Ten Tips for Teaching Writing to Dyslexic Students

Spencer Powers reports:

"Use pictures.  Most people with dyslexia minds are highly visual.  Pictures will help us describe something in words and add details...Expect inconsistency.  Probably the most frustrating thing about being dyslexic is that one day you feel like you’re making good progress and keeping up with the rest of the class, but the next day, nothing makes sense and you are baffled by stuff that you understood yesterday...Be flexible about topics.  My favorite way to learn is to research and write about a topic that fascinates me, but writing about a topic of no interest to me is pure drudgery.  Please give me as much freedom as possible to choose my own topic...Don’t let the aide hover over me.  One of the things I hated most about school was when an aide told me what to do every step of the way.  I’d rather do it my way and be wrong than just do exactly what somebody else says, especially with my writing.  One aide told me that I had to use sentence starters, which I know are helpful to a lot of students, but always made me feel like I was taking an easy way out, almost cheating even...Give me specific feedback.  My favorite teacher used to make [check marks] in light pencil beside sentences that I needed to revise and then talk to me about how to do so...[as well as] make stars in places where I needed to add more information...Let me use audiobooks and videos when doing research...I’ll get more writing done if you let me gather information from audiobooks and videos as well as printed sources...Use consistent vocabulary...Always, always, always allow me to use the keyboard.  SpellCheck is really, really important to me...Don’t just correct my punctuation but review the rules of punctuation with me...Please don’t confuse inattention with lack of interest...[A] dyslexic brain makes 5X more neural connections than a [non-dyslexic] brain when engaged in language-based tasks.  This is a fact that’s been proven over and over again by scientific research.  So, of course, those hard-working brains get tired 5X faster and need to take breaks 5X as often."