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CallaFirestormBW -> RE: Spelling/Grammar (again?) (7/18/2009 9:57:34 AM)
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quote:
I have never in my life met a person who would look at a lower case letter and see it as a capital, or who saw nonexistent punctuation marks.
Then you've never seen my son, a moderate/severe dyslexic, who sees letters inverted and sees capital letters as a completely different alphabet. (In other words, 'A' and 'a' are not different versions of the same letter, to him, but completely different letters) so if he learned a word first with a capital letter, it will -always- have a capital letter... but if he learned it first with a lower-case letter, he won't put in a capital letter, because, to him, that is a completely DIFFERENT word.
Even more interesting is my companion, who has a similar issue with both capitalization and -fonts-... so to her, capital letters and lower case letters are a different alphabet... but so are words written in, say, Times New Roman versus the same word written in Arial... and even words written in bold-face or italic don't look like the same word to her as the word written in normal font.
My son's situation is further complicated by whether he learned the word from reading or from a spelling list. If he learned it from reading, it is automatically attached to whatever punctuation immediately followed it, whether that punctuation is correct for its current use or not. For example, the previous word, 'not' a the end of the other sentence, had he learned it from reading the word, would now and forever more be 'not.', regardless of when he used it, and it is a major effort to re-train himself in more effective grammar and spelling techniques. Not to mention that he routinely reverses and inverts letters (not the same thing... reversal is swapping the letters around. Inversion is flipping the letter upside down, so 'b' becomes 'p' and 'd' becomes 'g', or 's' becomes 'z'.)
I am -extremely- picky about grammar and spelling. I grew up with mild/moderate dyslexia and discalculia (flipping numbers) and my parents pushed me and pushed me to learn, look things up, and make certain of the words I used. Even now, when I get tired, I still both invert and reverse letters and numbers, more in reading than in writing, but it's always been that way for me, and is why I am a -mild/moderate- dyslexic and not a moderate/severe dyslexic like my son or my companion. I think my son does a lot better because we genuinely pushed him to work very hard at his language, but his dyslexia is much more severe than mine. We always told him that it would be hard, but if he was willing to let people see his command of communication, even though his spelling was poor, that people would see that he wasn't ignorant or uneducated... just challenged. So far, that has been true. I hope that there are very few people like the author of the OP who would castigate someone for attempting to use language to its best advantage just because they couldn't necessarily get the letters in the right order.
Dame Calla
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