Dyslexia can broadly be defined as a learning disorder that is of neurological origin. Almost 15%-20% of the world population is affected by this disorder. Dyslexia can occur in any gender and any age group. However, since it is a neurological disorder, children are born with it. Dyslexia can be observed only when a child starts learning things. People with dyslexia have a problem with reading, writing and also spelling; also people face problems with general mathematics and sequencing. Dyslexia is often the result of a hereditary problem and the problem varies from slight to severe disorder is the learning process.

Usually the following characteristics can be observed in dyslexic people:

• They find it difficult to read the printed letters and memorize them.

• They tend to reverse the letters like replacing p with q or b with d. Often they also tend to change the order of the words like dog would become god.

• While reading, dyslexic people might end up inserting or deleting words on their own.

• When such people are asked to read aloud, then they might substitute consonants for one another or would be unable to differentiate the vowel sounds.

• They find it difficult to memorize the spellings no matter how many times they go through them.

• It is also seen that people with dyslexia find it difficult to write and often make grammatical and lexical mistakes.

It is important that you understand the difference between the mistakes that a dyslexic makes and the mistakes made by a normal reader. Dyslexics tend to repeat the same mistakes again and again and this becomes difficult to correct. The same is the case with the reading skills where they make the same reading mistakes repeatedly despite corrections.

There are basically three types of dyslexia:

• Observed in children: This is a genetic and neurological problem with which dyslexic children are born. This is found in children who have problems in understanding how to perform the basic activities of normal life and reading and writing things.

• Observed in adults: This is seen to occur when adults are still dealing with the problem of dyslexia that they suffered in their childhood.

• Alexia: This is a case of dyslexia that results from a brain trauma. Researchers prefer categorizing alexia as a type of dyslexia.

Modern day scientists describe dyslexia by dividing it into two subcategories namely deep dyslexia and surface dyslexia. Surface dyslexia results when words are deciphered phonetically rather than reading them on how they were written. This is because of difficulty in identifying of the words; this type of dyslexia can be corrected by reading aloud and making the person understand the difference between pronunciations of each letter. Deep dyslexia is as a result of inability to read new words because the person does not have the capacity to differentiate letter-by-letter and know the words by memorizing their structure only.

Dyslexia is a condition that can be improved with time. With some technical understanding of how to deal and make dyslexic people understand the difference between letters and sounds will help them lead a better life.

Jonathan Pitts

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