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"What does dysgraphia look like?"

Dysgraphia can look different in different children, and there are also different types of dysgraphia... so the answer to that question is "it depends".

My ds12 is dysgraphic, so I can compare/contrast your example with his writing, but keep in mind, he's only one example. My ds' handwriting at 6-7 years old was similar re mixing of caps and lower case and direction, but that's the main similarity. There are some huge differences - for instance, my ds would never have been able to write a sentence like that in first grade, or even in 4th grade using handwriting. Both the length and the detail are more typical of a child who can hold some thoughts in working memory - and for many kids with dysgraphia, the act of handwriting overwhelms their working memory, limiting their written output as much as fine motor or visual difficulties impact output. The other thing I noticed about your sample is that your ds used punctuation (periods at the end of sentences) appropriately; punctuation is often a struggle for kids with dysgraphia or at least comes later in the learning process. Your ds spelled the "Mail" consistently between male and female, even though he spelled it incorrectly - young dysgraphics who are struggling with spelling often spell inconsistently even within the same sentence.

The other things I can tell you about my son's experience with dysgraphia are:

When he was young, his hands hurt when he wrote. He stopped frequently, rubbed his hands, wrists, fingers.

He had a very odd pencil grip.

His pencil pressure was uneven and unusually strong - he pushed so hard on his pencil when trying to write that his papers usually had holes in them and looked crumpled.

His handwriting was really large, he couldn't follow lines on paper, and he would run words off the page in the middle of the word.

He did *not* follow the normal description of typical handwriting development that starts with lines of scrawls and turns into letters then words etc. He never scrawled. When he was in a Montessori preschool where children were allowed to choose the area they worked in, he never once chose the activities that included painting, drawing, anything remotely related to handwriting type activities (this was in stark constrast to the other kids in his preschool, who had their folders jammed full of "work" to take home each week :)).

He refused to do homework and did everything he could to delay completing written work in school when he was in K-2. We knew he was beyond smart - that was so obvious from his verbal communication. Starting in first grade he had homework packets, usually simple math worksheets. Math that we knew he was capable of completing - and he would just sit and stare at the worksheets as if he was totally lost. When we encouraged him to get started, he would crumple the worksheets up in frustration and toss them across the room and stomp and yell and scream.


It would help us to see the subtest scores - your ds has scatter, but is the scatter also present among subtests within Verbal, PRI, etc or just among VIQ, PRI etc. FWIW my ds at 7 had high VIQ and high PRI, WMI was around 110 (I can't remember for sure without looking it up), and his PSI was much lower, with the score in coding really low compared to his other scores (he had > 12 point scatter between subtest scores and > 40 pt scatter between VIQ/PRI and processing speed).

When I look (with my *very* untrained eye) at your ds' scores, the scatter between VIQ and PRI stands out more than the scatter in VIQ/PRI vs processing speed - but that might look very different in the actual subtests.

The other thing I'll add is that handwriting can be very messy and odd for a number of different reasons other than dysgraphia. I have two younger dds, both of whom have had messy handwriting with lots of reversals in the early years of elementary school. Our neuropsych actually looked at my older dd's handwriting samples and automatically said "Yep, you have another dysgraphic child" before her evaluation... but the problem wasn't dysgraphia, it was a vision challenge, and her handwriting (and reading skills) improved tremendously after vision therapy.

My younger dd (8 years old, just completed 2nd grade) has handwriting that looks very much like your ds' handwriting - very similar spelling too. She also can write long detailed creative sentences. She hasn't been through a full neuropsych evaluation but she's been through an educational assessment to determine if she is dyslexic because she also struggled quite a bit with reading even though she's also clearly intellectually gifted. Her educational assessment revealed a significant weakness in associative memory. She had the WJ-III Test of Cognitive Abilities instead of the WISC, so I am not certain which test on a WISC would show up as low for her, but fwiw, her processing speed subtests were extremely high, among her higher scores. She doesn't have dysgraphia but she *does* have a challenge that requires accommodations and remediation.

So - sorry for the long post! FWIW, I understand your concern. I think you don't have all the information you need to know whether or not your ds has a challenge or if his handwriting is developing typically. I'd look for some of the things I mentioned about my ds re dysgraphia, also look for signs such as can your ds tell right from left, does he have difficulty with other fine motor skills such as tying shoes etc. And I'd ask for a referral for a neuropsych eval or ask for the school to do an evaluation to look for LD. If you can afford a private eval (or if insurance will pay for it), that's the route I'd choose simply because you'll get more complete info, more detailed testing, and no bias.

Gotta run - I hope some of this was helpful!

polarbear