Dyslexic writing 1:

As someone who writes every day for work, would like to write more for pleasure and is also dyslexic, I’m no stranger to online spelling and grammar checkers. Not wanting to sound like an advert for Grammarly, but it really has saved my professional integrity on more than one occasion.

I know how to use grammar, probably better than most. I didn’t acquire the rules intrinsically but rather I had to consciously learn them. I know when something is wrong, I can explain why it’s wrong, but sometimes I just can’t see it for looking.

As a dyslexic, writing by hand is a laborious and stressful process, which I have tried to avoid ever since I finished school. Aside from having barely legible handwriting, I am all too conscious of making spelling mistakes. This is a constant worry for dyslexics and means leaving a quick handwritten note becomes an agonising nightmare of umms and errs as you try to remember whether it really is i before e in this case. I fully recognise that I am only able to do my job due to the advent of technology. If I were handwriting everything or even typing it, there would be no way for me to work in communications.

But as much as I rely on technology for work, I have found that it can have a negative impact on my writing. While technology liberates me to write more freely since it takes care of the proofreading, it is also a constraint on my creativity. The o-so-helpful red lines highlighting my minor digressions against perfect English are a blessing and a curse, helping me pick up errors but also offering a constant distraction which I feel obliged to go back and correct and thus breaking the flow of writing. Which is why one day, I decided to throw out my laptop (not literally) and pick up a pen again.

Writing by hand means writing with no distractions

Whenever you write with Grammarly or any other spell checker, you rely on them to find and underline all your errors, but when you’re being creative you don’t need the distraction of having red lines appear every time you make a mistake. Bad spelling and incorrect grammar don’t matter when you are in the creative flow. When I write by hand, I can just carry on scribbling away frantically as the plot takes me without needing to go back every few words and see what the mistake I have made.

Terrible handwriting means your words are going nowhere

Whenever I type on my laptop, I’m making plans for where that story or article will go. Before I’m even two paragraphs in, I’m already wondering where I can share it, who I will send it to, who will read it. Subconsciously, I’m considering that someday, someone, somewhere may one day be reading this. It bloats my ego and makes me paranoid at the same time.

That’s a lot of pressure to put on something that hasn’t even been written yet. But when I handwrite something in a notebook, that is never an issue. What I write in my notebook is condemned to stay in those pages forever, and that is both its blessing and its curse. The words are free to run their creative course, and go where they want without the shadow of a potential reader looming over them right from the start.

Being dyslexic made me embrace technology with my writing, but it’s important not to let technology become more important than your creativity.