Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Twice Exceptional living with disorder of written expression

Are there any adults here who have learned to deal with/work around this disorder? What accommodations could be reasonable/helpful to address this in college?

Thanks

Bump.

Also curious.

In college I avoided any class that required a paper. I attended the University of Alabama and then transferred to UNC Chapel Hill my junior year. I had to take the required English courses and struggled through those. Students that need accommodations in college are often advised to attend a small schools. One of the advantages of attending a large university is the variety of classes offered. I wanted to go to law school until I found out how much writing was involved. I decided on med school, but later changed my mind and attended PA school. It took me months to write the admission essay.

At my current job, all the providers in my office dictate our notes, so that is very helpful for me. In my daily life I avoid writing and instead communicate with friends, teachers, and others by phone or text. I also make my husband do all of the writing for us. DYS application, Stanford Online High School Parent essays - he had to do all of it.

Thanks chkitchens!

My DD's CBT therapist has advised her that she could get accommodations in college that reduce writing requirements. I was uncertain if it was the best idea (to just avoid writing), rather than trying to overcome the difficulties. My DD also took months to write her admissions essay (but it was great once it was written!).

I read somewhere that there is no cure for "disorder of written expression" and careers that require writing are just closed to people with this disorder. I wondered if this was a new "disorder" since I never heard of it before. It helps to know it is real and there are adults who have done well in spite of it.

Thanks for sharing,
Nik

The types of accommodations that will be needed depend to a large extent on which aspects of the writing process are most problematic.

Accommodations that may be useful include:

Extended time for all written assignments;

Alternate response formats (oral response, video presentation, use of keyboard for in-class writing assignments, etc., depending on the individual's needs);

Use of outlining and/or word prediction software;

Use of voice recogniton software or a scribe;

Reduction in volume of written work required;

Lecture notes or outline provided by instructor in advance;

Recording lectures;

Instructor-provided templates or examples of each type of written assignment required with essential elements noted;

Notetaker (may be as simple as having another student make a carbon copy or photocopy of class notes);

At some point the educational system needs to say, "If you can't do the work, you don't belong here." If a college history class requires written term papers, I don't think that requirement should be relaxed for anyone. Grades on college transcripts should be comparable. One student's "B" should signify roughly the same quality and quantity of work as another's in the same class. Making accommodations that do not water down course requirements, such as making sure lecture halls are wheelchair-accessible, are another matter. If a student needs more time than others to do the work, he should consider taking fewer classes.

But what if (as in my DD's case), a student has such a vastly superior grasp on the subject than the others in the class and said student can wow the socks off their professors through oral discourse, bringing in valid new insights/perspectives, showing original creative critical thinking on the matter, in some cases making arguments that challenge the status quo in profound and valid ways, but said student can not do the same in written form in a timely manner.

Should this person be denied the opportunity to shine? Should the world be denied the potential contributions of such an individual merely based on their ability to write?

Did Socrates or Jesus write essays?

As a professor who routinely gives written assignments, and who also deals with people with disabilities, I have to disagree with Bostonian. We had a blind student in our grad program who could not do the written comps - choice was either a professional scribe or do an oral exam. Should we have not allowed her to graduate because she couldnt demostrate competence with our preferred method? For my students with LDs which affect written work, which oddly being blind does not, not with computers, we just figure out what they need to do. Dyslexics usually want more time. However, if there were other issues, I just need documentation of what they are, and what is the preferred method to deal with. Someone with expressive issues, I could see asking to do an annotated outline which they then present to me orally. That way I could see the research. I am pretty sure I could design equivalent assignments. In all likelihood I would have to guard against being too hard since it is much harder to present supported argument orally than written for undergraduates.

I think a social science or humanities is tough for someone with an LD but certainly not impossible. And given that the goals of universities are to educate and prepare for the future - to limit the way in which someone can demonstrate competence is short sighted. And I have never had someone suggest that another student had it easier or received a break from me over an accommodation, because the answer to why did I get a B is always found in ones own work, not in someone else's.

DeHe

I think Bostonian is correct to point out that there are tricky issues involved in accommodating disabilities while maintaining the usefulness of the qualification to third parties such as employers, but it is also something we routinely do. In the UK, we are bound by the Equalities Act 2000. It's all pretty sane. (I am not sure, though I did look it up at some point, which parts of what follows are actually specified in the law and which are just what we see as good legally safe practice, though.) The general principle is that we must make reasonable adjustments for disabilities. "Reasonable" naturally depends on context - e.g., it's reasonable to expect a university to make classes wheelchair accessible, even at considerable inconvenience and expense, because we can take it, but it wouldn't be reasonable to expect a startup tutoring company whose offices were up four flights of stairs to do the same. Where assessment is concerned, we must do whatever may be required for the student to demonstrate that they have met the learning objectives of the course. We don't have to pass someone who can't meet the LOs, and we are allowed to set prerequisites for entrance to the course provided we have good reason to do so. E.g. if "be able to spell all of the most common 10,000 words of English" were a learning objective of the course, then it would be fine to penalise a dyslexic person for spelling errors in exams, but otherwise, it isn't. Where I am, one result is that people write LOs more carefully and tightly than they used to, because the less vague they are, the easier it is to deal with this kind of thing fairly. [ETA E.g. some of the LOs on courses I've taught start "Explain..." and so, I think, if I had a student with disorder of written expression who could do this orally but not in written form, I would have to assess that student specially. Had I written "Explain in writing..." I would not have to accommodate. Incidentally a feature of the UK system compared with the US one is less on-the-fly autonomy for individual professors: these LOs go through a committee a year in advance.]

The thing we can't do is create more time, and this is the thing I've found hardest in dealing with students with disabilities. In this system, you can't just take fewer courses per year and take longer to graduate; there is a fixed annual courseload. If someone has a disability such that it's possible for them to meet all the learning objectives of all the courses but at the cost of significantly more effort than nondisabled students, it's very easy for that person to sink, and very hard to help them. (People can and do repeat years, but if they can't do a year's courseload in a year, they can't pass.) In those situations it really does end up depending on the organisation and motivation of the student. Students who aren't exceptionally organised and motivated can and do fail.

ETA One thing I have wondered about is this. Currently, if a student has a disability that is accommodated, nothing about this appears on the student's transcript or certificate. So it is quite possible that a potential employer might, for example, have some knowledge about the amount of writing involved in one of our degrees, and deduce from the fact that a student has a degree from us that they must be able to write well. If the student had an accommodated disability, that might not be correct, and there is no obligation on the student to declare the disability to the employer. I tend to think this is OK, and best seen as just another reason to get those LOs correct and public. I do think of this every time I read criticism of universities for "turning out students who can't write a decent paragraph" though! (In practice, there is a class of things I'll comment on in student work but not penalise, and many writing problems are among them.)

The fairness of accommodations was an issue while I was in law school. Our tests were timed and getting written responses out onto paper before the time was up was the only basis for grading. There was one written timed test per class for almost every class the first two years. No one turned tests in early and most were frantically writing the entire test time.
Our top student had an accommodation for a separate room and no time limit. He got as much time as needed, he routinely got the highest grades and got hired on at a prestigious law firm. Perhaps he would have had the highest scores had everyone gotten all day rather than two or three hours but we'll never know.
Personally, I didn't really care. I thought he was a nice guy who seemed to work hard. There were others that were within reach of that top spot that thought the accommodation went too far.