Sept 2026 - The Words My Brain Thinks Are Right
There is a particular sort of confidence that comes with being absolutely certain you've written something correctly.
You look at the sentence, you read it and it makes sense. You know what you mean and so you move on. And then, sometimes much later, you look at it again or someone mentions it and you look again and realise:
**Oh [insert profanity]! That wasn't what I meant, or, in my case, when I’m being particularly harsh on myself; "Apparently, I don't know how to spell anymore or have any grasp on the English language. Why do I even write!"
However, my brain would probably argue that it does know how to spell. It just has its own ideas about which spelling it would like to use on any particular day, especially when the English language has its variety of idioms to contend with.
I was reminded of this recently when I posted on Facebook:
“Off to London today! Some sites of interest for what my daughter leant at school last term.”
At the time, I didn't think there was anything particularly remarkable about that sentence. It was factually correct, as I was off to London with my daughter. We were going to see some places connected to something she'd been learning about at school.
Simple. I wrote it and gave it a read over but didn’t deliberate too much as I don’t want my social posting to get in the way of my family time. I presumably thought, Yep, that'll do, and published it.
It was only afterwards, and a quiet word from a friend, that the words started to reveal themselves.
Sites.
Well, technically, sites is a perfectly good word, as a site can be a place. So that one doesn't immediately look ridiculous. Except I wasn't talking about sites, I was talking about sights.
And then there was:
Leant.
Again, a perfectly legitimate English word, and if I said someone leant against a wall, nobody would look at me strangely. Except my daughter hadn't leant something at school; she had learnt something.
Two perfectly real words. One unfortunately sounds exactly the same as a similar word but has a completely different meaning, and the other the only difference was one letter, which when read quickly could be missed, and was missed, as somehow my brain had looked at both and decided:
Yes. That’s the correct word.
This is one of the things about dyslexia that can be difficult to explain to somebody who doesn't experience it. I don't look at the vast majority of words and think, I don't know how to spell that, because if I don’t recognise it, I look it up (which is infinitely easier than when I was growing up in the 80s and 90s, when there was no Google!).
The problem is my brain sometimes doesn't even realise there is a problem. It sees a word and it understands the sentence. It understands the general meaning of the whole sentence and it carries on, without dissecting every single word within that sentence. Which is rather inconvenient when you are someone who has chosen to become a writer, since my career involves words. Lots and lots of words. Frustratingly, every so often, one of them turns up wearing somebody else's name badge and I miss it. That's another complication with dyslexia, or at least my dyslexia, is it feels incredibly hard to remember all the silly rules there are in the English language especially those that make no sense. I’m talking about silent letters or using two letters like ‘ph’ when there is a perfectly acceptable ‘f’ that does the same job!
So, perhaps it is time I explained a little more about what dyslexia means to me. Not as a medical lecture, as I am not a qualified professional, but I have lived with knowing that I have a different brain for the last 34 years or longer since I was dyslexic before they put a name to it. I won’t present you with a list of symptoms copied from somewhere else and definitely not as an excuse for every spelling mistake I've ever made and will likely make in the future.
This is simply my experience with a vane hope that a reader may take comfort in knowing they aren’t alone.
Being diagnosed at ten
I was diagnosed with dyslexia when I was ten years old, while living in Virginia in the United States. My teacher approached my parents and suggested that I have a test done, as she could see that my problems with the English language went beyond just the fact that American English has removed the letter ‘u’ from words such as colour and neighbour.
When you're ten, you don't necessarily have the vocabulary to explain how your brain works. I simply knew that some things, particularly remembering, spelling and numbers, seemed harder than they should. I could see that my peers appeared to get through certain tasks, like English and Maths, more easily, and then there were other tasks, computing and crafts, where I excelled, which didn’t make a whole lot of sense to me.
Then there were the times when I was told I had made mistakes. At the time I couldn’t vocalise enough to have them explain it so that I could understand why, I just started to learn these rules, sort of. Unfortunately the downside to these corrections was that it was very easy to start to make assumptions about myself.
Maybe I'm not clever enough.
Maybe I'm not trying hard enough.
Maybe everyone else understands this and I don't because I’m stupid.
