Dealing with Adult Dyslexia

One of the first things you should do if you think you might have adult dyslexia is to go for professional testing and diagnosis. This will allow you to work on accurate strategies to help you address and overcome your issues.

Many people with adult dyslexia try to hide their daily struggles, which can only make things worse, because neither you nor the people around you will know what’s really going on. You will only spend a lot of time and effort on developing coping strategies instead of getting to the root of the problem.

Try to manage your time better
Many adults diagnosed with dyslexia have time management issues and one way of overcoming this is to maintain a daily planner, in which they write absolutely everything down, within reason.

Remember your mother's diary, the old yuppie filofax, well we now have a startling number of low and high tech devices to help us take notes and keep track of our time.

Pick something that you find simple and convenient to use, something that fits with your life style, a planning touchstone to refer back to, as frequently as you need to, to check on what, how and when things are due.

Gadgets can help
Around the house you can use a simple wind up cooker timer to keep track of activities but when you are out and about you can use some of the newer electronic gadgets on the market today. Something with alarms you can set to remind you in advance that you have an appointment to keep or a presentation to make, etc,.

Other, more expensive gadgets can take a snapshot of a sign, document or other text and read it back to you through an earpiece or out loud, depending on what you prefer.

These capabilities are now built into or loaded on to mobile devices and smartphones, which can travel with you when you travel and are particularly helpful if you are going to a strange city. These devices are discussed at length in other postings on this blog.

Lack of short-term auditory memory
One of the characteristics of dyslexia is a lack of, or deterioration of short-term auditory memory. By repeating instructions or directions back to someone after hearing them, and writing them down or even recording those directions in your diary, is a simple method to help overcome this particular obstacle.

You should also try to focus on key words and perhaps try to visualise these words in a series of mental pictures.

Improve your reading and writing
One way to work on improving your reading and writing skills is to break words into their basic sound components i.e. blends, graphs, diphthongs. etc, and then learn to rearrange the sounds to produce different words.

This technique has been shown to help adult dyslexics develop better reading fluency while producing fewer errors in their writing.

Summary
If you have been diagnosed with dyslexia, you shouldn’t despair. It may take some time to rebuild your self-esteem and confidence, especially if you’ve been trying to manage this disorder without external or additional support.

You should keep in mind that being dyslexic does not mean you’re unintelligent or unable to learn; it just means your brain is wired differently.

If you have any questions or comments on this post please let us know at dyslexiauntied@gmail.com