Resource Centre: Library

Dyslexia First-hand

Eric Woehrling, Ph.D

Eric Woehrling graduated from the European School of Brussels in 1988. He studied English at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge and took his Ph.D at the University of Liverpool. He is now a European equities investment analyst with Stewart Ivory & Co., Edinburgh, UK.

My career as a dyslexic has come full circle. I have suffered throughout my schooldays as a result of dyslexia, but I have slowly learned to cope with it to the point where I recently got the job I always wanted.

Yet dyslexia does not go away. It keeps cropping up in odd ways. I had re-read my Ph.D before the oral examination, and detected hundreds of mistakes which, curiously, my external examiner made no mention of during the examination. I asked him, at the end, whether he had noticed any mistakes and he replied that he was dyslexic and that he had only noticed four. Intrigued by this, I told my supervisor, who went to check the four mistakes and discovered that the examiner had been so dyslexic that none of the four were actually mistakes in the first place. This just shows that even acute dyslexia is no impediment to an academic career.

Dyslexia is hard to define as it covers a lot more than inverting words or having trouble reading. Although dyslexic, I had no trouble with reading and writing but I persistently misspelled certain words. My problem was that I couldn’t do things like understanding time-tables, reading maps or remembering directions.

Now, lexis in ancient Greek meant the manner in which you said something, the style if you like, contrary to logos which meant the content of what you said or the reality. Lexis in a more extended sense describes the conventions which allow us to communicate and live together and make sense of a common logos or reality. What underlies the different problems described as ‘dyslexia’ is a difficulty understanding these conventions.

On my first day at school in Brussels, our first lesson was Maths with our form teacher, who gave us the time-table for the year. I inexplicably assumed that Maths would be the first lesson of every day of the week. I was, partly as a result of this, late for every lesson every day of the first week and frequently for the rest of my school days. Once the teacher had to send a search-party for me. What hurt me was the fact that my interpretation of the time-table was not a priori illogical, although it was certainly strange; it was just that everyone else automatically knew what rules to follow and I didn’t.

Dyslexia often leaves you feeling exposed in this way, like a soldier on parade who turns left when the rest of the regiment is turning right. In my case, turning up late was a ritual the whole class looked forward to and my disconsolate entry would, perhaps understandably, elicit waves of hysterical laughter. Those and other related difficulties made me into a figure of fun with my peers, and frequently played havoc with my school work, thus preventing me from achieving my potential. It all seemed so unfair because there was never anything fundamentally irrational about what I was doing; I consequently felt resentful and humiliated much of the time. Today, when I make mistakes similar to those I made in those days, I can feel the frustration well up purely because of the associations raised.

This leads to an important point. Though spelling and time-tables are often arbitrary, they are essential to life in society. These conventions are so central to our world that when dyslexics question them it often makes people feel insecure. It is because of this that teachers can sometimes be so harsh with dyslexics.

Certainly, the knee-jerk exasperated rejection of dyslexics is harmful and should stop. But the dyslexic must also learn to accept the conventions of society as his own, and to understand that these are not mere trivialities. To want to invent your own ways of doing things is to isolate yourself.

To the harsh teacher, who will dismiss a beautiful essay because it is full of dyslexic mistakes, we can retort, as the saying goes, ‘the spirit brings life but the letter kills’; but to the dyslexic who cannot see the point of spelling (and I am thinking mostly of my former self here) I would say that without the letter the spirit is just a lot of air. Dyslexics should be confident that they have something of value to say even if it does not always conform to linguistic and other lexical conventions, but they should still learn to accept those conventions and, as it were, make their peace with the world.

In coping with dyslexia you are absolutely dependent on others and absolutely dependent on yourself at the same time. I was lucky to have parents who supported me through thick and thin. They were prepared to stand up for me even when I was in the wrong, and they believed in me with such fervour that I was able to continue believing in myself when everything seemed to fall apart. I also had great teachers who were able to recognise some value hidden in my chaos, but were also consistently able to criticise and help me identify those weaknesses which prevented the value from revealing itself.

At the same time, as I say, you are absolutely responsible for yourself. The most important element is self-belief, because for years you can make efforts to improve yourself and get no results or recognition. It is very easy to give up then, and you have to keep believing it will come right.

The second element is ambition. You have to be willing to sacrifice and make efforts to make yourself a success. The cliché of ‘going that extra mile’ hits the mark here. Once you have, say, made your paper 95% error-free, you have to be willing to stay up an extra hour to make it 96% error-free, and then keep working until it is perfect. Whether it was in re-reading my job application forms or the final chapter of my thesis, going the extra mile has meant the difference between success and failure for me.

There is a lot of value to be released from dyslexia in this way because I think the act of not following conventional lexis gives you an independence of mind and an original approach. Sometimes it also gives you a better understanding of conventions because you have actually had to consciously learn them. I now find that I am a useful proof-reader, because checking for my own mistakes has given me an extra habit of vigilance.

Today, in my job, as I calculate profit forecasts or how many shares to buy, I am able to do so without making dyslexic mistakes. And yet I still make mistakes, some of them typical of a dyslexic. But I also realise that everyone, dyslexic or not, sometimes makes similar mistakes. Then, I wonder, am I just making the same mistakes as anyone would, or is this a residue of my dyslexic nature? The great thing is that I just can’t tell – I have changed so much that I’m just unable to ‘sditinguish’ between the two.