Maybe I'm just bad at it all and I’ll never be able to get a good job.
The diagnosis helped in a small way to change that. It didn’t magically make the difficult things easy. It didn’t suddenly make spelling behave itself. It didn’t mean I woke up the following morning with an entirely different brain. However, it gave my parents and I a reason why sometimes I couldn’t do certain things, particularly when they involved letters or numbers (it was only dyslexia back then; now I know that I likely have dyscalculia and dyspraxia along with dyslexia).
Knowing that I have dyslexia has meant that instead of asking of myself:
“Why can't I do this?”
I could start to ask, particularly with support from tutors:
“What way does my brain need me to do this?”
That's a very different question, and it is one I've carried with me ever since.
Dyslexia isn't simply getting letters mixed up
I think one of the biggest misconceptions about dyslexia is that it is simply a matter of getting letters in the wrong order. Sometimes, yes, letters can seem to have a mind of their own, particularly when writing with a pen quickly, but my experience of dyslexia is much broader than that.
For me, it is about how I process written and verbal information. Yes, it's about spelling and it’s about words. It's about retrieving the exact word I want, but whether it’s the true correct word isn’t always easy to notice.
It's about looking at something I've written and being completely comfortable with it because my brain is reading the meaning rather than necessarily noticing every individual component within the sentence.
It's about knowing something but occasionally struggling to get it from my brain onto the page or out of my mouth in exactly the form expected by everyone else.
And it is also about the strategies I've developed to work around those things. The interesting thing about coping mechanisms is that when you've used them for decades, you can forget they're coping mechanisms. You just think:
This is how I do things.
Knowing a word and producing a word aren't always connected
This is probably the part I want people to understand the most. Making a spelling mistake doesn't necessarily mean you don't know the word. At least, that isn't how it works for me. I can know exactly what a word means. I can recognise it when I read it or, if it’s a tricky word, I know how to read it based on the sentence e.g. 'I like to read verses' vs 'I read a book every day for a month'.
I can understand it when someone says a word, although I might not be able to write down exactly what was said. I can, usually, use words correctly in conversation with the correct context and yet, when I'm writing, my brain can occasionally produce something else. Sometimes the difference is obvious and sometimes it isn't. Then there are the times when the wrong word is close enough to what I intended that my brain doesn't raise the alarm.
That is exactly what happened with my Facebook post. My brain wasn't randomly throwing letters onto the page. There was a logic behind it [honest]; unfortunately, it was the wrong logic. But it was my logic, and that is what can make some dyslexic mistakes so frustrating.
If I simply didn't know how to spell a word, I could look it up, especially with the help of technology. If I wasn't sure which word was correct, I could check, or, as happens in Word, it gives me some suggestions that would fit better grammatically. Unfortunately, sometimes the problem is that I feel I don't need to check.
The word looks right and the sentence makes sense. The meaning that I want to convey is there. Therefore, my brain has effectively ticked the box, boom Done.
Next.
Except the box shouldn't have been ticked.
My brain reads meaning
One of the coping mechanisms I've developed over the years is that I tend to read for meaning. I'm taking in the overall meaning of a sentence rather than necessarily processing every word separately. That can be incredibly useful; I can get through information without getting bogged down in every individual word. However, it also means that when I'm writing, particular if I'm doing it quickly, a small mistake can sometimes slip past me.
If I'm reading a sentence, my brain is interested in what that sentence is telling me. It wants a picture it can create in my mind. That’s how I do most of my books: I am visualising the characters in my head and writing it down as if I am copying out a show that I’ve watched.
My brain wants the information; it wants the story and to not get bogged down by the individual words or letters.
That becomes particularly interesting when I'm proofreading something I've written because I'm not just seeing the words, I'm remembering what I intended. I'm hearing the character's voice or my own voice if it’s a post. More importantly, I'm thinking about what happens next, I'm experiencing the scene in my head, and if the sentence says what I expect it to say, my brain can be remarkably willing to accept it.
This is one reason editing is such a different process from writing. I have had to train myself to look at the words in the sentence, not just go for the overall picture.
