The first post covered how Dyslexia affects me when I read. It is kind of hard to explain and as such the post wasn't very long nor had a whole lot of detail. The reason for this is because unless I am reading out loud most of the time I don't notice myself making mistakes unless the sentence ends up not making sense to me. With writing in general it is a whole lot easier for me to point out and even describe how it affected me growing up. Remember this from the first part?
I don't know if it was actually my Dyslexia that caused me not to be able to work with the program (Asking my mother about it, she believes that yes Dyslexia was the problem) but for me, spelling has always been my main issue with it. I remember in the third grade that spelling became a bigger part of learning than it had in previous years. We had weekly sheets of words that we were supposed to remember how to spell and at the end of the week we would have a test. The test itself would then be self-graded and we kept score in this folder that we had on a printed out grid sheet. The tests were done with a regular pencil while the grading could only be done with blue color pencil. I would always score low on these. For all I know I might have been one of the lowest scoring ones in class.
One time I got upset with always having a low score and remember trying to cheat to bring up my score. How did I cheat you ask? Simple, I used the blue coloring pencil to write in the letters I had spelled incorrectly not realizing the entire reason my teacher insisted on the blue pencil was due to this. I ended up being tattled on by a girl I sat near and the teacher got upset with me. I asked my mother about this because I don't remember clearly what happened around this time, but she believes it was due to things such as this that I was tested for Dyslexia in the first place. Thankfully after third-grade spelling tests such as that didn't happen very often. We had worksheets but not spelling tests.
That is until seventh grade. I considered myself very unfortunate at the time to have to face my greatest enemy as far as I was concerned at the time. I probably would have gotten a grade average of an A if it weren't for the spelling tests but still managed to get a B. By then I had been on the internet for over a year role-playing on a site called Neopets. Incorrect spelling can get you laughed at on the internet or you encounter people who will correct you especially nowadays. Back then people were more forgiving yet my mother thankfully wasn't. I don't know if it was in part due to me failing the spelling tests in seventh grade or not but she made it a rule that if we, my sister and I, did not type words out correctly, used internet talk, or anything like that she cut our internet time. I took it to heart and my spelling did improve around this time.
Yet this is when I truly began to hate my mother being told to be glad for spell check. You see, the thing about spellcheck... Well first off, especially when I was in middle school, in order for spellcheck to work for you, you need a general knowledge on how to spell the word you want. The farther off on the spelling the less of a chance of getting the word you want. Even worse? Being Dyslexic as I am made it harder for me to pick the correct word especially if two words are close to the same spelling. I'll give you an example; I write Digimon Fan-Fiction which you can find via my FanFiction.net link. In it, I have an evil Digimon with the attack called Devil's Descent. Descent is not a word I use very often and as such did not know how to spell. Thus I had to rely on spell check to correct my attempt to spell it. However, I didn't end up with Descent like I wanted to... Instead, the attack ended up being Devil's Decent and was that way for a few months live on the internet before I typed it out one time and thought it didn't look right. I ended up having to use Bing to find out I had used the incorrect word. Embarrassing right? Here's even more to that. I had to look it up just now to make sure I didn't mix the two of them up while writing this.
Sometimes I mess the word up so much even when I try sounding it out spell check has no idea what I am trying to get at. It will give me words I can tell are not what I want. In cases like this, my only choice is to yet again rely on Bing. Nine times out of ten if I type the word out in Bing's search it will give me the word I was aiming for. If even that fails me than my next choice is to either use a similar word I know how to spell or try and find how to spell the word through other means. I spent over an hour one time trying to find the correct spelling for tendril once. If I remember correctly I ended up finding it by searching for similar words to tentacle... I could be wrong about that though... Continuing on.
Seventh grade was an important year for me though. It happened to be the year that I started writing stories for the first time. At first, it was because I wanted to role play on my own, but then I began to love writing. I still have a copy of the first story I began to write back then. I'm still working on writing it even though it has changed greatly since then. Writing assignments for English Class were always a favorite thing of mine to do around that time as well. Since my mother was no longer working thanks to an on the job injury she would always go over my writing to find the mistakes I made and correct it to the best of her ability. I still would see red marks on my paper, but I have a feeling she only corrected the mistakes caused by Dyslexia and nothing more. One time in seventh grade our teacher wanted us to write our own fairy tale and we were supposed to put three simile's into the paper. I had chosen the three I had wanted and had decided to rewrite a fairytale I had written in third grade for fairytale week for the assignment. Except I had forgotten to put the simile's into the story because I had become engrossed in the telling of it. My teacher enjoyed the story so much that she gave me a B minus which I was quite happy.
