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Dysgraphia Imagine having a head full of wonderful ideas and not being able to effectively commit them to paper. Imagine picking up a pencil and having everything you write down come out backwards. This frustrating learning disability is called dysgraphia, or graphic dyslexia, and it is something Nathaniel Marston has been dealing with since childhood. Dysgraphia is more than just an inability to write neatly, although poor handwriting is frequently a symptom. It is a neurologically based learning disability in which there is a difficulty in automatically remembering and mastering the sequence of muscle motor movements needed in writing letters or numbers. Interestingly, this difficulty does not always extend to non-writing tasks, so a person with dysgraphia may be talented in the graphic arts. Nathaniel briefly touched on his learning disability in an interview with Soap Opera Weekly in March of 2003: “When I was a kid, I could draw and write very well. I was very artistically inclined. But everything I wrote was backward." Marston was taught to write forward, but it never clicked. "I could write faster at 4 than I can now." Dysgraphia is not an indicator of intelligence. In fact, many famous people have struggled with this disability, including Albert Einstein and Louis Pasteur. People develop various coping skills to deal with it. Nathaniel was able to dictate his work to someone else during one school year. In recent years many students have come to rely on computers to translate their thoughts and knowledge into the written word. For more information about dysgraphia/graphic dyslexia click on the following links: http://www.ninds.nih.gov/health_and_medical/disorders/dysgraphia.htm |
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