Dyslexia and the “writer who can't spell”
There is a slightly amusing contradiction in being a dyslexic writer.
I spend my life dealing with words. I deliberately choose a career that involves words. I voluntarily sit down and create thousands upon thousands of words and form them into sentences and paragraphs. Over the years, I have a relationship with those same words that can occasionally be complicated. I also enjoy reading books; fantasy, sci-fi and romance mainly, which give me different words or phrases that I in turn might use in my own books. Not in a copywrite way.
It's rather like becoming a chef when you have an unreliable relationship with one of the ingredients. You can still cook. You just know you need to keep an eye on it.
For me, writing has never felt like something I shouldn't be doing because of dyslexia. In fact, reading and writing have always been relaxing for me. That might surprise some people.
I often wonder if people think, "If you've struggled with words, why would you choose to spend your free time surrounded by them?"
Because struggling with something doesn't necessarily mean you don't enjoy it. Reading and writing gives me something different.
When I'm writing a story, I'm not sitting there thinking:
This is a spelling exercise.
When I’m working on my books or reading someone else’s I'm somewhere else. Usually, I'm inside the story. I'm watching the characters and listening to them. I'm wondering what they're going to do and I'm thinking about why they're behaving the way they are.
I'm exploring relationships between the characters and when I come to edit my own work, I’m trying to make them feel believable. I'm discovering things, and that is where writing becomes much more than putting correctly spelled words in the correct order. The words are the tools to build the story.
Learning how I learn
One of the most useful things dyslexia has given me is an understanding that there isn't necessarily one correct way to learn anything. There is the way that works for me, which may not be the same way that works for someone else.
This became particularly important as I got older and when I have had employment which has meant training co-workers. Being adaptable myself means that I can also adapt my training to suit the person, not just trying to get someone to do it my way.
However, when you're young, so much of education is built around doing things in a particular way:
Read this.
Write that.
Remember this.
Spell that.
Copy this.
Learn this sequence.
And if that particular method doesn't work well for you, it can be very easy to assume that you are the problem, and sadly my education when I returned to the UK at 13 felt that way. I came back to a system where dyslexia didn’t exist, and so the method was the problem and I had to learn around it by myself.
By then, though, the diagnosis had meant I had a few years to discover what worked for me, and my parents were, and still are, super supportive, helping me to navigate my GCSEs, then A-levels and finally my Bachelor Degree, create coping mechanisms to deal with the fact I simply learn differently from what felt like everyone else.
My coping mechanisms
My coping mechanisms have changed over the years and yet they are largely just built on the foundations that I started when I was ten. Technology has obviously changed dramatically since I was ten, and even more so since I was thirty and even forty.
When I was growing up, there wasn't the same collection of digital tools available to help people with reading and writing. Today, I can use spellcheck and, in some programs, grammar check.
I can search for a word without necessarily needing to know how it’s spelled exactly. Oh, paper dictionaries and I were never good friends growing up. How on earth can I find a word if I have absolutely no idea what the first letter is, especially when I go to what I think it should be and can’t locate it? Pesky silent letters!
These days you can have a piece of writing read aloud, which is amazing if you can get a decent voice where you can hear what the words are. With my editing, reading aloud is sometimes where I pick up when I’ve used the wrong word.
I can use dictation and I've particular found Otter to be very reliable as my dictation can be transcribed and I've even found that it has recognised passages where I have had two people talking and has already transcribed them as seperate paragraphs.
If you’ve read my previous blog posts, you’ll have heard me talk of my reMarkable Paper Pro and transcribing my written text into typed text.
I can ask technology to help me find inconsistencies. AI such as ChatGBT can explain a concept to me, or, with the latest book I’m writing, describe to me what the Kazakhstan desert is like so that I can write about it more accurately.
And I use those tools. Why wouldn't I? There is no prize for making life unnecessarily difficult, and I never utterly understand when people won’t. The phrase ‘cut off your nose to spite your face’ always comes to mind when someone says, ‘the old ways are the best ways’. Well yes sometimes they are, but in truth I think a mixture of the two is what is important as I know technology isn't the whole answer. Technology and AI is sooooooo useful, especially for dyslexic writers, but it isn't magic. It still needs a person in the loop, and AI cannot write exactly what is in my mind and I wouldn't want it to write my books for me.
