My mother made scrapbooks for my siblings and I with samples of our schoolwork over the years.

If you go back and look at early examples of my handwriting, every "S" was backwards, my b and d were often flipped the wrong way, as were my p and q.

My spelling was atrocious, but my vocabulary was way above average.

I also had the issue with transposing numbers while doing math.

It wasn't until I reached High School that I had a teacher who recognized dyslexia when he saw it.

Yeah, I think most people don't read words, but recognize their shape, first and last letters being most significant. That's why it is relatively easy to read text with words internally scrambled. Unusual names, long words that are first learned from text, misread once and remembered like that forever. This is especially easy if you don't normally pronounce words while reading.

I still have to double take on "invertebrate", because I originally read it as "intervertebrate" or something like that :).