nope.

im also workingat the same time so not paying full attention... lol

i bet they got a healthy amount mate.
but did i get extra help?

well.. no. I got bugger all.

then told i was doing crap.

helpful?
not really.

Ah, work - yes. I'd forgotten about that.

True dyslexics tend to be blind to their own mistakes. Given extraordinary circumstances, however, like working, that wouldn't be such a reliable indicator.

I think maybe Marco has hit on something - in recent times there has been a swing towards lazy labelling of people as dyslexic on the part of educators rather than taking responsibility for ensuring other causes for poor spelling/grammar performance are ruled out - mother tongue being a major one. Gets them out of a potential hole in terms of achieving results...

Talk to many parents of dyslexic children and they will tell you about the difficulty of getting their child diagnosed or having their condition taken seriously.
I can remember my cousin (who is now in his 50's) only being diagnosed because his parents knew he was intelligent and had enough money to be able to get some serious academic muscle to force his school to recognise it.
My wife had terrible problems getting her son's dyslexia recognised, partly because many dyslexic children connect so little with "normal" reading and writing activities that they quickly become bored and disruptive, hardly endearing them to teachers.
There is research to suggest that left/right brain dominance is linked to dyslexia - specifically that if neither hemisphere is dominant, the brain gets confused. My stepson is (or used to be) completely ambidextrous, which seemingly meant he couldn't recognise the order of letters because his mind couldn't distinguish between the direction of reading them. Part of the treatment he underwent at Reading Uni involved him wearing an eye-patch to encourage dominance of one eye/side. It seemed to work, although I would contend that he will never be the most academic child...

Enforcer i agree to if im dyslexia or not , but thats what the dyslexier guy told me when they done tests.

I was just left to get on with it , this was back in 90/91 so there wasnt really much more they could do about it. Maybe i was just a product of my slow learning and bad teaching.

Jim: Have you tried the old fish-and-chips caper on him?

It really sounds like you just got off to a slow start and there was no-one there to pick you up.

Yeah maybe , although the teachers wouldnt help me and this really effected my school life in terms of teaching.
Too the point i was told i could leave at just 15 and get a job , come back year later to sit my exams. This was partly because i had got fed up with school and was a big trouble maker. But my head of year wouldnt exclued anyone once we where in 4th year due to exams.
Thing is if anyone but me shouted etc, i would be the one who got kicked out of class! why i couldnt tell you, but in end few teachers got in trouble because of this.

In my eyes the school system failed me , but at same time it works for many .

Like Jim said its very hard to get them to recognise dyslexia in more then just labeling you with it.

And there's the problem - you can choose to avoid cricket threads. However, there are people who apply a similar blissful ignorance to correct application of language. It's their choice, but if they want to post on a public forum, their apathy (unlike your cricket aversion) will be obvious.

I also take pride in my spelling, grammar and punctuation, as I know that it makes my posts easier to read, especially for our overseas forum members. I also find it difficult to read posts with little or no punctuation and sloppy spelling.

The difference is that I'm happy to not let it bother me. You would probably resist strongly if someone started to force-feed you with cricket knowledge - the members that can't spell / won't spell are probably just as cheesed off with efforts to "improve" them. They too are "blissful in their ignorance" - why not just leave them to it, instead of preaching?

If you don't like what's written, or HOW it's written, don't read it. There's plenty of other stuff to read on here or elswhere.

Nigel, unless I've missed something, I don't think Andrew is preaching, he's expressing a point of view as part of a discussion about dyslexia. As far as my unhealthy appetite for this forum tells me, the "having a go" at people for poor grammar and spelling tends nowadays to be in individual threads and usually when those involved are hot under the collar about something else. There is remarkably little generalized pedantry on here, I'd say.

Jim - I agree, but look at the first two paragraphs of Andrew's starting post - he's started this thread becuase he's pulled Jonny up on his spelling and he openly admits to having "a bit of history" with spelling and grammar on here.

I too dislike sloppy writing, but I'm not bothered enough to question people's claims of dyslexia, nor do I go out of my way to assert my superior spelling abilities on those that can't or won't meet my standards.