AI interprets what it sees or hears, and sometimes what it sees or heard is not what I thought I had written or spoke. Or, as I said in August’s blog, letters can look remarkably like each other when doing cursive and the machine does it’s best to sort it out and curiously still come up with an English word.
However, the biggest coping mechanism I've developed is probably simply knowing myself.
I know that I need to give myself time.
I know that something can look right and still be wrong.
I know that I shouldn't trust myself entirely to spot every spelling error in my own writing.
I know that if something is particularly important, I need another pair of eyes.
I know that sometimes I need to walk away from a piece of writing and come back to it later.
Distance helps, and being in the correct frame of mind is also important. When you've been staring at the same paragraph for an hour, your brain becomes rather attached to the version it believes is there. Come back the next day and suddenly you can see the problem. Or, occasionally, you can see three more problems.
Which is always fun.
Which brings me neatly back to the general theme of this newsletter. Sometimes the human brain and the technology are in perfect agreement; unfortunately, they can also agree on the wrong thing.
The danger of words that are real
I think this is one of the most frustrating things about spelling in English (I don’t have much experience in other languages it may be the same across the board). A completely wrong word can be easier to spot than a slightly wrong one.
If I'd written:
“Off to London today! Some elephant of interest...”
I'd probably have noticed.
An elephant of interest?
Hang on.
Something has gone wrong.
But:
“Some sites of interest...”
No immediate alarm. It is perfectly grammatical. It makes sense. It's just not what I meant.
And:
“what my daughter leant at school...”
Again, technically possible. Perhaps she spent six months leaning. Who knows?
The sentence doesn't collapse. It simply changes meaning slightly to those reading it, and my brain is quite capable of accepting that slight change without raising the alarm.
This is why I edit as many times as I do
Being dyslexic doesn't mean I don't care about spelling.
I do.
Very much.
It doesn't mean I think mistakes don't matter; they do.
Especially in books, including my books. When somebody buys one of my books, I want them to be able to disappear into the story as I do in so many books that I read. I don't want them constantly being pulled out of the fictional world by spelling mistakes or grammatical inconsistencies. I've had that happen to me with books I've read and it can be distracting if it happens too often. Although it does give me some relief to find issues, especially in traditionally published books.
For my books I want the characters to be what they notice. I want the emotions to be what they feel. I want the story to be what they remember.
That means editing, proofreading and technology matter, and most of all, having my editor is a must.
Very much.
The pressure to be polished
Social media creates an interesting problem for people with dyslexia. We are constantly surrounded by polished versions of other people's lives.
Perfect photographs.
Perfect meals.
Perfect houses.
Perfect holidays.
Perfect careers.
Perfectly written posts.
And somewhere in the middle of all that, it can be easy to feel that everything you put online needs to be equally polished. As a writer, I probably feel that pressure more than those who are not. After all, if I am an author, shouldn't I be able to spell? Shouldn't my grammar be perfect? Shouldn't every social media post be carefully edited? Shouldn't every sentence be beautifully constructed? In an ideal world, perhaps.
In reality? Sometimes I am posting from my mobile, which won't pick up grammar inconsistencies. Sometimes I'm thinking about something else but still want to get something out so that my algorithm stays on track. Sometimes I'm excited about what I've been doing. Sometimes I'm writing quickly or I'm tired, since writing is not my main career (I know crazy!).
Sometimes I press publish and only notice that my dyslexic brain has quietly slipped something past the security guards when it is picked up by someone else or when I see the post again later on.
That doesn't mean I don't know how to write.
It means I'm a human who has dyslexia, which occasionally means I trust my own brain more than I should.
There is something liberating about admitting it
For a long time, mistakes could feel embarrassing, and in some cases they still do. There’s that moment where I want the floor to open and swallow me whole, especially when they're mistakes I know I should have caught.
I still have that same little childhood voice saying:
You should have known that.
But here's the thing.
I did know it, and that's the strange and frustrating part.
I know sight and site are different words. I know which one belongs in sights when you go to a city to see them. I know learnt and leant are different words.
