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Why I loved to write, but have never published. by John Howard.
Hi everyone. Let me introduce myself and tell you a little about me. It will help you understand me a little better. The more you comprehend about me, the less the chance that you will misunderstand me.
I love to write, and I write a lot. I mean A LOT. I love writing because I feel I can better articulate my thoughts through writing than I can by talking. The problem is, I am actually not that good at writing. If you are now confused, let me explain.
I was diagnosed with severe dyslexia when I was six years old. Actually, I was very fortunate because my dyslexia was so pronounced that it was caught early by my first-grade teacher who knew something about dyslexia. Many kids back in the 1970s with dyslexia went undiagnosed for most of their life and suffered a lot of ridicule as a result of people thinking they were just stupid. My case was so severe, I wrote everything entirely backwards. The wrote the word, "THE" as EHT and the E would be inverted. AND, was written DNA and the D and N would be inverted. So and so forth. Numbers were all written inverted as well. So, I struggled in school. I loved science and math and did very well in those subjects. I loved history but hated to read, so I did not do as well as I should have. But English was the bane of my existence. I hated writing with untold passion, and I despised American English because of the inconsistency of the rules of grammar. It was an outright war to get me to write anything, and if I did, I would try to figure the most concise way to write it in the fewest words possible.
So, how did I become the person who loves to write today? In one word, Computers. Most people do not realize this, but computers help people like me with dyslexia. Why? Well, it is because of how it displays text. You see, when you read text on a piece of paper, what you are seeing is a "Reflection." Have you ever read a book with a flashlight? You point the light at the page, right? The light reflects off the page and to your eyeballs. So everything you see in the natural world is actually a reflection. Light is reflecting off of everything, and that is why you can see it. And we all know that reflected images are inverted right? But in a person that does not have dyslexia, their brain rectifies the inverted image that they see. This does not happen in a person with dyslexia, like me. So, you might be asking right about now; how does a computer change this. Well, you see, the text you see on your computer screen is not a reflection, it is a Projection! Because it is a projection, it is not inverted and does not need to be rectified by the brain.
So, computers changed my life as far as writing goes. I had actually learned to love to read at the age of ten. I was living in a British colony at the time and ran across a book about some boys who had a fort in a junkyard and solved mysteries. It was called The Three Investigators. I hated to read, but that book intrigued me so much that I read it all the way through. It was only a tiny book of about 100 pages, I believe, but it took me six days to read it. But when I was done, I wanted more. There was an older couple who had a set of forty-two Hardy Boys mystery novels written in the Queen's English. All hardback editions. I don't know what the publishing dates were, but they were very old. They gave me the whole set, and I read every one of them many times over. All my friends could read a Hardy Boys book in two hours, and it took me two days, but that did not stop me. That was the beginning of my love of reading, although I still hated to write.
So, here I am today. I love to write, but because of my dyslexia, I struggle. I make a lot of mistakes that I cannot see myself, and I draw some ridicule, but I do not let that dissuade me from writing. Many hundreds of people have told me that I am a good writer, but I have never published anything I have written. I guess I am still a little self-conscience about my writing and afraid that I try to publish, I will embarrass myself.
That is my writing origin story. I am sure it is full of errors, so please be kind.
Hi everyone. Let me introduce myself and tell you a little about me. It will help you understand me a little better. The more you comprehend about me, the less the chance that you will misunderstand me.
I love to write, and I write a lot. I mean A LOT. I love writing because I feel I can better articulate my thoughts through writing than I can by talking. The problem is, I am actually not that good at writing. If you are now confused, let me explain.
I was diagnosed with severe dyslexia when I was six years old. Actually, I was very fortunate because my dyslexia was so pronounced that it was caught early by my first-grade teacher who knew something about dyslexia. Many kids back in the 1970s with dyslexia went undiagnosed for most of their life and suffered a lot of ridicule as a result of people thinking they were just stupid. My case was so severe, I wrote everything entirely backwards. The wrote the word, "THE" as EHT and the E would be inverted. AND, was written DNA and the D and N would be inverted. So and so forth. Numbers were all written inverted as well. So, I struggled in school. I loved science and math and did very well in those subjects. I loved history but hated to read, so I did not do as well as I should have. But English was the bane of my existence. I hated writing with untold passion, and I despised American English because of the inconsistency of the rules of grammar. It was an outright war to get me to write anything, and if I did, I would try to figure the most concise way to write it in the fewest words possible.
So, how did I become the person who loves to write today? In one word, Computers. Most people do not realize this, but computers help people like me with dyslexia. Why? Well, it is because of how it displays text. You see, when you read text on a piece of paper, what you are seeing is a "Reflection." Have you ever read a book with a flashlight? You point the light at the page, right? The light reflects off the page and to your eyeballs. So everything you see in the natural world is actually a reflection. Light is reflecting off of everything, and that is why you can see it. And we all know that reflected images are inverted right? But in a person that does not have dyslexia, their brain rectifies the inverted image that they see. This does not happen in a person with dyslexia, like me. So, you might be asking right about now; how does a computer change this. Well, you see, the text you see on your computer screen is not a reflection, it is a Projection! Because it is a projection, it is not inverted and does not need to be rectified by the brain.
So, computers changed my life as far as writing goes. I had actually learned to love to read at the age of ten. I was living in a British colony at the time and ran across a book about some boys who had a fort in a junkyard and solved mysteries. It was called The Three Investigators. I hated to read, but that book intrigued me so much that I read it all the way through. It was only a tiny book of about 100 pages, I believe, but it took me six days to read it. But when I was done, I wanted more. There was an older couple who had a set of forty-two Hardy Boys mystery novels written in the Queen's English. All hardback editions. I don't know what the publishing dates were, but they were very old. They gave me the whole set, and I read every one of them many times over. All my friends could read a Hardy Boys book in two hours, and it took me two days, but that did not stop me. That was the beginning of my love of reading, although I still hated to write.
So, here I am today. I love to write, but because of my dyslexia, I struggle. I make a lot of mistakes that I cannot see myself, and I draw some ridicule, but I do not let that dissuade me from writing. Many hundreds of people have told me that I am a good writer, but I have never published anything I have written. I guess I am still a little self-conscience about my writing and afraid that I try to publish, I will embarrass myself.
That is my writing origin story. I am sure it is full of errors, so please be kind.
Enjoy the forum.
