2000 word essay in a week? You have to be joking?

Every now and again I read something that throws my mind back to my undergraduate studies and reminds me of just how difficult writing essays can be for someone who hasn’t overcome their dyslexic difficulties yet. The frustration, anxiety and heartbreak at not being able to produce written work to a standard that you feel adequately expresses your thinking is one of the worst things imaginable as a student eager to get the grades you feel you deserve – you know the subject inside out but you just can’t show it on paper!

This brilliant short story by Shirley Cooper from Aberdeen in Scotland gives ‘none-dyslexic people’ an insight into a few of the issues experienced by some ‘dyslexic people’ when faced with the task of having to write a 2,000 word essay in just one week. This might seem like an easy feat for most people who do not have issues with writing but as you will see it presented Shirley with a massive challenge that she had to courageously battle through!

Shirley is an inspiration to all of us at Dyslexic Brian as I’m sure she will be to all of you who read this amazing story.

~ Antonio Giuseppe Farruggia-Bochnak Share this story on FacebookShare

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2000 word essay in a week? You have to be joking?

Awww the alarm! 7.45am already, which means I slept for….. (Counting on fingers) 4 and a half hours! Mmmm it is going to be a long day. Even though I was up half the night I did not finish that damn essay. Stress! It has to be in tomorrow and I’m not half done yet, even though I’ve been at it for days, long into the night and early morning. Oh well!

So I get and the first thing I do is switch on the computer, ready to start battling with it again…. soon. Must wake up first, brain is in a fog that is particularly hard to shake this morning. Probably prolonged lack of sleep and the fact that my brain is in constant action. Thinking, thinking all the time, thoughts whizzing in and out, playing movies in my head. Constant thought I can’t escape. Thoughts about everything…thoughts about nothing…..just thoughts all the time. Great!! Being able to think fast, that can’t be a bad thing…right…. wrong! Think of these thoughts whizzing around in there, but when trying to apply an appropriate output for these thoughts you become stuck. That is, the thoughts run up against the brick wall in your mind, jumble up and ‘fall’ out in no particular order. Must sit for ten minutes in silence with my coffee, try and quite the jumble.

It’s Sunday so my family are sleeping late, I won’t be disturbed for a while. So I sit with the laptop on my knee staring at what I wrote the night before. I start to read, I’m confronted with a page full of undeveloped thoughts, bad grammar and lots of waffle! Depicted by the spell checker as lots of little red and green squiggly lines. Awww another frustrated groan leaves my throat. I know what I mean when I write it, I know the facts, I’ve done my ‘homework’ I understand the subject. Why, why is this so hard!

A week, that’s what we were given to produce a 2000 word essay, a week! Perhaps an achievable task for someone more adept with the written word than I. But to me, to be honest a mammoth task! I look at my essay plan again, the order in which I think the information should go based on Cottrel, Palgrave and other authors of ‘how to write a good essay’ type books. The trouble is (I think) that I know my conclusion before I start; I’ve made my judgment on the subject. I don’t necessarily know however, why I think that. This leads me to ‘what an essay is?’

I suppose it is a description, or flow of thoughts, describing arguments and evidence that lead to a natural conclusion. Where the writer takes a certain viewpoint, or impartially describes the argument, using a logical flow of the thought. And that’s when the problem is obvious, my chaotic mind struggles with putting my thoughts in any rigid logical order. The undeveloped thoughts (on paper) are a symptom of my fast thought, my hands unable to keep up with what I’m thinking, so ‘skipping stuff’. Add to this a below average ability for spelling, poor short term memory, slow reading and processing rate, and you have the ingredients for a tortures task!

So I say to my friendly lecturer, who said in an encouraging way “its only 2000 words, and I know you have notes… so you can do it” when I complained that a week was not long enough. I say, you’re probably right, given longer I would have just pained over it for longer! But…in no way is it a flippant or easy task. Just so you know, it will take me twice as long, tremendous amount of concentration, a deathly quite atmosphere in which to quite my mind, many re-writes, re-reads and re-arranging. Then when I get my work back, there will be pages of corrected grammar, spelling and sentence structure, to contemplate. Even though I looked that work over at least three times and could see no mistakes, they are there! Almost like a chicken with blue ink on its feet scratched all over my work! Ah well…I pull my wandering mind back to my work and continue with the battle. I just have to work harder…that’s all!?