The problem was that, at that particular moment, my brain didn't flag the choice as wrong.
Knowing something and retrieving or applying it consistently aren't necessarily the same thing. That's something I've learned over the years, and perhaps that is one of the most important things I would like other people to understand.
If someone makes a mistake, don't automatically assume they don't know the answer. They might, and they may simply not have accessed it correctly in that moment.
Dyslexia has also taught me persistence
There are obviously frustrating parts to dyslexia, but there have been positive things too.
Having to figure out how I learn has taught me to experiment; if one approach doesn't work, take a deep breath and try another. If that doesn't work, try something else.
If I can't remember something one way, find another way to remember it.
If I can't make something work by following the obvious route, I’ll find a different route.
That mindset has probably helped me in more areas of life than I realise, as it helps with change and being able to adapt to an ever-changing world.
Writing certainly requires persistence.
You don't write a book because everything works perfectly every day. You write a book because you keep coming back to it. You write when the sentence is brilliant and the words just seem to flow naturally out. You write when the sentence is dreadful and hope that during the edit you know how to fix it. You write when you know exactly where the story is going and when you have absolutely no idea what happens next.
You edit. You rewrite. You delete or save it to another file, just in case.
You put something back.
You wonder why you ever thought a particular scene was a good idea.
You discover that a character has somehow developed an opinion you didn't expect them to have or, as in the book I’m currently working on, want their own chapter!
You carry on.
That ability to keep going matters.
Dyslexia and creativity
There is a common tendency to connect dyslexia with creativity, which I'm always a little cautious about.
I don't think being dyslexic automatically makes someone creative. It certainly hasn't given me a magical superpower that allows me to write bestselling books while everyone else struggles.
If only 😊
For me, writing has always been a place where I can explore ideas without having to know the answer in advance. I can create characters who are nothing like me, although there are a few evil characters in a separate series I’m developing where I struggle to get into their mindset, as I’m just not that evil.
I can put them into situations I've never experienced.
I can explore emotions.
I can ask:
What if?
And sometimes the answer takes me somewhere I didn't expect and that's one of the things I love about writing.
The advantage of knowing your weak spots
One advantage I have now is that I know there are things I need to watch. I don't have to discover them from scratch every time.
I know spelling needs attention.
I know homophones can catch me.
I know my brain can fill in what it expects to see, so sometimes I need to read aloud.
I know that leaving something for a while can help.
I know that another person reading it is valuable.
I know technology can help, but it shouldn’t do everything.
I know technology can also misunderstand my handwriting, so it will need checking.
I know that if something really matters, I should check it rather than simply trusting that because it looks right, it is right.
That awareness is itself a coping mechanism.
It's a little bit like knowing where the potholes are on a road. You don't have to rebuild the road; you just learn where to slow down.
Dyslexia doesn't look the same for everyone
I also want to be careful not to suggest that what I've described is what dyslexia looks like for everybody.
It isn't.
Different people experience dyslexia differently; some people struggle far more with reading, some struggle particularly with spelling, some have difficulties with working memory, sequencing, processing written information or retrieving words, some develop coping strategies that mean other people barely notice. Some people discover their dyslexia as adults, some people are diagnosed as children, some people never receive a formal diagnosis at all.
So when I talk about dyslexia, I'm talking about my dyslexia.
These are the things I've noticed in myself and the ways I've learned to cope.
Someone else's experience may be completely different.
And that's okay.
In fact, I think that's important.
Dyslexia isn't a single neat little box. People aren't either “dyslexic” or “not dyslexic” in exactly the same way. Brains are much more interesting than that.
What I wish people understood
If I could make people understand just a handful of things about dyslexia, this would be my list.
Knowing the correct word and spelling it correctly aren't always the same thing.
I can know the answer and still write it or say it incorrectly.
Reading something correctly doesn't mean I will spot an error in something I've written.
My brain already knows what I intended to say.
Sometimes it reads that intention rather than the exact letters on the page.
Spellcheck helps, but it isn't infallible.
Technology doesn't always understand context.
Some correctly spelled words are still the wrong words.