Then Eighth grade rolled around and something interesting happened about half way through the year. My English teacher began to teach phonics. She explained to us that when she was in elementary school she had been in a car accident and had missed this part of school herself. As such, she decided that once she had become an English teacher that she would spend a portion of the year teaching phonics in case someone happened to fall into a similar situation as her own. The thing is I honestly don't remember them teaching phonics in elementary school. I asked my mother about it and she told me they didn't in my generation and that is the reason Hooked on Phonics became a thing in the first place. I don't know if my teacher happened to know this or not but thanks to her lessons I became more proficient in spelling words than I ever had before. I still have trouble sounding out words correctly and spelling them because of it, but it is nowhere near as bad as it had been before eighth grade. You see the type of Dyslexia I have makes it to where I cannot identify diphthongs. Diphthongs are, according to Wikipedia are;
Here is the real kicker about my ability to spell out anything at all. Most of the words I know how to spell? It's a mixture of muscle memory (from typing/writing so much) and plain old memory. If I think about a word too hard there is a greater chance I will misspell something than if I just let my fingers do all the thinking. For example, I learned how to spell together not by sounding it out. I learned how to spell it in third grade when a classmate of mine taught me to break it down into to-get-her three words I had no problems spelling. Sometimes when I'm tired I will still find myself relying on this old trick to spell it correctly. It is also due to this that the later it gets the more words I spell incorrectly. It's also why if I never use a word often, such as descent, I'm almost guaranteed to misspell it. Maybe I should get one of those word a day calendars or something?
Why am I not writing anything about high school you may wonder? I didn't attend a normal high school due to health issues. While reading, writing, and spelling were a thing in high school it wasn't as clear nor focused on as in my earlier years. Thus not that important to this post.
... when they found out I was Dyslexic and my mother asked what could be done to help me their answer was a simple one, "Be glad that computers are coming out with spellcheck."What they said about being glad that computers are coming out with spellcheck now would be something I would grow to absolutely loathe. Before we get into that, however, let's start with my younger years as the issues with spellcheck wouldn't really crop up until much later. When I was little there was this Hooked on Phonics set that was shared around within my family. I don't know how it works now, but when I was a kid, this would be before kindergarten for me I believe, it was on cassette tapes and I believe some type of flash cards to go with it. My parents wanted me to use the cassette tapes and learn how to read using this program. No matter how hard I tried I just could not associate the sounds from the cassette tapes to the flash cards. It just didn't work for me.
I don't know if it was actually my Dyslexia that caused me not to be able to work with the program (Asking my mother about it, she believes that yes Dyslexia was the problem) but for me, spelling has always been my main issue with it. I remember in the third grade that spelling became a bigger part of learning than it had in previous years. We had weekly sheets of words that we were supposed to remember how to spell and at the end of the week we would have a test. The test itself would then be self-graded and we kept score in this folder that we had on a printed out grid sheet. The tests were done with a regular pencil while the grading could only be done with blue color pencil. I would always score low on these. For all I know I might have been one of the lowest scoring ones in class.
One time I got upset with always having a low score and remember trying to cheat to bring up my score. How did I cheat you ask? Simple, I used the blue coloring pencil to write in the letters I had spelled incorrectly not realizing the entire reason my teacher insisted on the blue pencil was due to this. I ended up being tattled on by a girl I sat near and the teacher got upset with me. I asked my mother about this because I don't remember clearly what happened around this time, but she believes it was due to things such as this that I was tested for Dyslexia in the first place. Thankfully after third-grade spelling tests such as that didn't happen very often. We had worksheets but not spelling tests.
That is until seventh grade. I considered myself very unfortunate at the time to have to face my greatest enemy as far as I was concerned at the time. I probably would have gotten a grade average of an A if it weren't for the spelling tests but still managed to get a B. By then I had been on the internet for over a year role-playing on a site called Neopets. Incorrect spelling can get you laughed at on the internet or you encounter people who will correct you especially nowadays. Back then people were more forgiving yet my mother thankfully wasn't. I don't know if it was in part due to me failing the spelling tests in seventh grade or not but she made it a rule that if we, my sister and I, did not type words out correctly, used internet talk, or anything like that she cut our internet time. I took it to heart and my spelling did improve around this time.
