Dyslexia or Learning Disability – 7

Continuing the writing difficultiesthat many children with LD face, they have poor handwriting as their finer muscle controls are bad in the initial stages and by the time they gain control over the finger muscles, the pattern would have been set and children demotivated enough by all the insults that they keep hearing that they never make an attempt to write neatly. Or occasionally, when they have received positive strokes by the teacher at school or by parents at home, sudden motivation can make them write neatly on that day for which lot of effort goes in. But it is not sustained for long as their mood gets spoilt by other demotivating comments. Hence we see lot of inconsistency in their writing. If a child has very severe degree of difficulty to write, then the child is said to have dysgraphia.

Since these children have poor spatial ability, they can not understand how much space needs to be left between words in a sentence or how much space would be required to write a longer word at the end of a line. They try their best to fit in a long word at the end of the line by over writing or by going out of alignment, or by erasing the word number of times and somehow fitting in the word that they lose precious time doing all this acrobatics!  

It becomes difficult for them to make connectivity to the next letter while using cursive style of writing (joining handwriting). Most of us are taught cursive letters of alphabet in isolation and the beginning of the stroke is always at the bottom of the line. But many a times, inside a word, these letters have to be connected from the previous letter from atop. Ex: in a word beginning with ‘o’, say, ‘owl’ or ‘toy’, the child can connect well. But if ‘o’ were to come in-between, like in ‘bowl’ or ‘vowel’, connecting ‘o’ becomes difficult. Many cursive letters pose this problem when they are positioned between two letters and the stroke has to continue from top. This makes the handwriting look clumsy.

Their writing looks clumsy because of unevenly sized letters in a word or inconsistency in maintaining the size and shape of the letters. Because of their slow speed of writing, they are always lagging behind others while writing dictation or while copying from the black board. They are unable to comprehend the rules of punctuation and capitalization of letters.

When the teacher realizes these difficulties that a child is experiencing, she should not insist on neatness, but focus on the content of the writing. As long as the writing is intelligible, she can overlook the minor errors and appreciate the content and the effort the child has put to complete the task. But unfortunately, most of the teachers insensitively scratch out all the work that the child has done with a bold red ink mark and place a remark “rewrite”, “poor handwriting, re-do” or some even tare the page into pieces, taring the self-esteem of the child into shreds!

………….. to be continued