In the greater scheme of things, it's not that important. One of the reasons that there's remakably little pedantry on here is that the Mod and Admin teams have established a culture of tolerance of varying grammatical skills, rather than demanding grammatically perfect grammar on every post.

It takes all sorts - there are people on here with great mechanical knowledge of cars and thankfully, they don't ram their superiority down the throats of us lesser mortals. I don't imagine that the non-spellers amongst us are enthralled with attempts to rectify their deficiencies either.

I think the humour and irony/sarcasm is pretty blatant, though. As I said, it was the "intro" to this thread, which - in the best tradition of this forum - is designed to stir up some lively debate.

I haven't seen Andrew - or anyone else for that matter - being pedantic for some time other than in self-mocking terms. If that is thanks to the mods, then well done mods!

My spelling on here has got better due to my use of Swype on my phone, so now all the words are spelt correctly but they are not necessarily the words I intended
Swype is a sort of handwriting recognition system for the keyboard. Anyone who ever used that feature on an apple Newton will understand some of the pitfalls

I am not dyslexic but a very bad speller and can't say I put the effort in for forum posts unless I am writing a guide. I am generally lazy and reserve my energy for spell checking of work presentations and job applications.

Swype has a mind of its own. My wife is called Caroline, but Swype often calls her Charline. Imagine the fun I have explaining why I'm texting my undying love to some bint called Charline. Another favourite is "darkling" for darling. Swype is quite clever, but can be infuriating!

Ever heard of the two dyslexic bank robbers that tried to rob the bank?

They ran in and shouted, "Air in the hands motherstickers, this is a f%*kup!!"

LOLOLOLOLOLOL

Well done Mrcoa your first word spelled right you thick git!!

Most of you will know me as someone who cares deeply not only about spelling, grammar, and punctuation but also about the logical presentation of a question, a thesis, or a response... indeed, I have an MSc in what is basically 'how to spell words that don't exist'. I've spent a long time looking at words, their evolution, their use, and their misuse - mainly as a way to correct them in certain electronic forms.

Some points for consideration. I use 'I' throughout to indicate any particular person who might display the behaviour I'm commenting on without reference to any named individual - not necessarily that I do it myself!

1) There's a difference between 'unable to spell' and 'unable to select the correct homophone' - words (or groups) that have the same pronunciation irrespective of meaning. The classics there are 'there, they're, their' or 'your, you're'. I strongly suspect that the latter group are not helped by automated spelling checkers since they do not, as a rule, consider context; if I try and write one when I mean another, and I get it close enough for the spell-checker to accept it, I will never know that I got it wrong.

2) Punctuation and capitalisation has become in recent years apparently optional. Spacing sometimes goes the way of the pear, too... I believe (but cannot prove) that this is directly due to the number of portable writing systems - phones, mainly, of which the writing is an inconsequential part of the design and yet is such a major part of their use case. Such devices become the major use of writing for significant numbers of people, but rather than encouraging traditional styles they go out of their way to prevent it: to type 'don't' instead of 'dont' on my Nokia phone requires seven extra keystrokes. There's no wonder I'm going to be lazy.

3) I believe that it is incumbent on me, if I want to make a point, or say, ask for help with a problem, to do it in a way which makes it as simple as possible for someone to respond to me. If I choose to write without benefit of punctuation or ignoring case or generally accepted grammar, or not bother to check my spelling, I place an extra level of effort on the reader. Instead of a simple parse of the sentence, at each point where I have introduced a mistake he has to stop and try alternative meanings. It slows him down and offers many more chances to misunderstand me. It also suggests that if I don't care about his time and understanding, why would I show any more care in my interpretation of his answer.

4) I have seen studies and surveys which suggest people read far far fewer books than even as recently as ten or twenty years ago. There are reports of people who have not picked up a book since they left school; library use has been falling for years. I can't help wondering how, if people aren't exposed to words, they ever learn new words, or indeed how the words they already know might be better used. I accept I'm unusual - I can expect to read better than two hundred books in a year. I'd encourage anyone to read anything - the more, the merrier. Doesn't matter whether it's technical or trash; thud and blunder or the classics; science fiction or the classics. I firmly believe that the simple act of reading - and enjoying the words - will improve my use of the language both in spoken and written forms.

