Does my spelling distract you?

Dyslexia. For most people that means that I spell backwards or can't recognize my sixes from my nines, which is only partially true. It also means that when I was learning to read and write (something I did not become respectivly compitant at until the third grade) I had to learn every thing phynetically. Sound it out, they said, take it slow, follow along with your finger. I graduted from 5th grade with a college reading level, above average scores on writing content, and abismall scores mechanical writing. Commas, because they sometimes slip silently into sentances escaped most of my writing. I wrote at the words came into my mind, sometimes slowing my thoughts down to sound out something simple, or-ange, mon-day, sur-face. Sometimes words just arn't spelled like they sound.

People who cannot spell well are seen as stupid, thier ( <-i before e accept after c... except in this case) errors used as a tool to discredit their points. If she can't spell words like chivalry, institutionalized, and chovanism then obviously she knows nothing about "the institusionalized chauvanism found in the door opening ritual which is disguised as chivalry." Look! her spelling isn't even consistant. She spells the same word at least three different ways in the same paragraph. Obviously this is just laziness if not stupidity.

At times it's a matter of trying to missspell a word the correct way so that spellcheck can pick up the word I'm actually trying to spell. Sometimes I have to type four syninims in the word's stead then look on the pull down bar to see if the computer can give me the word I had in my head all along but didn't know how to spell. Sometimes it's a matter of shaming myself by asking someone near me how to spell something that can be found on fourth grade spelling tests. "Um... (incert name)... Excuse me... Please don't laugh but how do you spell cloud?" They will usually either supress thier laugh, patrinizingly spell the word out very slowly just in case I'm so dumb that I'll miss what they said, or my favorate is when the try to help me "it's C-L-owd." I just wish people could say it nutrally, but I guess it's unusual for college freshman who attended an Honor's program for Communicative Arts to ask how to spell two syllibal words.

It's not from lack of trying on anyone's account that I have so much difficulty. My parents read to me every day, had me struggle to read to them, made flash card games we played every sunday and saterday, covered the whole house in Q-cards so I could see how everything is spelled whether I wanted to sit on the C-H-A-I-R chair or pet the D-O-G dog. My parents sent me to a child psycologist who determined that I would need "special help" for my "special issue." He's the one who reassured my worried parents that although their young girl may have a good vocaublary, comprehension, and social skills that didn't mean that there is nothing wrong with her. She could still have dyslexia.

So when someone "corrects" my spelling on my status updates and uses them to tease me, discredit my experiances, my views, my writting, I tend to get a bit upset and post long responses that she hopes that someone reads and is not to distracted by her spelling to switch to the next blog.

(BTW I purposly did not do the rigourous spell checking and reviewing I usually do in order to prove a point.)