True - but to my limited knowledge, typical dyslectic problems are NOT related to building good or bad sentences, but in translating words between (oral) language (in the mind, or spoken) and the written text. As far as I know, spell checkers are great tools for many dyslectics. (I have 4 close friends with that problem. 3 of those have a Pd.D degree... Dyslectic comes in all flavors; one of my friends had it real hard and had yellow post-it stickers all over his study with words he had to memorize... the stubbornness and devotion in that guy is incredible!)

Anyway - whatever works! I'm happy you found a good tool that works for you, J.I

Mostly Harmless is correct. I have a firm grasp of my native language and know how to build a clear, comprehensive paragraph. The difficulty is in putting letters together to build clear and understandable words.

As for my second language, I still make grammatical errors as the French grammar is different from English.

Jeanette Isabelle

Jeannette,

I am curious. Were you ever diagnosed by a neuro-psychologist, a doctor who actually diagnoses learning disorders?

I am asking, because you say you know four other people who have it. True dyslexia is extremely rare.

When my grand-niece was diagnosed with dyslexia, I did a little research. What I found was that it was the schools that were diagnosing dyslexia. I also discovered that for every child they say has a learning disability, it seems they get more federal money. Quite an incentive, isn't it?

Anyway, I also read that someone asked a neuro-psychologist just HOW they diagnosed dyslexia. The answer was a bit of a shock at the time. He said they recommend to the parents that they enroll their child in a straight-phonics reading program outside the school for six months. At the end of that time, they test the kid again. If there has been noticeable improvement, they don't have dyslexia, they are simply the victims of the reading system their school uses. If there has been no improvement, they continue searching and testing.

Sue

Jannette,

I understand that you are talking about a disorder like condition. But my point is that you can build a grammatically correct word, which will be acceptable for a spell checker program, but will be actually different from what you had in mind (mostly apply to typos, though).

For example: people often write "to" instead of "too"; I'm often catching myself writing "it's" instead of "its" for some subliminal reason. e.t.c.

First, I was not the one who said I know four other people who have dyslexia. Mostly Harmless is the one who said that.

Second, though there was some testing in schools, most testing was done in hospital settings, most notably Texas Scottish Rite Hospital in Dallas. They have a learning disorder center and to the best of knowledge they don't have an incentive to diagnose children with dyslexia. Though I have undergone many tests, I don't know how many neuropsychologists were involved. The test you mentioned was not used.

Jeanette Isabelle

I do confuse homophones so, as you can imagine, my homophones are very confused. This is why my preferred word processor, Word Perfect, is so handy. It comes with a Grammatik checker so it catches many of the common mistakes. However, it does not catch every mistake of this nature. If I am unsure about a word, I use the built-in thesaurus. If it is not in the thesaurus, I turn to Google or to my 3" thick dictionary.

Jeanette Isabelle

By the way, the more advanced option would be a narration software (the Dragon Naturally Speaking is the top of the line). The AI algorithms they've implemented to auto correct the real time speech to text recognition data are much more sophisticated than anything a plain text processor might have.

Spell checkers certainly help and MS Word's grammar checker is fairly good.
I often have problems with the homophones too.

I also tend to drop letters as I type.

I think there are a lot more people with some form of dyslexia than we recognize. I think that we generally fail to recognize the milder forms. Often I notice people who drop letters and get them in the wrong order but correct for it quickly.
I am not talking about typos either.

From what I have seen most forms of dyslexia seem to affect the highly intelligent more than the average person too. Why that happens I don't know and can't even make a guess at.

I happen to know a woman who is mildly dyslexic and is a technical writer. I could joke about that being why so many manuals so hard to make sense of, but she writes very clearly because she has had to proof read her own writing all of her life.
It is a constant habit with her.

My wife was diagnosed with dislexia (and yes, withe a LOT of testing) - there was some debate if she had dislexia, or disgraphia

She has serious issues with "pitch" - you can play a note 2+ octaves apart, and she can't tell you which is higher/lower

Mozilla Foxfire with Aspell installed. Effective, simple to use, and, best of all, free.