Writing and Dyspraxia

[DSA Tutor Aileen]

I am amazed that so many of you talk about getting on so well at school exams and coursework for writing, but do not succeed at university. If you get the course moved around so that you don't get too overloaded that helps.

Do people not have weaknesses in structuring ideas and translating them onto paper? I find that very good at thinking and talking/explaining the essay but not good at writing it up is a common pattern for dyspraxic university students. Then it depends after that whether you had a sympathetic school experience of writing slowly or the need to use a keyboard to offset handwriting speed and read back what you said for errors.

Feedback Please. Find my introduction for my details.

Aileen

[Catwoman42]

I can only speak for me...I was a uni student and have gone back and am studying counselling. I developed my own shorthand which no one else could read. But even now, I find myself writing so much in lectures etc that I am not taking it in, I find though, that writing what is being said helps keep me focussed and stops my brain shutting down.
I'd rather write than type, my typing skills are poor, although it helps that I have an ergonomic keyboard at work. I prefer to write as my typing cannor keep up with my brain and I need to get the idea on paper before I forget it!
My essays are like my mind...meandering and tangential, so I do prefer typing these so I can cut and paste material into some kind of order! Hope this helps.

[Tim G]

I am amazed that so many of you talk about getting on so well at school exams and coursework for writing, but do not succeed at university.

Thats verry true with me - I was at a spechial needs school (More House (if thats sounds fammiler)) and that really helped getting the grades at GCSE and A level (I stayed on for 6th form). So I put in a lot of hard work and got the grades and got into unie - grate I thought, I could achive anything .......

So I went to unie and studied lighting programing (technical stage / event lighting etc) which was a vocational course but I struggled and without knowing it. - I put in a lot of work and effort but it basickly counted for noughting as it all wasent right due to time mangment, mis-interpration, not staying focused / on track etc etc.
Basickly before I left and due to the help of my partner I released that things were compleatly crashing - people compleatly disliking me, work going badly etc. This ended up in me having some realisation of my issues and thus created a compleate brakedown and leaving the course at the begging of my final year.

So now I am fighting axianty, depreshion etc and ovesley dyspraxicia and am trying to get my self back on my feet.

I don't blame anyone or anything for this although the asumaption could be made but looking back it is quite clear that thies were allways there to haunt me.

So yea basickly unie is a big step up from A levels and many dyspraxicis dont survive it (which is no surprise) - if you are dyspraxic and thinking of unie then my advice would be consider it a lot and think about it.

[DSA Tutor Aileen]

I am sorry to hear that university was such s hard experience for you. Sounds like maybe the course did not suit you and maybe you should try something less stressful. Open university gives you the chance to do the course bit by bit and that takes the stress off a lot. Did you get any mentoring when you were on the course? Maybe with the right support you could have not got so stressed out. Don't blame yourself. As you say the leap was too big a jump. Many dyspraxics can get very disorganised and cannot keep a focus as it feels too chaotic trying to multi-task. You just had overload problems. I don't blame you for feeling anxious. Are you getting help with that?

Regards,

Aileen

[DSA Tutor Aileen]

Catwoman 42,

yes, your comments are very insightful, that sounds like a familiar story, when people say it helps them to stay focused and writing it down helps it go in. I have that experience myself and I've been studying for 20 years (at least), with 10 of those doing degrees. I guess I had to prove to myself I could do it when many said I couldn't.

I must also agree with something someone else said earlier too "that teaching it helps you learn it". I got my best learning from my teaching for the last ten years, partly because when I tried to explain something to someone else it made me realise the bits I was missing in my knowledge myself, and then I could fill them in. Our minds think they have the full picture until we try to explain it and then we realise that we only half know the thing really. I got spelling under control when I had to do the "how to teach spelling" course for my dyslexia teacher's license. I found it amazing how much there was to learn in the spelling patterns between sounds and the look of the recurrent visual patterns. Before then I had never noticed these patterns.

I also totally identify with the comment that "my mind moves too fast" and having to write things down quickly at speed so that the production of the sentence in my head is not lost. I think this is one of the key facts of being dyspraxic. It's not just that I cannot be sure of the things my hands and eyes are doing, sequencing the words/letters/sentences, but having a fast mind. That turns into anxiety sometimes, and then I get really slow as well, as a counter balance. So hearing these comments is very good for me and others I think. We need to define our experience of it ourselves and not leave it up to others, not dyspraxics, observing us from the outside. That is what motivates me to study what has been written about it. I want to put my view point as a dyspraxic in.

I used to say to teachers, even in my 40's, "by the time I am into writing down the sentence my mind might have thought up and corrected, or offered several alternatives to that expression before I gave got to the end of the sentence. This happens especially when I am still thinking about what I want to say and the knowledge of my point has not completely settled down in my mind yet. So, when I am writing this sentence here it is not so bad, I'm not being pestered by other thoughts, other ways of saying the same thing, or close approximations, interfering with what I'm trying to write, because I am confirmed in what I want to say.

I think this is an attention problem in language production. When we attend to something (all people) we don't just attend to that, we also have to shut down all the other possibilities. And what you are describing is that many many other possible 'formats' for the sentence 'haunt' us. And the traces of these alternative formats sometimes come out in the sentence as extra bits of debris (trash) that we include by mistake.

The same happens in my spelling. I know everything about spelling now, and can come up with a good version mostly. But often the alternatives to ways to spell that word-Kat/Cat, Fish/Phich, pop out and then I have to edit them out later. Sometimes, still, words look completely unfamiliar. I just don't recognise the spelling at all of a common word. So I have to devote a lot of concentration to both these issues when I write. That sucks energy away from the meaning of the sentence, that it makes sense or that others can understand it.

All I can say is that after 40 years of trying and devotion, I guess, I got a lot better. But I am not ever going to be as automatic as someone who has done a lot less writing than me, and has no dyspraxia.

Hope that is not too much detail for you guys. Just thinking outloud. Writing is good for that. Good practice for writing is just writing with a pencil any old drival that comes out off the top of your head and not care for structure or spellings or even reading it back. Just aim for fluency.

Please give me more information if possible. I would love to hear more of your comments.

Thanks,

regards, Aileen

[Catwoman42]

I am dyslexic, but numerically. I have no problem with spelling or writing. I totally agree that before I have finished writing a sentence my brain will have moved on somewhere else, This problematic when I am speaking as I can be saying something and my brain will wander off. i find myself saying "what was the point of that?" a lot! as we do a lot of listening on my counselling course I explained my problems to my tutors. I now do small group work in a room with no other groups in it as I found I couldn't concentrate on what the speaker was saying as they were competing with another speaker in the room.