literacy. The child with learning difficulty tends to juggle between the two, and thus, the notebook looks like common dyslexia examples demonstrated through a few distorted words and pictures.
Thus, the dyslexic child is normally perceived as an inattentive child unless and until it receives the proper diagnosis, and eventually, help. So, what does writing feel like to dyslexic? A punishment, to say the least. They are sure to find ways to avoid doing it in order to not sound dumb, which they actually are not. Their intelligence has nothing to do with their reading and writing abilities.
2. Feeling lost
It is a natural calling of any parent to send the child to school for early education. The child is sent to school or preschool normally at the age of 3 to 4. Such a small child is not able to communicate, for obvious reasons, that there is a problem with the ability to learn reading or writing. Peer pressure falls on them as a bigger force.
In a desperate attempt to keep up with the pace of other students, to feel loved and accepted, they try harder, pushing their limits and ultimately giving it all up. They start feeling lost and also start avoiding attention towards themselves. So, the way you will feel in a Japanese country without a guide or knowledge about the language, they feel the same when they are asked to read or write.
3. Feeling of confusion
People may show signs of Dyslexia examples for a major part of their lives, but some seem to have gotten over it. Many students doing well in their studies were diagnosed with it even in their twenties during their college years. They share that there is a constant juggle of words that happens in front of their eyes when they try to read words.
Words morph into something else, a poor association of words with the sounds and other related Dyslexia examples leave such people quite confused.
4. Feeling frustrated
The performance pattern of a person suffering from dyslexia varies on a day-to-day basis. Sometimes, it can show poles apart results within a gap of hours too. Since the problem of dyslexia does not allow the patients to keep things in mind or tend to forget the association of sound with words or numbers they learned, they naturally feel frustrated. Eventually, they do not want to try anymore.
5. Headache and nervousness
Though not a direct effect of dyslexia, due to the stress and frustration caused by trying to read and write, a dyslexic child may complain of headaches. Not being able to keep up with the expectations leads to feelings of frustration and they try to avoid these activities. Pushing the brain to do something it is not wired for leads to stress manifesting into headaches.
When constantly pestered, dyslexic children tend to go into their cocoons. They become a bit socially phobic and show signs of nervousness when asked to read or write.
6. Mental exhaustion
The combined result of all the points mentioned above is mental exhaustion. The process of reading and writing becomes too much to handle and the students tend to feel exhausted trying to do it, much sooner than the other people of the same age group.
Most importantly, when mishandled, it can be the cause of depression too!
To conclude,
Many researchers have put forth their research outcomes in order to guide people who are dyslexics or dealing with such people so that they know where and how to look for solutions and also how to arrive at the solutions. Since it is quite clear from the picture and pointers above that reading and writing for a dyslexic is not going to be a cakewalk, the teachers and parents have to work a way around to ensure that the person is able to get his share of education basis the intelligence he naturally has.
An engineer, Maths expert, Online Tutor and animal rights activist. In more than 5+ years of my online teaching experience, I closely worked with many students struggling with dyscalculia and dyslexia. With the years passing, I learned that not much effort being put into the awareness of this learning disorder. Students with dyscalculia often misunderstood for having just a simple math fear. This is still an underresearched and understudied subject. I am also the founder of Smartynote -‘The notepad app for dyslexia’,