Well, as I'm the person who dared pull up Jonny on his spelling, despite him being dyslexic (an act on par with pushing Stephen Hawking down a flight of stairs), why don't I get the ball rolling?

It may surprise some of you to learn that I've got a bit of history about calling people out over their spelling and grammar. I'm not *that* pedantic, but it does bother me when people repeatedly get the basics wrong.

Over the years I've seen the response, "I'm dyslexic" a great deal. It's a hard comeback to refute, you can't ask somebody to post a scan of their dyslexia licence.

Speaking as somebody who's not an expert on dyselxia at all (in fact I know nearly nothing about it) some things bother me about a lot of those claiming dyslexia...

- They tend to get small, simple words correct, but repeatedly misspell longer, more complex words.

- They tend to consistently misspell words. Not trying to pick on him, but Jonny kept using 'astronaught', which is neither correct nor phonetically spelled. He also changed to the correct spelling half-way through the sun nicking thread, after the correctly spelled word had been used by others in the thread.

- Common mistakes - your/you're, they're/there/their, to/too, etc. - are also common in their posts. To me this suggests ignorance of language basics, rather than dyslexia.

Now I'm perfectly willing to be educated about the above, and told that they are all symptoms of dyslexia, but, at present, I don't believe they are.

Andrew, to be perfectly honest...

if it bugs you that much, why come on here?

my spelling is sh*t, im well aware of it.
i dont hide it, it does not bother me.

you can read it if not, then who care's.

all your doing is sitting there saying some people cant spell, learn how to spell or i can teach you.

who are you to say what peoples conditions are true or not?

Edited: No personal attacks please!

Here we go again

I don't agree with you, Marco. If you don't like threads about dyslexia, don't read them, but it is a perfectly legitimate, and interesting, topic.

Andrew, you must be aware that you also make repeated spelling errors on certain words. We probably all do to varying degrees. So the first thing is to acknowledge that we are all human, and all make mistakes.

Having said that, I fully agree with you that much of what is often passed off as dyslexia is rather the result of laziness, lack of motivation, etc. Marco has just told us it doesn't matter and he doesn't care, for example.

In response to Jim on the other thread, I just wanted to emphasise that my comments referred to statistics, not to individual cases. So countering with the case of your wife doesn't really achieve much. I still claim what I claimed there. Much of what passes for dyslexia is nothing of the kind. And many people with dyslexia are successful in other fields which do not demand good writing skills, but just because that is the direction they have had to take. Statistically.

My spelling is very poor and F7 is my favourite key on the keyboard.

Does that make me dyslexic, don't know, don't care.

What I don't accept is people who pick holes in other people simply to prove a point, get a reaction or look bigger than they are.

I do know people who have been proven to have various levels of dyslexia, but I don't tend to make a song and dance about it.........

I'll have 10 Benson and Hedges

It's a complicated issue. As I posted in the Twilite Zone (or UFO thread as debunkers call it), I'm familiar with dyslexia as a number of my nearest and dearest suffer with it. I also believe that it is used as a catch-all by some people who do not find spelling easy and/or have never been particularly interested in getting it right. Spelling and grammar are ever-changing and the mores of the time dictate how much importance we attach to getting things "right". I personally am quite anal about it, which works well in partnership with MrsC, as she writes for a number of publications and I get to proof-read her work. However, although I don't like poor spelling and grammar caused by laziness, I accept that it is often due rather to a lack of emphasis on these skills in schools over the last 20 years or so. If people have not been taught the "importance" of doing something correctly, then it is understandable that they won't make much of an effort at it. I also love language used skilfully for its own sake, but I equally get that for some people it is casting pearl before swine.

Enforcer, I agree that my wife's case proves nothing statistically, but I think it serves as an example that dyslexic people in my immediate circle (as well as others I know of) do seem to be creative, possibly more than the norm. Whether this is because of needing to find alternative careers or because of a natural leaning I don't know. In my stepson's case, he is also extremely talented at distraction, a skill he has developed as a defence mechanism to obfuscate his problems at school with literacy.

I think I have a very specific type of dyslexia that might not have been discovered yet.

