How you cope now, depends on the type of problem you had as a child. May be you found it difficult sounding out printed words, if reading out loud, you tended to pronounce certain words (e.g. yacht, bough) incorrectly, or maybe you had difficulty remembering what you have read for example. Unless you have a severe dyslexia, as you go through your education, you will gradually develop strategies to help you cope. That is, things you can do you tend to rely on more. For example, if you have a difficulty in sounding out words, you will listen carefully when others say them and add them to your lexicon by memorising them. Adult developmental dyslexics are often referred to as compensated dyslexics when they have found ways to cope with their problem.
You may cope perfectly well as an adult using these strategies and no one would ever be aware. But you may realise there is a problem and want to check it out for sure. You can look at your spellings and see if there is a pattern. Do you regularly spell words you hear as they sound (even “yacht” or”bough”) for example.
One thing that research has shown is that there is nearly always a reading speed deficit, even as a compensated dyslexia, as an adult the reading speed will be slower than normal. If you are going to test your reading speed yourself, do not use a paragaph where you can pick up the context as this obviously helps you. Construct a 200 to 300 word paragraph that consists of random 3 letter words that do not form a sentence.
Such a sentence may be along the lines of, “dog, the, may, cat, say, the, big, and”. Read it silently to yourself with a stop watch and get a couple of other people to read it as well. See if your speed is slower.
At this point, it must be pointed out that you may not dyslexic at all. If you failed to learn to read properly at school because you had poor attendance, moved around a lot, didn’t bother, poor eyesight or hearing etc., you may just be a slow and ‘garden variety’ type of poor reader. Take the online dyslexia test today and give yourself a proper idea.
CLICK HERE to go there straight there now.
