writing dyslexia

Interesting thing happened last night.

I went to the celebration party for the National Novel Writing Month Toronto group. There were about 60 people there, most of whom had done this, including me. The goal was 50k in a month! So lots of quantity. I didn't go the quantity route, though I learned to speed up some. About 10 people read short excerpts, including me.

I read the first segment of the novel. Out loud. And something was different. Dyslexia was missing. When I read aloud (or speak), I always switch the words around, not rewriting, but rather accidental switches, even spoonerisms. You may have noticed this in me or others. It happened a lot last week at a friend's play reading evening. I switched so much of the written dialogue around without being able to stop it. Not good for a play reading, though the gist was always correct.

This didn't happen reading my excerpt last night. There was this decidedly warm comfort seeing my words on the printed page. They were in the right order, whatever that means. I read them, out loud, without any switches, as if in writing I'd made them work right.

I don't know what that means-how does the disability work? But... now I suspect whatever it is has been built in to my writing style. Like a red green colour blind person doing beautiful paintings without ever using any reds. So when he (most red green colour blind people are actually men) looks at the painting later, there'd be a relaxing lack of colour confusion in the work.

It was like that for me. The words were in the right order, and it felt so nice. I wish everyone wrote like that! I'm writing stuff I can't spoonerize.

I wonder what that says!

Peter responds:

That's.. .. significant. Significant to a functional theory of cognition. And you might be right. You might have used all and only linguistic ingredients functional for you.

Hmmmm. Maybe not about cognition - maybe only about cue discrimination. Still, significant, and some would say cue discrimination is an aspect of cognition...

Carolyn responds:

Yes.

I experienced, so this is totally subjective, something more. I felt my brain searching for ways to spoonerize. I felt it. Became really aware while reading the excerpt. Aware of the autosearching happening and failing.

I felt the duslexic processing fail. Not that dyslexic processing didn't try to intercede, but that it tried and failed. It wasn't a conscious effort, trying or failing. But I was aware of it happening, unlike when it succeeds in happening. When it succeeds, sometimes I get an uncomfortable feeling, without knowing why. Very fascinating experience.

I suspect there's a solution to the dyslexia here somehow, not a cure, but perhaps a coping strategy. Not the 'only read what I wrote from scratch' kind of solution. That's very limiting. Rather something like practicing with my own writing to build the awareness muscle. Practice without the dyslexic results triggering, learn what that feels like, and then exercise with other material. Learn to avoid the dyslexic process, or even perhaps take control of it. Like removing one's native accent.

I'm rather excited.

So is that cue + cognition, a learned bad behaviour, ... ?