When I'm hand writing something I often miss off the first letter of a word when the previous word ends with the same letter.

So, for instance, "I have large ars" (instead of "ears") It only ever happens when I'm hand writing things which to be fair isn't that often. And I instantly know that I've done it.

in all fairness, i appoliges for my last post.

didnt think before i typed.

this thread will make interesting reading into levels of dyslexia.

Andrew, no hard feelings mate.
just a touchy subject for me...

i find my issues are general spelling and mixing letters up as i type.

the normaly comes out as teh and stuff like that.
i try to sort it before hand but i also seem to miss read it and my mind corrects it for me.

I do find that my fingers sometimes type faster than my brain. One thing I find is, as Nobby, that a word will either merge with a previous word if it ends in the same letter, or it will start with the starting letter of the next word.

e.g. wnext word

Though in many, probably most cases, my internal censor will see it and I'll correct it before the spelling checker gets a chance.

I'm more likely to write a sentence and change my mind half way through and thereby miss complete words...

Marco, nobody was attacking you personally; I'm interested as to why it makes you so angry and upset...

Would you accept that if your spelling and grammar were better that it might make what you write easier for others to understand?

As the resident dyslexic... with it being that prevalent I was told I had this at primary school and then reassessed at secondary. its something I would gladly be rid of. I would rather be a lazy picked on grammar hater because I could at least do something about it.

You cannot believe the frustration it causes when you have to change a sentence because you cannot figure out how to spell a word and do not have a spell checker. What's even more frustrating is I know how the word should look, even with out a spell checker its not as if I don't know I haven't spelt something correctly.

For the most part society has become a little more accepting but its still pretty easy to make my self look incredibly uneducated and completely inept with in a few short sentences.

Any how, I just try to crack on with it, its not like its going to kill me. I did read a study some time back showing there was a correlation between autoimmune diseases and the occurrence of dyslexia

Sadly I have only seen snipits of the old studies and cannot find anything newer

http://archneur.ama-assn.org/cgi/content/abstract/47/8/919

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0028393290901225

So basically people who are not proven to have dyslexia are ignorant or lazy? You're term of basic English may vary among all of us dyslexia or not.

This is a public forum of varying ages, education levels, nationalities and walks of life. Peoples English will different and may not be up to you're impeccable standards.

If people make the same reoccurring common mistakes maybe its simply a problem word etc that they have.
As long as its readable who cares that much? We are human and mistakes can and do happen.

This thread is not about dyslexia but more about peoples English on the forum and there reasons. Except for Andrew there is no excuse for it.

As a public forum we have to be flexible with everything to accommodate each other, otherwise we won't have a forum.
It will just be you and a selected few Andrew.

I much agree with barnacle about typing much quicker than thinking though. It is a common trait for me unfortunately in which my interpretation on the screen isn't quite what I am thinking.

I understand sections of Andrews argument of peoples branding of dyslexia but in the other hand people you are branding people who are not as ignorant or lazy.

Sam you do great and don't have any problems reading any posts. Would never distinguished your posts against others.

Now I'm thinking you're doing it on purpose....

@Marco - no offence taken and sorry if I caused any, this is a touchy subject.



My spelling is pretty shocking, and always has been, although I can generally tell when I've spelled something wrong and check it.

For reasons of idiocy I can't work out how to make IE underline words I misspell in forum replies, so I tend to have a Word document open in the background, to type in any suspect words.

At the moment it looks like this:





Possibly this is part of what annoys me - I am always aware that I will be judged not only on what I post, but also on the correctness of my post, so I make an effort.

Anyway, back on topic...a month or so ago I read The psychopath test, one of the closing chapters of which deals with the huge rise in childhood bipolar disorder diagnoses in the States, despite there being a large body of doctors who say that there's no evidence that the condition exists.

I don't doubt that dyslexia exists and is a very real problem for some people, but to what extent is it used to diagnose/excuse children who simply aren't very bright, don't pay attention in school, or aren't gifted with strong literacy skills?