Point 4 is definitely true for me. I always joke that the last book I read was Stig of the Dump

But in all seriousness I do not read anywhere near as much as I should, but perhaps thats just me. I don't watch soaps, I don't care for chat shows or general entertainment. But I love reading random facts, tales of old or stuff about cars.

For me reading is one of the best, most enjoyable things you can do - and by using a public library you can do it for free.

I couldn't contemplate not having anything to read, it's almost like I have an insatiable hunger for it, I even took a book to the AGM knowing full well i'd be bladdered from start to finish (almost).

Words evolve though, trying to maintain something and constrain something is always going to be an uphill fight.

Lets all be honest here, out of a fair few languages the English language is very poorly put together with words that sound the same but can have completely different meanings when applied in context. We have words with silent letters for no good reason as far as I can see. If we could start again and set out to make it a little more simple it all it would be a much better more robust and easer to learn language.
If some one set out a programming language like we have developed the English language you can be sure no sod would use it.

Summarised from my dissertation, Sam: English has at least three major incompatible languages from which it has derived words or roots - Latin, Germanic, and Norse. Add Celtic and Greek, plus just about every other language where the British had influence or were influenced by including some unscripted ones.

As an old acquaintance of mine puts it:


Research from Google indicates that up to 1950, there were just over half a million English words. Since then it's more than doubled to over a million.

One reason for silent letters is thought to be that medieval copyists either to imitate the French spelling, or because they got paid by the letter, not the word...

I'm sure I read somewhere* that silent letters normally represented how the word used be pronounced - spelling being a rather informal affair for most of the history of written English.

* In best Ufologist tradition I can't remember the source right now. Although I do recall that Bill Bryson's biography of Shakespeare talks about 16th/17th century English pronunciation at some length.

You make an excellent point, Sam: no language ever remains the same, it evolves constantly. There are statistics (that I have not to hand) about what percentage of words fall into disuse every decade, replaced and complemented by some that perform the same function and others that describe new phenomena.
When we (and I most definitely include myself) complain about others' use of language, we are talking about the language of right now, or possibly the language of a few years ago, because, as a middle aged, middle class white man, I doubt I have my finger on the pulse of the English of "now". Innit, blud.
I would be very surprised if, assuming we reach a ripe old age, we are not shaking our heads and tutting at the appalling standards of English even more so than now. We'll probably also smell of cabbage and wee, but that's a side issue.

Barnacle is also right that the many relatively new writing devices we use actively discourage the use of "correct" language. It is more a measure of my pedantry that I text using language as accurate as I can than my ability to communicate effectively with such devices. Then again, when my Dad was living in the Antarctic in the early 60s, he was only allowed to send 100 words of morse code a month back to the Falklands for forwarding as a telegram to family. You can bet he and his colleagues cut out any unnecessary words, much like today's texting.

In my experience, English is much easier than, say, French, to learn badly and much harder to learn well. By way of an example, a typical French article will contain around 30% more words than its English translation. English is, ironically, the language of le mot juste.

French, like English, contains many anomalies of grammar pronounciation and punctuation, but the answer to these is evidently not to synthesise a new, entirely regular language as you can tell by attending a nearby meeting of your local Esperanto society.

L L Zamenhof accuses you of sarkasmo, Jim...

Must be true. Imagine people pronouncing 'strength', 'caught', 'queue', in that way

I am a coping (hard word to spell looked it up to make sure) dyslexic. This means (posible misinterpreted word) everything I type is very time consuming (easy word got right but checked). Often I might forget a word so each sentance. (Oh got one)( doh mean forgot oneword) has to be checked. Some times a sentance could be merged with the next or missed so each paragraph must checked (should be must be checked) It is rear (no that's back mean rere dam rare) that a sentence would be backwords. I hope (hopping and hoping aweful words) that helps you understand the difficulty we have.

You said homo.

You've got me giggling too, now!