Dyslexic Authors Drowned in Red Ink

As someone who is dyslexic, I have spent much of my life in a slightly adversarial relationship with language. I have always loved stories, but the machinery of writing them down has not always loved me back.

When I was young, I wrote often and with enthusiasm: stories I thought were exciting, strange and funny. Few things delighted me more than watching a teacher smile, or hearing them laugh, as they read something I had written. Then the page would be returned to me bathed in red; a victim of bloody violence. Misspellings circled, grammar corrected, awkward phrases underlined.

It took me longer than it should have to realise that the laughter I had elicited was not won through wit, but through error. Through the medium of red ink, I saw my stories as others saw them: nothing but collections of mistakes, tied together by proximity, with the story itself buried too deep to be seen.

There is a peculiar cruelty in teaching a child that the errors in their language matter more than the ideas underneath.

How many authors and poets were murdered before they were born—drowned in red ink before we could discover what they might have written?

I know that I have written far fewer stories than I might have had someone taken the time to look beyond the fractured spelling and clumsy sentences and simply ask me about the story.

Language should be a bridge between minds, and of course, for that bridge to work, words matter. Grammar matters. Clarity matters. Later in life, I came to understand errors in language as being like hitting the wrong notes in a musical recital: jarring and intrusive, capable of pulling us out of the experience just as we are beginning to lose ourselves in the melody. But a wrong note does not mean there is no music. And an imperfect sentence does not mean there is no story.

We should inspire children to love language first, and get it right second. We should try to hear the melody they are trying to play first, and then help them play it better.