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Comment by liamtk43 | Hacker News Reader

As an attorney who has struggled with dyslexia and ADHD my entire life, I can attest to the frustrations associated with responding to emails. While most people are able to quickly, if not subconsciously, craft a well thought out response, I spend countless minutes if not hours, fighting to find a way to transfer the sentence I have in my mind on to the screen. For those who do not have dyslexia, the best way I can think of to describe this limitation is the feeling you have when you are trying to remember a word, name, or sentence that is "on the tip of your tongue." It is frustrating and often becomes overwhelming.

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I sometimes lose words. Like chair disappears from my mind, I can describe one, I know what one is, but the label for it is gone and even if you say it I may or may not recognize it. I don't have dyslexia, but a mental health issue that causes it. The funny part is names do the same thing, they're labels for specific people.

I do this as well!

I experience this, too!

I have dysgraphia, which is similar to dyslexia, but it only affects writing. It takes me a frustratingly long time to write emails. I've literally spent two hours writing a 100 word email before.

In general, I can write an email quickly, coherently, or succinctly, choose two.

My writing ability in a particular medium about a particular subject improves with time, to the point where I feel as though I don't have a learning disability. However, I find myself back at square one if I try to write in a new context. It's really maddening.

The worst part is that other people don't understand it at all, yet they think they can speak somewhat authoritatively on the issue because they (like all people) have had difficultly learning something in the past.

It's exhausting.

Do speech to text software, or recording and then transferring to text sidestep dysgraphia?

Kind of. There are two types of dysgraphia, physical, and cognitive. For people with physical dysgraphia, they do effectively sidestep their limitations.

I have cognitive dysgraphia. Basically most people don't think about writing once they've learned to write, they just write. That is, they've automated the physical component of turning words into text.

I, on the other hand, have an extremely diminished ability to translate language into physical expression. Basically whereas forming letters for other people is always automatic, I always need to think about what a letter looks like and then draw it.

I've been trying to use speech-to-text software for probably 20 years now. It has definitely improved, but it has never gotten to where I want it to be. For one thing, written speech is fundamentally different than the spoken word. There is a lot of implicit formatting that speech-to-text completely misses. Adding in this formatting adds back in all of the overhead that I hope to avoid by speaking in the first place.

One of the biggest issues is that speech-to-text works great when your vocabulary is limited. I think this is one of the reasons why it has always been a reasonably popular option for doctors and lawyers when compared with other fields. I think speech-to-text suffers when it comes to general-purpose writing because the vocabulary is so much larger, and understanding what word is intended requires a lot of context.

I've tried recording, and it works reasonably well, but it is really slow. The best coping strategy I've found is to write down all of my ideas on notecards (or any paper really) and then arrange them in a logical order. I then type out a rough draft using the notecards. I then print the rough draft and then type out my second draft (rather than editing my first).

Fundamentally, my dysgraphia shows up in testing as substantially lower working memory when writing than when performing other tasks. (To the tune of two standard deviations or so). I think my method works because it sidesteps the need to hold information in my head while writing.

I wonder how much, if at all, has the spread of auto-correct helped with overcoming that?

Or encouraged it?

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