I suffer from a disability called agraphia. It is a learning disorder that affects my ability to spell and write.
The disability in my case is congenital (been with me from birth) however others may suffer this because of brain damage or a stroke. It is often mistaken for dyslexia to which it has a passing similarity however unlike dyslexia it does not affect my reading.
Why don't you use a spelling checker?
The use of the spelling checkers is problematic as they are are designed for people who make an error about once a paragraph. As I make errors more often than that and often the suggestions are nowhere near what I have in mind, it can take up to 5 minutes a word to correct.
How do you use the command line when you misspell everything?
Using a command line interface is easier than you might think, the vocabulary is small and the words are short. In addition there are the neat tools of command line completion (if I type gre and hit 'tab' it will write grep for me.) and tcsh correction.
In fact I would love an equivalent to command line completion for the english languge.
And I've discovered it. By placeing a list of the most commonly used English words (extracted from usenet) in a emacs buffer I am able to use dynamic expansion to complete words that I don't know how to spell.
How do you program a computer with all these spelling mistakes?
As long as I get the key words right and the spelling of everything else consistent my program will have little problem running. My spelling does introduce a number of bugs but they're easily removed in the debugging stage.
In perl I almost always "use strict;" (good advice even if you are not agraphic) so that variables don't pop into existence from spelling mistakes.
As there is a small number of keywords (relative to that of English) it is far easier to remember them, or to look them up in a manual then to do similer tasks in English.
I have this great (flash card/drug/tapes) that could fix your spelling up.
Really? Has it been double blind tested? I've been involved in many well intended methods to fix my spelling. I'm sorry but I no longer have the patience to go on another wild goose chase.
Do you know of any agraphia resources/further information?
I'm always searching for more information here are a number of links that I have found (A number of these refer to dysgraphia, it's basically the same thing).
| Information about dyslexics, agraphics' access to education | Access |
| LD online has this helpful resource page | LD online |
| And also this one | LD online |
| Family Village disability resorce page | Page |
| What is Dysgraphia? | Graphia |
| Writing LD | Caroline |
| Diagnosis and Intervention Strategies for Disorders of Written Language | Margaret J. Kay, Ed.D. |
| Gifted/Learning Disabled Children | http://www.geocities.com/Athens/1105/ |
| The gift of dyslexia | Ronald D Davis, isbn 0 285 63281 7 |
| The Writing Dilemma: Understanding Dysgraphia | Regina G. Richards R E T Center Press |
If its congenital why do you call it agraphia?
Because it's harder to make bad jokes about dysgraphia
Why have I been e-mailed this?
If you have been e-mailed this it is because either you have asked me about agraphia (if so I hope this has been helpful) or you have flamed my spelling (in that case shame on you).
It's a conspiracy to take over the world!
Yes it is, read the Plot of the Platypus
Any last comments?
I respect a man who knows how to spell a word more than one way. -- Mark Twain