Dyslexia is a specific learning disability that manifests primarily as a difficulty with written language, particularly with reading and spelling. It is separate and distinct from reading difficulties resulting from other causes, such as deficiencies in intelligence, a non-neurological deficiency with vision or hearing, or from poor or inadequate reading.

Instructions

• One of the most obvious telltale signs is reversals. People with this kind of problem often confuse letters like b and d, either when reading or when writing, or they sometimes read (or write) words like “rat” for “tar,” or “won” for “now.”
• Another sure sign, which needs no confirmation by means of any form of testing, is elisions, that is when a person sometimes reads or writes “cat” when the word is actually “cart.”
• The person who reads very slowly and hesitantly, who reads without fluency, word by word, or who constantly loses his place, thereby leaving out whole chunks or reading the same passage twice, has a reading problem.
• The person may try to sound out the letters of the word, but then be unable to say the correct word. For example, he may sound the letters “c-a-t” but then say “cold.”
• He may read or write the letters of a word in the wrong order, like “left” for “felt,” or the syllables in the wrong order, like “emeny” for “enemy,” or words in the wrong order, like “are there” for “there are.”
• He may spell words as they sound, for example “rite” for “right.”
• He may read with poor comprehension, or it may be that he remembers little of what he reads.
• The person may have a poor and/or slow handwriting. This problem is often referred to as “dysgraphia.”