Yet this is when I truly began to hate my mother being told to be glad for spell check. You see, the thing about spellcheck... Well first off, especially when I was in middle school, in order for spellcheck to work for you, you need a general knowledge on how to spell the word you want. The farther off on the spelling the less of a chance of getting the word you want. Even worse? Being Dyslexic as I am made it harder for me to pick the correct word especially if two words are close to the same spelling. I'll give you an example; I write Digimon Fan-Fiction which you can find via my FanFiction.net link. In it, I have an evil Digimon with the attack called Devil's Descent. Descent is not a word I use very often and as such did not know how to spell. Thus I had to rely on spell check to correct my attempt to spell it. However, I didn't end up with Descent like I wanted to... Instead, the attack ended up being Devil's Decent and was that way for a few months live on the internet before I typed it out one time and thought it didn't look right. I ended up having to use Bing to find out I had used the incorrect word. Embarrassing right? Here's even more to that. I had to look it up just now to make sure I didn't mix the two of them up while writing this.
Sometimes I mess the word up so much even when I try sounding it out spell check has no idea what I am trying to get at. It will give me words I can tell are not what I want. In cases like this, my only choice is to yet again rely on Bing. Nine times out of ten if I type the word out in Bing's search it will give me the word I was aiming for. If even that fails me than my next choice is to either use a similar word I know how to spell or try and find how to spell the word through other means. I spent over an hour one time trying to find the correct spelling for tendril once. If I remember correctly I ended up finding it by searching for similar words to tentacle... I could be wrong about that though... Continuing on.
Seventh grade was an important year for me though. It happened to be the year that I started writing stories for the first time. At first, it was because I wanted to role play on my own, but then I began to love writing. I still have a copy of the first story I began to write back then. I'm still working on writing it even though it has changed greatly since then. Writing assignments for English Class were always a favorite thing of mine to do around that time as well. Since my mother was no longer working thanks to an on the job injury she would always go over my writing to find the mistakes I made and correct it to the best of her ability. I still would see red marks on my paper, but I have a feeling she only corrected the mistakes caused by Dyslexia and nothing more. One time in seventh grade our teacher wanted us to write our own fairy tale and we were supposed to put three simile's into the paper. I had chosen the three I had wanted and had decided to rewrite a fairytale I had written in third grade for fairytale week for the assignment. Except I had forgotten to put the simile's into the story because I had become engrossed in the telling of it. My teacher enjoyed the story so much that she gave me a B minus which I was quite happy.
Then Eighth grade rolled around and something interesting happened about half way through the year. My English teacher began to teach phonics. She explained to us that when she was in elementary school she had been in a car accident and had missed this part of school herself. As such, she decided that once she had become an English teacher that she would spend a portion of the year teaching phonics in case someone happened to fall into a similar situation as her own. The thing is I honestly don't remember them teaching phonics in elementary school. I asked my mother about it and she told me they didn't in my generation and that is the reason Hooked on Phonics became a thing in the first place. I don't know if my teacher happened to know this or not but thanks to her lessons I became more proficient in spelling words than I ever had before. I still have trouble sounding out words correctly and spelling them because of it, but it is nowhere near as bad as it had been before eighth grade. You see the type of Dyslexia I have makes it to where I cannot identify diphthongs. Diphthongs are, according to Wikipedia are;
Yeah... I tried to spell diphthong as "Dipthongs." When I said out loud that I had misspelled diphthongs and no wonder since it has an h after p, my mother, we're in the same room as I write this, said, "And that my dear is a diphthong."A diphthong, also known as a gliding vowel, refers to two adjacent vowel sounds occurring within the same syllable. Technically, a diphthong is a vowel with two different targets: that is, the tongue (and/or other parts of the speech apparatus) moves during the pronunciation of the vowel.
Here is the real kicker about my ability to spell out anything at all. Most of the words I know how to spell? It's a mixture of muscle memory (from typing/writing so much) and plain old memory. If I think about a word too hard there is a greater chance I will misspell something than if I just let my fingers do all the thinking. For example, I learned how to spell together not by sounding it out. I learned how to spell it in third grade when a classmate of mine taught me to break it down into to-get-her three words I had no problems spelling. Sometimes when I'm tired I will still find myself relying on this old trick to spell it correctly. It is also due to this that the later it gets the more words I spell incorrectly. It's also why if I never use a word often, such as descent, I'm almost guaranteed to misspell it. Maybe I should get one of those word a day calendars or something?
Why am I not writing anything about high school you may wonder? I didn't attend a normal high school due to health issues. While reading, writing, and spelling were a thing in high school it wasn't as clear nor focused on as in my earlier years. Thus not that important to this post.
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