The Dyslexic Advantage (27 page)

Highly interconnected and insight-based problem-solvers often benefit most when brainstorming is unstructured, relatively free of time pressure, and conducted in a relaxing environment. Very open-ended prompts like “What does this make you think of?” or “What pops into your head when I say . . . ?” often work well. Having a digital recorder or scribe to record ideas without any need for the student to write them down may also help students keep track of their ideas without derailing the creative process. Highly narrative thinkers often benefit from beginning the brainstorming process by searching for cases, examples, fables, legends, myths, or stories that particular questions or topics make them think of. Students should be allowed wide latitude to think freely during this stage of the process.

Other methods for freeing up the creativity of the student before beginning the writing project include:

When the student bogs down during the writing process, use prompts like those mentioned above. If the student is struggling to find particular words, Dr. Haynes recommends a “graduated series” of
extrinsic
and
intrinsic cues
like the following:

In general, writing tasks for dyslexic students should also be “chunked” into small, distinct steps or stages. Each step should be clearly explained and demonstrated to them, then tackled one at a time.

 

Including—and Leaving Out—the Right Details.
Many individuals with dyslexia have difficulty learning how much and what kind of detail to include in their writing. Individuals with strong I-, N-, or D-strengths may include excessive or irrelevant details because they often see so many connections and levels of meaning between ideas. For students who have difficulty narrowing down their ideas, it often helps to decide in advance what the focus of their writing will be. One useful strategy for limiting focus is to use the “5W/H” approach, where the student decides which of the potential questions (i.e., who, what, when, where, why, or how) to answer and which to ignore.

At the other end of the “detail spectrum,” dyslexic individuals with either especially strong verbal imagery and/or particular weaknesses in word retrieval or verbal output often include too few details. This can be either because they “see” so much detail in their heads that they forget how little they've communicated to their audience or because it takes so much effort for them to put their thoughts into words that they experience working memory overload before they can get everything down on paper. Students with problems of this kind often benefit from reading their work aloud or being asked to form a mental picture of their subject using only the words on the page.

Reading written work aloud also has other benefits. Law professor and dyslexic David Schoenbrod—who has written four highly regarded books on environmental law and legislation—shared a story that illustrates these benefits: “I had a lot of trouble learning to write. In high school I was assigned to write one thousand words every weekend, and I had a lot of trouble getting finished. My father was an excellent writer, and he was left shaking his head. I labored at writing until a law school professor had us students write short articles about the law in the manner of, say,
The New Yorker
, and then read them aloud to the seminar. That way, we heard our clunkers and might eventually acquire the skill of ‘hearing' them even when reading silently to ourselves. This made writing an extension of talking rather than reading. What a relief.”

One potential limitation to this “self-proofing” method is that the dyslexic writer's brain often initially “sees” what it thinks it's written rather than what's really on the page. Using a pen or a finger to “tick off” each word read as it is read, or getting the assistance of someone else who can read the work aloud, can eliminate this problem. So can the “read-aloud” (text-to-speech) technologies we discussed in the last chapter.

We sometimes encounter one other rather surprising source of diminished detail in some students with dyslexia. That source is a misunderstanding about the point of school essays. Several dyslexic students have told us they write short essays because they don't like to tell teachers things that the teacher already knows. So they avoid restating facts they learned in school and include only information the class hasn't discussed. These students need to understand that the point of school essay writing isn't to teach the teacher but to write as if trying to teach another student who knows nothing about the topic.

Before moving on we want to stress once more that there's absolutely no reason to push students with dyslexia to write at the paragraph and essay level too quickly. If a student with dyslexia is still mastering sentence-level or single-paragraph writing in middle school, that's okay. Keep working at that level before trying longer papers. Many teachers and parents worry that students will “miss the boat” if they don't develop essay-level writing skills early on. However, the danger is much greater that dyslexic students will give up on writing altogether before they have a chance to “grow into” their talents. Many of the individuals we interviewed for this book were considered poor writers by their teachers in college—including hugely successful novelists Anne Rice and Vince Flynn—yet they now make their living preparing highly polished prose.

Just as with reading, educators often disagree about the use of technological accommodations for students who are struggling to write. Some believe that all schoolwork must be handwritten. Others allow keyboarding for certain students but deny other accommodations like oral dictation or oral testing. In addressing these hotly contested issues, our choices may be clarified if we consider the
point
of writing.

Writing allows us to share our thoughts with others in a form that's easy to store and transmit. Writing sharpens our thinking by allowing us to elaborate, explain, and develop our ideas to a greater degree than most of us can do orally. Writing also imposes a greater demand for precision and clarity because it prevents us from “slurring over” our structural and conceptual difficulties as we do when speaking by using facial expressions, gestures, or postures to complete the meaning of our sentence fragments.

