Thanks everyone for the valuable input, I am printing this thread and will have to read it over a few times before we go talk to the Disability Support Services office at our local college next week.
DOWD can also impact a person's ability to express their ideas/thoughts on paper, and this can manifest in different ways (generating ideas, organizing ideas, etc). This is an area which potentially can be helped by remediation/targeted tutoring. Our ds has made good progress working with a speech therapist specifically on written expression. He's never going to be a great novelist, and chances are he's never going to enjoy the act of writing, but it's helped tremendously with his ability to express his thoughts on paper.
This is where my DD struggles most, is written expression something speech therapists typically work with? Or did you just get lucky? My DD has no trouble with speech (other than sometimes talking too fast and too much - lol).
Wow Penrose, I’m sorry for your struggles but thank you for sharing and I am glad you found something you could excel in! My DD shares these parts of your history:
For me it started in kindergarten when I was humiliated in front of the class because of my poor handwriting at age 7. Then as a teenager, I always struggled with all written assignments. …written vocabulary was way below my oral abilities. I couldn't put my thoughts into sentences…What had started as a child’s writing handicap became a complete phobia. Eventually the whole process of writing filled me with dread. …the fear of every written piece of work caused so much anxiety I ended up dropping out of university altogether. …I just could not deal with the extreme anxiety and complete mental blocks.
And although these parts are not consistent with my DD’s experience, I could have written these parts about myself:
I didn't have a clue about punctuation…I just littered my writing with commas. Instructions to put capital letters at the beginning of a sentence and a full stop at the end were completely meaningless as I had no idea whether I had reached the end of a sentence or not. My work was always returned to me covered in red corrections and low marks. I was always none the wiser as to what I had done wrong to deserve such criticism.
I was never shamed about my handwriting (thankfully), so I didn’t develop anxiety about writing. I just remember the lessons in grammar being so boring and it seemed so stupid to me, I think my brain just refused to learn it. I remember thinking, “I have good ideas and I can convey those ideas so that they are understood by others, why would I ever need to know the silly rules about the parts of speech?” I managed to get through college with straight A’s despite a lot of red ink on my written work and comments like “watch your grammar” and “run-on sentences” on nearly every paper. I think writing became easier as I got older though (in part probably due to word processing software), at 30 I went to a liberal arts grad school with a ton of writing requirements and I did just fine. I still have trouble with capitalization sometimes though.
The odd thing with my DD is that at random times she actually produces excellent written work (just never on cue or by the deadline), and she is beyond superior in her ability to edit other people’s written work for proper use of punctuation and grammar but she might not be able to explain the “why” behind it very well. She was an early reader (spontaneous at 2) and has been a voracious reader ever since, so maybe she just knows what looks right.
I still don't believe that colleges and universities really recognise this as the crippling disability that it is.
I agree, there still seems to be a general lack of understanding or willingness to believe that this is a real disability. If I had known more about it earlier, I might have been able to help with taking dictation and maybe that would have prevented the whole issue from becoming such a full blown phobia.
DeeHee, I wish there were more administrators/teachers like you! I asked the ADA contact at DD’s last college about getting supports in place and she said “we expect the students to just work it out with each of their teachers on an individual basis” sigh! For a 50K a year school, that’s a big chance to take (that DD who has/had severe anxiety would be comfortable spilling her soul to each of her teachers at the beginning of the year when she doesn’t know them, and that they would all be understanding and willing to work with her on reduced writing and the substitution of oral reports for written ones).