With a PC when one is willing to put the time in and make multiple edits its possible to look almost normal. Give me a pen and paper and ask me to write a letter and I would make Andrew weep (with tears of laughter)

I'm my own worst enemy sometimes due to rushing though a post, not proof reading or just not giving a monkeys on occasion how legible my post may be to people with out the benefit of having English as a first language (which rightly so should be frowned upon)

I think correct use of language should be strived for, its nice to occasionally use "I'm dyslexic its not my fault" but chances are if I'm in front of a PC and have still spelt something incorrectly it is..... It all boils down to how much time I want to put in to checking and double checking and making sure the red lines have gone away for the correct reason.

Its a personal thing so perhaps how I interpret it differs wildly from others?

Intelligence is funny thing. It is very hard to quantify and yet is very recognisable. IQ tests don't really tell you much as anyone can be trained to get better scores. If someone who got an IQ score of 80 was schooled in how they work and how to improve got a score of 120 a week later has their intelligence suddenly gone from 20% below average to 20% above average? Quite obviously not. With that in mind we can therefore seperate intelligence and education into very independent things.

So what is raw intelligence and where does it come from? I believe that every human being is born with a predisposed level of intelligence. A cap, if you will. People who grow up and have that nurtured will excel at academic studies and appear more intelligent, but aren't necessarily more clever than someone with no academic qualifications. So how do you quantify raw intelligence? The reason IQ tests have been the benchmark for years is that they're designed to remove the necessity for academic study and try to measure how your brain can compute physical problems, i.e. if I turn pulley A anti-clockwise which way will pulley E move. As previously said though, because humans are very good at learning we can be taught to get a better IQ score without actually being any more intelligent.

Dyslexia obviously exists as a condition. Some people are born predisposed to not be able to arrange characters correctly. I think the percentage is a lot lower than claimed by a number of people. I read the figure 10% of the population are dyslexic in one form or another, which seems realistic. Dyslexia and raw intelligence obviously have no link whatsoever as I have met people who are very clever and yet can't write for shit. I have also met people who are intrinsically stupid and can't write either, blaming it on dyslexia. Reading and writing are entirely academic though. How intelligent you are plays a big role in how easy you find it to be taught to read and write.

Nobody likes to think of themselves as stupid, or even not up to average intelligence, but it stands to reason 50% of people are below average. I aware of my own limitations and that there are a number of people here who are more intelligent than I, although Jonny is not in their number. In today's politically correct society we're not allowed to label people stupid or simple despite 50% of the population being below average. It's a lot easier for society and the individual in question to give their stupidity a label and, unfortunately for genuinely dyslexic people, that label is often dyslexia.

So you have a small population who find it hard to write correctly and a much larger number who are too stupid or too lazy to write correctly. If you have a condition, be that dyslexia or you're born stupid then there's little you can do about that apart from try to improve despite the condition. If you're too lazy to learn the difference between lose and loose, bought and brought, or witness and whitness then rather than sympathy and understanding all you deserve is to be laughed at and have anything you say derided.

Having spent time with some dyslexic people I think it's easy to spot the difference in something written by someone with genuine dyslexia and someone who is lazy and/or stupid. It's not easy to quantify that as the differences are subtle, but they're there. Couple those with idiotic content of what is trying to be written and it becomes plain for all to see whether someone is intelligent but struggles with the written word or is simply a retard.

Surely the same can be said for many things. Dyslexia, dyspraxia, dyscalculia (sp?)

I understand that many of these broadly cover
A: Your brain knows what it wants to do
B: Your body can't do it, or the signal gets blurred along the way.

Whose idea of a joke was it to make 'dyslexia' such a difficult word to spell?

In all honesty I don't know alot about dysexia and how people are helped with it.
Is extra help offered as support? Even as an adult?

If those are your troublesome words Andrew your spelling is far from shocking

Brewster - agreed; It is generally quite obvious whether one of my students is dyslexic, bone-idle and unmotivated, or just thick. You just get to know. I can't really explain how.

The latest development was people pleading dyslexia as the reason for their generally poor level of ability all-round, even when their writing was perfectly fine.

Work that one out!

well, my spelling is shocking, i may not have an italian accent, but i was born there and English was not my first launage.

at school, i was classed dyslexic.

which really annoyed me as they knew the situation.

