She may just not be ready to process what you're saying. Because ultimately, you
can't tell her what she's really yearning to hear. At least not without being dishonest, which I don't recommend.
Looking slow/backwards/dumb isn't the same as
being that way... and really, it's a problem that her peers have to figure out, not her. While this is technically true, it's also true that it's causing her real problems in the here and now.
My husband has a PhD in a physical science and spends much of his time communicating in writing. He is a
terrible speller. Oh my goodness!! We can both laugh about the ways that he can mangle a shopping list-- but we're middle-aged. He says that his spelling is his revenge for my penmanship, by the way. LOL.
He felt dreadfully insecure as a child, and in that era, even teachers used spelling ability as a measure of intellectual capacity, I well recall. He was (truly) labeled globally "slow" by an elementary school teacher. Of course, technology has made life orders of magnitude easier than it must have been for our grandparents' generation. Few of his coworkers would even know about his awful spelling problems because of the way that communication tends to occur now. He never skips spellcheck, though-- he even runs his e-mails through spellcheck, and often posts on FB or message boards, as well.
People
do judge others on the strength of their written communication, unfortunately, and correlate that to an estimate of the person's intellect and ability to handle complex tasks. Might not be fair, but it does happen.
As she gets older, more of those work-arounds will be accessible to her, and the problem will become less obvious to her peers. THAT, you can say with complete honesty. My husband is also extremely up-front about the problem. "I'm a terrible speller," defuses a lot of the expectation. Self-awareness is a higher-order cognitive skill, after all. Having the self-confidence to admit to one's weaknesses with such transparency also signals competence.
I'm a terrible athlete (no,
really terrible). He's a terrible speller. We're both HG+ people, and we've both been extremely successful in spite of those failings.
