How Technology Helped Me Cheat Dyslexia

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From Wired:

I’m going to tell you a secret. It’s something almost no one in my professional life knows. I’m dyslexic. Given that knowledge, my chosen career—writer—might seem odd. But while I was cursed with poor spelling skills, I’ve always been drawn to storytelling. The career-planning report that accompanied the aptitude test I took at 13 even tried to dissuade me from a “literary” career, but even back then I had enough bravado to overrule that piece of computer-generated advice.

Dyslexia, my constant companion, occupies a taboo place in my personal narrative. Like my breath, I often forget it’s there. Sometimes I delude myself into thinking I’ve outgrown it. When I told friends that I was writing this article, several advised me to back out of the contract. One didn’t even believe me when I told her I was dyslexic. How could I be a writer? They were concerned this assignment might be my last.

But I’ve never thought of myself as having a disability. Instead, I see it as a glitch, and one I’ve gotten good at masking. I’ve been able to hide my dyslexia for decades simply because I live in an age of technological wonders. Microsoft Word spell-checks most every syllable I write. When my dyslexic mind mangles a word so much that it’s rendered un-spell-checkable, I’ll deploy an arsenal of workarounds. I might reverse-engineer a word by typing an easy synonym into the thesaurus, or I might paste my best attempt into my browser bar and let the search engine offer the correct spelling as a suggested query.

. . . .

These “cheats” are ingrained in my writing process; I hardly notice doing them anymore. But something happened a few months ago to break me out of my familiar routines. I began writing with the help of an AI-powered browser plug-in so adept at correcting my linguistic missteps, it ended up sending me on a quest to discover what life might be like in a technologically enabled post-dyslexic world.

When I was really little, I tried to see words—the actual orthography—as pictures. For the word “dog,” I would think: There’s a circle then a line, then a circle, then a circle with a hook. Knowing the specific letters and decoding them wasn’t part of my process. Thinking in pictures was how reading worked, I thought.. . . .

At this point in my professional life, I’m only outed when writing by hand in a public setting, which was the case when I went on a book tour to promote my memoir about new motherhood and wrote my inscriptions with an unforgiving black Sharpie. I’d keep post-it notes and a pen by my side. “Could you put down what you want me to write? And if you have a fancy name like Margaux, well, jot that down too.”

. . . .

While it is agreed that dyslexia is a language-based learning disability, there is no universally accepted definition of the phenomenon, nor is there a complete understanding of its cause. But with the arrival of functional magnetic resonance imaging to measure brain activity, scientists in the last few decades have been able to study the brain activity of dyslexics. What’s striking is how the dyslexic brain does not utilize areas usually engaged in reading. In addition, the brain can be seen jury-rigging other areas to form words in the same way a stroke victim might during recovery, harnessing plasticity—the brain’s ability to rewire itself.

A hallmark of dyslexia is the inability to discern phonemes, distinct sounds represented by specific letters. I struggle with this. I can hear the sounds, but I sometimes can’t translate them to letters on the page. The other day, I wanted to write the word “agitated.” This is a word I know. I’ve said it aloud countless times without mispronouncing it, and I’ve read it often as well. And yet, when typing it, even sounding it out as I go, I hear a “d” and a “j” in it. So fishing around in my brain’s Bermuda Triangle, I typed out the word adjetated. I can remember short words—most of the shopworn workhorses come easy—and a bunch of longer ones too. But there remains a large subgroup of words I cannot phonetically master or remember.

Then, a few months ago, I discovered Grammarly, a free cloud-based software extension that you add onto a web browser. The plug-in is billed as a “writing assistant,” but I mostly used it as a spell-checker, a task at which it proved nearly omniscient. Grammarly could help me spell even the words that regularly flummoxed MS Word and Google.

Those first few weeks with Grammarly, it felt like I was like falling for a crush. In the browser, it works like any other spellchecker. An elegant light green box (Pantone 2240 U) appears when the cursor hovers over a red underlined word. But my infatuation quickly grew. Even the name, “Grammarly,” sounds like the benevolent hero in a Jane Austen novel: Good Mr. Grammarly! The software seemed to get me—and my scrambled misspellings—in ways that no other had before. Grammarly always knew the right word. It even seemed to understand the way my dyslexic brain thinks—a maze of patched and redirected connections zig-zagging around my gray matter—and could come up with exactly what I was trying to say, even though I couldn’t fully spell it. It was only then, using something so seamless, that I wondered if technology could soon bring an end to my dyslexia as I knew it.

Link to the rest at Wired