~ Shirley Cooper from Aberdeen in Scotland

Josh Cope’s Dyslexia Life Story – so far…

This dyslexia life story by Josh Cope, Trustee of UK Youth, is a great example of how a young person, determined to succeed in life, pushed his way through the dyslexia pain barrier to come out the other side with a great sense of pride in being dyslexic. Share

Well done Josh, you are an amazing person and Dyslexic Brian takes his hat off to you

Once you have read this story pay a visit to Josh’s blog: my blog www.joshcope.wordpress.com

Josh Cope’s Dyslexia Life Story – so far…

In school I was told I was slow.  Slow reader. Slower writer. Slow runner. HORRIFIC at playing any Game that involved hand eye coordination. So there wasn’t much to keep me engaged at school. My parents thought I had dyslexia from a young age, but the school, for whatever reason, didn’t test me. My mother would beg the head teacher and in the end I had an hour with a SPLD teacher, but still no test. Then when I reached college things changed, the teachers could see that there was obviously a problem with my reading and writing in particular and at the beginning of the first year of college I was tested and they told me I had dyslexia.

Not only does dyslexia affect your ability to read and write. But one of the biggest problems (I still struggle with) is organisation. As a child with dyslexia you also have to put up with the bullying and Being in such a small secondary school there were little resources available to me. So my parents paid for me to attend the DDAT centre in Cardiff. What a great program!!! They helped so much and I think it’s a program that should be available to everyone.

Since leaving school I have started college and also work for a charity called UK Youth. I could never apply myself to the subjects in school but when I find a topic that excites me I always find ways of expressing my views. Since starting working for UK Youth my confidence has grown dramatically. I feel confident enough to stand up in front of a room filled with CEO’s and fell totally comfortable. As I write this I am on my way to meet Her Royal Highness at an event where I will be giving a talk on youth empowerment.

I wanted to write this blog to tell people, and hopefully inspire other young people to get involved. Last week i managed to meet Pixie Lott (what teenage boy wouldn’t love that).

Learning about what dyslexia is, really help me understand why I face the issues I do and now I feel proud to say I’m dyslexic and I can look at things from an alternative angle. This has prompted me to look at the educational system and how we are failing our young people and how it can be changed.

You can find out more about my views about education reform at my blog www.joshcope.wordpress.com and my twitter Josh_io .

Josh Cope Trustee for UK Youth Director of Shine week (www.shineweek.co.uk)

Make the Letters Stop Dancing – an Inspirational Dyslexia Life Story

The following  Inspirational Dyslexia Life Story and poem ‘Make the Letters Stop Dancing’ was sent to us by Andrea Boff Sutton, a remarkable woman who has harnessed her ‘dyslexia’ and turned it into an amazing resource.

I hope that you enjoy this poem as much as I did – I’m sure that Andrea’s story will inspire and motivate people – dyslexic and non-dyslexics alike – to further develop the creative abilities of their minds… it certainly has for me!

Thanks once again Andrea,

All the best from Dyslexic Brian

Andrea Boff

Wonderful Dyslexia: Embracing the Wiring of My Mind by Andrea Boff

Throughout my childhood, my grandmother saved all my drawings in a special place in her kitchen. I still have some of them (thanks to her) and they date back to when I was 2 years old.

The point is, I always thought in pictures and in 3-D (even though I only have one working eye). Something in my brain enabled me to “see” space without stereo vision.

Even as there were abilities, there were liabilities. My mom would send me to the store for bread and milk and I would return with eggs and butter (knowing that I was supposed to get some sort of staple) but my memory just would not “hold” on to the ideas. Time was a mystery to me, so I was always late for dinner. I could not tell left from right and drew and “L” and an “R” on my bike handles, jeans, and hands. Simple tasks like “cross referencing” two lists, or organizing my school work was just about impossible and frustrating.

But it was the discipline of drawing that taught me how to think. I had an imaginary pencil and with it I drew imaginary lines in space. I drew houses, and hinges on the doors. By spinning the doors I realized that they created “cylinders” in the air. The planes of the house taught me perspective and geometry. I understood 3 dimensional space. That was the beginning of everything.

Today, I thrive. I am the Director of Experience Design in the Creative Department of a Fortune 100 where I design and build complex web properties. My ability to see in 3-D is tapped every day as I plan the tracks that users take through the web. Once I was afraid to speak of the Dyslexia and now I see it as a design resource in myself and others. Dyslexia has helped me understand that there are powerful differences in the ways human minds are wired and I respect others wiring even as I respect my own. There are many ways a mind can be wired – dyslexia is just one – and they are all very fascinating. I embrace this wiring. I know the pitfalls and the glories of it and that there is so much to learn from a person with a 3-D mind.

Make the Letters Stop Dancing

When my mom first opened books
across my lap for quiet looks
the pictures dazzled at a glance
and every word got up and danced.

The “T” and “H” spun with the “E”
and all for the delight of me
but they would not be still enough
for me to learn to read the stuff.

They would not sit on the line
so I stopped them with my mind
imagining them spatially
I sucked them down with gravity.

They quivered on the sentence shelf
till I could read them all myself -
And when I finished paragraphs
I let them all back up to dance.

Andrea Boff Sutton © 2009

Visit Andrea’s website www.boff.myexpose.com