I think your daughter handled it perfectly. She doesn't need any more practice in handling this. Now she just needs to learn to believe the message.
she could answer "I am dyslexic; I have a harder time than most kids with spelling, but it doesn't mean I'm not smart" - or whatever she wants to tell them
My caution with this is that I have a graduate student who explains all his struggles by starting off with his dyslexia. At some point the explanation has become an excuse. I like the way your daughter explained it to her friend. She has to work harder at it. Period.
After the kid left, DD burst into tears. She said that no one will ever look at her ideas if she couldn't spell and that people only look at her mistakes. She said that people discount her ideas because her spelling makes them think that she doesn't know what she is doing. I tried to reassure her and tell her that we'll keep working on her strengths and weaknesses. I don't feel that I responded to the core of her concerns.
The fact of the matter is that people do judge the message based on the errors. The same grad student with dyslexia gives me stuff that's spelled wrong and lacks capitalization and verbs. At this point, though, dyslexia is his burden but should not be an excuse.
I strongly suspect that my development in elementary school and middle school could have tested out as dyslexia/dysgraphia at the time. My daughter's trials in school feel very familiar. I'm also a prof in the natural sciences. My writing has improved dramatically as I have gotten a ton of practice and I've had a few excellent mentors. I am careful with my professional writing. I take 2-3 times the amount of time to write things than my peers, not in terms of hours, but in calendar days. This gives me the opportunity to make full use of spell checkers, the MS Word grammar check (not perfect, but I've learned a lot), and professional editors. Yes, I've been known to send drafts of proposals to a professional editor. I've learned the hard way that things done in haste have spelling errors and missing words.
I've now got a reputation as one of the best writers of the faculty in my department.