A spelling mistake isn't a measure of intelligence.
Neither is the speed at which somebody reads.
Neither is how neatly they write.
Neither is whether they find written instructions easy to follow.
Dyslexia doesn't mean someone can't be a writer.
It may mean they approach writing differently.
Asking for help isn't failure.
It's one of the ways I make sure the work reaches the standard I want.
And finally: sometimes we need to laugh about it.
Because if I couldn't laugh when my brain confidently decided that sites and leant were perfectly sensible choices, I'd probably spend far too much time being annoyed with myself.
The strange relationship between confidence and mistakes
One thing I've learned is that confidence isn't the same as correctness. That's true for everyone, of course, but dyslexia has made me particularly aware of it.
I can be extremely confident that something is right and discover later that it isn't.
That can be humbling and it can also be useful. As someone I’ve worked with for many years says, AFLO (Another F***ing Learning Opportunity). Because it teaches you to build a checking in process and not solely rely on how confident you feel.
Check.
Read it again.
Use another format.
Ask someone else.
Look it up.
And then move on.
I think that's a useful lesson beyond dyslexia too. We can all be wrong. The important thing isn't never being wrong; it's being willing to discover that we were and take steps to learn to be better. After all the definition of insanity is doing the same thing repeatedly and expecting a different result.
Why I haven't stopped writing
If there is one thing I hope comes through from this [longer than normal] newsletter, it is that dyslexia hasn't stopped me from loving words.
Quite the opposite.
Words are how I build worlds. They are how I introduce readers to characters and explore their relationships. How I describe places and tell stories about those characters and places. They create the emotion and build the plot to its conclusion. Unfortunately, sometimes those words arrive in the wrong order.
Sometimes they're spelled incorrectly or the wrong one sneaks in. Sometimes technology decides my handwriting says something completely different and I must work out what the word was supposed to be. Sometimes I or my editor look at a paragraph I've written and wonder what on earth I was thinking.
But the words still come.
And that's what matters.
From a diagnosis at ten to writing books
When I look back at being diagnosed at ten, I obviously couldn't have known where life would eventually take me. Even though I was already writing bits of stories at ten, I certainly couldn't have imagined that one day I would deliberately choose writing as something I wanted to pursue. At ten, dyslexia was simply something I had to learn to work with because some adults said this was why I was having issues with learning.
Now, it is part of the story of how I became a writer, of course, not the whole story, as I won’t let it define me. I simply accept, occasionally begrudgingly, that it is part of who I am.
It taught me how I learn and that the obvious way isn't always my way. It taught me to find coping mechanisms and to ask for help when I need it. It taught me persistence and that getting something wrong doesn't necessarily mean I can't do it; I just need a different route.
The irony of writing about dyslexia
There is something deliciously ironic about writing a long newsletter explaining why my writing sometimes contains mistakes. Especially when I am going to send it out to people who might read the whole thing and of course I do hope you’re still with me.
There is a tiny part of my brain going:
Are you sure this is a good idea?
Because somewhere in these thousands of words there will almost certainly be something I've missed. Perhaps a typo or a repeated word. There may be a sentence that needs restructuring or may even be a word that has decided to disguise itself as its homophone.
And you know what?
That's okay.
I will do what I can to catch them; I'll read it, I'll edit it, I'll check it, I'll probably read it again and eventually, I have to let it go. Because if I waited until I was absolutely certain that every single letter was perfect, I might never press publish.
And that would rather defeat the point of writing a newsletter about not being afraid of imperfection.
I'm not asking for a free pass
This is important to me.
I don't want people to read this and think:
Oh, so she doesn't bother proofreading because she's dyslexic.
I do bother. A lot.
I care about the quality of what I put out into the world, I care about my books and the words I use. I care about my readers and getting the story right. I care about presenting myself professionally. Caring about those things doesn't mean I will never make mistakes.
It means I have systems for dealing with mistakes, and most of the time those systems catch them or another person might catch them. Sometimes technology catches them and other times I catch them or my editor does later and rectify the error.
However, despite all of that, one will likely sneak through. Like sites or leant.