Jim - i would say if i could spell better ect then people may catch what i mean more ect

but it really does not bother me.

i just jumped the gun before hand

Calling somebody ignorant doesn't have to be seen pejoratively - we are all ignorant of some things, no one of us is a complete repository of all human knowledge.

I am almost completely ignorant of, to pick one example from many, the rules of cricket. I could remedy this, but I'm quite blissful in my ignorance, so instead I just don't post on topics that require a knowledge of cricket. If I did then I'm sure somebody knowledgeable would quickly take me to task over it.

For a lot of posts here, especially outside of the general chat forum, an ignorance of the basics of language, taught to us all from an early age, isn't a problem. If somebody is desperate to know what the yellow things on lorry wheels are then the answer, "There too show you when you're wheels nuts is coming lose", conveys the information and is understandable. However, when you're trying to engage in debate it doesn't help your case if your posts are littered with elementary mistakes.

Some people do suffer from dyslexia, I fully accept that, but a lot are too lazy to check for mistakes and too lazy to fill the gaps in their knowledge.

My standards are hardly impeccable, but I do think that on a public forum it's rude to care so little for your readers that you can't even make a tiny effort to ensure your post is readable.

Anyway, this wasn't meant to be a spelling/grammar thread, so we might have to steer back towards the topic now.

Marco - when you typed this, were you aware of the mistake?

Im dyslexia or was told i was at school .

My reading and spelling isnt great grammar is very poor. But dyslexia is more then just reading and spelling.

At around 12 i was found to have reading and spelling age of 7/8 year old! i struggled at school for a long time before and after ,and just copyied from friends in end . Teachers had no time for me as i couldnt keep up with the rest of class. I spent years of being kicked out of class due to my learning speed, which led to boredom then trouble making. I was predicted to fail all my exams and was told i would get help which never happened! my mum hired a private tutor to help me and i greatly improved on results but still wherent great. Also friends helped me in classes more then the teachers did in the end.

After school i couldnt get into any further learning due to my grades and dyslexia, still no one had time for my slow learning!
I have never used it as a excuse for poor spelling etc, and over the years spelling/reading has got better due to using more words and more often.

I can often add up VAT and times tables quicker in my head then some one with a calculator aswell as other wierd little things like that.

So does dyslexia exist who knows, but for me i hope the kids of today arent shown the treatment i was due to slow learning/thick/or dyslexia how ever its labeled.

This was the point I was trying to get to - how many people are told they are dyslexic, or believe they have dyslexia, for reasons that are nothing to do with it?

Marco, it would be interesting to know, for example, how much additional budget your school got for each 'dyslexic' child vs how much they got for each foreign language child.

Too early to tell, but my first impression is that you are not dyslexic. It seems you got off to a bad start at school and there was no-one sufficiently professional to help you to catch up. It happens a lot.

My lad has dyslexia. He was 'diagnosed' 18 months ago.

As for support, the school he was in was useless, so we moved him to another school for his last year of Primary school. He now gets 1:1 tuition 5 hours a week and he get's extra help from the support staff during normal lessons.

The Secondary school he's going to in September have a 'Learning Support' department which offers help for children with 'Special needs' (Dyslexia is classed as a special need).

We found the whole process of getting a diagnosis a terrible strain, the Education department (council) didn't want to know. We paid to get a test done and are now paying a shed load more for his final year at an Independant school.

His dyslexia manifests itself in slow reading, difficulty in writing and slow processing speed. But even with these 'afflictions' his spelling is very good and he still passed his 11+

Thats exactly the way I find it!

I will write a sentence, paragraph then find its a little jumbled not the way I orginal presumed I had written.

Then I will proof read to adjust but again I find its only a filter as I miss a few other errors.

After that you cant be bothered having to take 10 mins to fix something that done right first time takes 2 mins.

And as for intelligence at school it didnt do to well in English shock. All other subjects I done rather well. I now hold various qualifications in IT and electronics.

As for the old IQ test, I do struggle with some of the phrased terminolgy questions probably due to the time limit for each question as it jumbles I still manage to get roughly 120-128 Im not a genuis for sure but its not too bad.