These considerations point to several important benefits of writing. The most important of these benefits are the chances writing provides to develop and refine ideas, and its demands for precision and clarity.

Writing by hand is clearly not essential for receiving any of these benefits. So long as your words can be accurately stored and shared, the physical process by which you store those words should be relatively unimportant.
⁶
In fact, for many students with dyslexia, handwriting is more an impediment than an aid to written communication. When writers haven't yet mastered the automatic formation of letters, spelling, or other skills, handwriting takes up valuable working memory resources that could be better used for more important aspects of writing, like forming thoughts or using proper grammar and syntax. Insisting that students who struggle with handwriting should do all their work by hand is simply unreasonable, unproductive, and when carried to extremes, deeply unkind.

This doesn't mean that students who struggle with handwriting shouldn't practice to improve their handwriting. On the contrary, dyslexic students who struggle with handwriting should practice every day using the techniques we've described, so their handwriting will eventually become more automatic.
But students whose handwriting is not yet automatic should learn handwriting and written communication as two separate subjects
. Handwriting practice involves forming letters, writing words, and using written conventions. Writing volves forming letters, writing words, and using written conventions. Writing practice involves constructing sentences, paragraphs, and discourses (essay, story), and for students with severe handwriting difficulties this is usually best done using keyboarding (if possible) or dictation.

Keyboarding has many benefits for dyslexic students besides making their writing easier to read, so it can actually be valuable for all individuals with dyslexia—whether or not they have difficulty writing by hand. For students who are even modestly proficient with typing, keyboarding requires less working memory than handwriting. As a result, more working memory resources are left available for other aspects of writing. Cut-and-paste functions also make editing and rewriting easier, which is important since individuals with dyslexia almost always need to proof and polish their work. By lowering the effort needed to revise, word processing makes it dramatically easier for individuals with dyslexia to produce documents they can be proud of and that will earn higher marks from their instructors.

Word processing programs with an interactive spell-check function—especially programs that are geared for dyslexic students—are also very helpful. As Blake Charlton recalled of his middle school years, “I was given a calculator and spell-check for everything, and almost overnight I went from just barely passing my exams to being very far up on the curve.”

Not only do these programs help dyslexic students reduce spelling errors, but when used consistently they actually teach individuals with dyslexia to spell better. Spell-checkers provide immediate feedback on spelling mistakes—which is most valuable for producing lasting change and learning. They also focus their feedback on words that students actually use. We've often seen remarkable improvements in the spelling of dyslexic students who regularly use spell-check—even if they've made little progress with more direct and traditional forms of spelling instruction.

Word processing programs that are especially helpful for students with dyslexia also provide functions like grammar checking, word prediction functions that “guess” the word the student is trying to spell, read-aloud dictionaries that pronounce highlighted words and state their meanings, and oral text-to-speech (or read-back) functions that “tell” students what they've written. While even standard word processing programs like Microsoft Word come equipped with some of these functions, other programs have been designed to be particularly useful—and user-friendly—for individuals with dyslexia. We've listed some of the best of these programs in Appendix A.

There are two more kinds of technologies that many individuals with dyslexia find helpful for important writing needs. The first is speech-to-text software, which allows the writer to orally dictate into a computer microphone and then the program translates his or her speech into printed text. We've found these programs to be very helpful for individuals beyond mid adolescence, although younger students typically have difficulty making them work well and generally do better dictating to a parent, tutor, or other scribe.

The second form of technology helps with note taking—a task that's often especially challenging for students with dyslexia. While recorders have long been the standard option for students who struggle to take notes, one more recent and especially creative system combines a special paper notebook and an mp3 recorder to create an information capture system that allows students to take highly functional notes with only a minimum of writing. Many of our students have been quite successful using this product, which its manufacturer, Livescribe, calls a smartpen. See Appendix A for more on this and the speech-to-text tools mentioned above.

Ultimately, these accommodations are helpful only if students agree to use them, and unfortunately many students with dyslexia reject accommodations for fear of looking different or of being accused by classmates of cheating. Brown University graduate and dyslexia advocate David Flink described to us his discomfort as a young student using a laptop in class. “As a kid with dyslexia, I was different always, and that laptop was just one more mark on me after so many others that said I was broken and I couldn't do things the way everyone else did. It made me feel so much less resilient. Even though I felt empowered with my laptop, I also felt like I was somehow cheating and breaking the rules. In the end, though, I decided I was still willing to ‘break the rules' and use the laptop, because it was better to be a smart kid with a laptop than a dumb kid without one. I always knew that I could lay down my laptop and pass as not dyslexic, but then I'd fail.”