When it does, I'd rather laugh about it than feel ashamed, because the alternative is expecting myself to be perfect, and I'm not sure that's a particularly useful standard for anyone.
To anyone else who has a differently wired brain
If you're reading this and recognising bits of yourself, I hope there is something useful here for you. Maybe you were diagnosed young or you were diagnosed much later. Maybe you've spent years wondering why certain things seem harder than they should be compared to your peers. Maybe you're constantly correcting yourself or you’ve developed elaborate systems that nobody else understands. Maybe you have a collection of tricks that you don't even realise are coping mechanisms, and maybe you've had people assume that because you made a mistake, you didn't know the answer.
I can't tell you exactly what will work for you, only what works for me, but it might give you hope that you can find something that will work for you. One thing that I know for sure is that learning how your own brain works is worthwhile. Pay attention to the things that help. Notice when mistakes happen and what made it easier to catch or to notice them. Find tools that reduce the workload on the brain so that it can focus on the individual pieces of the whole picture.
Give yourself time when you need it and ask for another pair of eyes when something matters, even if that happens to be Chat GBT. And please don't let a spelling mistake become a judgement about your ability. A wrong word is a wrong word; it doesn't have to become a verdict on you.
And to everyone who isn't dyslexic...
Perhaps the biggest thing I'd like you to take away is simply this:
If someone makes a spelling mistake, don't automatically assume they don't know the word or are stupid. They might. They may simply have made a mistake.
If someone takes longer to read something, that doesn't necessarily mean they don't understand it or are dense, the font or the size or the contrast on the page may make it more difficult for their brain to process the information quickly.
If someone asks you to explain written instructions differently or write down verbal instructions, that doesn't necessarily mean they weren't paying attention when you first wrote or spoke them.
And if somebody's social media post contains a typo, it probably isn't worth judging their entire ability to communicate on the basis of it.
Sometimes a typo is just a typo, and there may be a reason behind it, such as my perfectly sensible brain briefly making a completely nonsensical decision.
I am still learning
After all these years, I'm still learning how my brain works. I don't think that's particularly unusual. Despite what people may want, we're all changing.
Technology changes.
The way we work changes.
The demands we put on ourselves change.
The tools available to us change.
I've learned things about my writing process that I didn't know two, five, ten years ago. I've discovered ways of editing that work better for me and technology that makes certain tasks easier. I've learned that sometimes handwriting can be useful and that my handwriting can also confuse technology. I've learned that sometimes the best thing I can do is stop staring at a sentence and come back to it later.
There is always something new to learn.
My permission slip
Perhaps this is really what this whole newsletter has been building towards.
Not an explanation or an apology.
A permission slip.
For me, as much as anyone else.
I give myself permission to make mistakes as long as I learn from them.
I give myself permission to use technology but not let it take over.
I give myself permission to reread something three times.
I give myself permission to walk away from a piece of writing and come back later.
I give myself permission to write an imperfect first, second and sixth draft.
I give myself permission to laugh when my brain confidently chooses the wrong word.
I give myself permission to continue calling myself a writer.
Because none of those things take that away from me.
So yes.
I wrote:
“Off to London today! Some sites of interest for what my daughter leant at school last term.”
It should have been:
“Off to London today! Some sights of interest for what my daughter learnt at school last term.”
My brain had a theory. Unfortunately, my brain was wrong, and that's okay.
I'll probably make another mistake tomorrow. Hopefully it won't be quite as entertaining, but if it is, perhaps I'll have another newsletter topic.
After all, there is always another story, and I've always loved stories.
Even when the words occasionally need a little help finding their way onto the page.
One last thought
I started writing because stories became a place where I could put things.
Ideas.
Dreams.
Characters.
Feelings.
Questions.
Possibilities.
Writing has given me a way to explore things that I might never have explored otherwise, and perhaps that is why dyslexia has never managed to take writing away from me. It may have made the process more complicated and editing more important. It can occasionally make me laugh at myself, but it doesn't take away the thing that made me want to write in the first place.
The imagination and curiosity is still there.
The characters and stories are still there.
And the words?
Well...
Most of the time, they're there too. I just occasionally have to check which ones have been brought to the table.
Until next month,
SJ
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