Xavier’s Nest

I was wondering, how much does writing quality matter to you?

I know on NaNo everyone says that quantity not quality is what they are going for, but is that really true?

In first grade, I remember on incident that stood out very baddly in my memor:

I was called up in front of the class, because I had gotten every single answer on my math test wrong. and the teacher wanted to “make an example of me”. She copied out the problems and my wrong answers on the blackboard, and loadly told the other children to learn from my “laziness”. (mind you this was in the 1970’s when dyslexia was unheard of).

My dylexia was so bad, that I was removed from school at age 8, (they said I was too lazy to study for tests and unbale to learn math) and all of my learning from that point onward comes from sitting for 8 or 9 hours a day in the library reading EVERYTHING. Not just novels, but also all articles in all magzines and every volume of each encyclopidia.

Now lazy I was not… I am the farthest thing from lazy. At age 6 I already had over 1,000 books in my book collection, (today it stands at over 10,000 books + 7,000 comic books, for a total of 17,000+ books, more than out local libray which has only 12,000 books in it) and had read them all (I have also read all the book in our local libray… when I ran out of books there, I ended up with library cards at 5 other librayies includeing the state libray which has 2 million books, I should have gone though those in less than 10 years… I’ll have to come back in 10 years to let you know) .. I had started reading and writing at age 3. I wrote my first book at age 3 as well.

I as, you may have guessed am a speed reader. I can read forwards, backwards, and upside down, all just as easy as reading normal front to back.

However, though my reading and writing skills resulting in my being tested by the Mensa’s… my spelling and math resulting in my being sent to an after school remidiale course.

I kept that math test. Still have it around here some where. Toay, I know what I did wrong and why I had gotten every answer wrong. I did not get them wrong. In fact I got every one of them right. I wrote them down in reverse.

Example: One one problem the answer was 92, but I had writen down 29. Every answer was like this.

I was 27 years old before any one eber pointed out to me that I read clocks in reverse as well. Say the time was 1:15, I’d say 1:45. I never knew I was doing this for the first 20 odd years of my life!

As I said, I wrote my first book at age 3. That book was volume one of the Twighlight Manor series, which now has over 30 books and stories in the series and I am this year for NaNo writing the next volume. However, writing with dylexia is far from easy, in fact it is down right next to impossible, as my mauscripts require some very serois editing borfor they can be publishable and no one but myself can read the “misspelled” words. It is a task that reqired me to program, one at a time, every word I misspell, into my MSWorks spell checker, along with the correct spelling, a task that took several weeks to do.

Why did I have to reprogram the spell checker? Beacuse a spellcheck assumes that you at last got the first 2 letters correct, and if you are tytping in reverse, than it well not find the answer. While the average person uses 2000 words in their daily vocabulary, I use 5000, this means it required some 5000+ words be hand programed into the spell checker.

It is not uncommon to find not only misspelled words but miswritten sentances.

Example:

Something as simple as “I love you” could come out as: “uoy evol I”. For someone o actually be able to read much of my writing from a first draft view, is next to impossible.

As a writer I strive for high quality… in both my books and my blog/forum posts; as a dislexic, I often have trouble with reverseing both words and the spellings of words. Often I do not see the misstakes until some one has pointed them out to me. It can be quite embaressing because I don’t always see grammar and spelling mistakes in my work or in the work of others. I do my best to write clearly and avoid misspellings, grammar problems, and run-on-sentences, but often I simply can not see them.

I have often been sent emails by folks who were thourally pissed off at my spelling and grammar mistakes on forums and blogs. They acted as though I had just slaughted a million people or something. I find it quite distressing that there are such holyer than thou evil minded people who are so cruel and cold hearted that they actually send out such hatful messages to people like me.

Are there any other writer/bloggers/NaNoers who have similar problems when writing? How do other writers with dislexia work around their spelling and grammar errors?Have you had anyone respond negatively to your blog/forum posts/writings due to how you write?

————-
Copper Cockeral
Publishing Your NaNo Novel?
Do You and I Read the Same Books?

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