Can't say I suffer from dyslexia as far as I know, but my brain very often works "too fast for the words". I nearly always see "shopfitters" as "shoplifters" for example, and have to read it twice.
Today's example is from our local rag, where the headline is as below. My brain read the first word as "Jane" and it conjured up such a weird image that again, I had a "what the heck?" moment and had to re-read it more slowly.
The headline is:
Jack Russell rescued by fire service after becoming trapped in hole for 6 hours near Barrington
Anyone else have wordy problems like this?
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>> my brain very often works "too fast for the words"
Surely this is the way the brain *does* work? In any case, I think the abilty to discriminate between the shapes of similar words normaly declines with age and reading glasses may help, as in my case.
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It sometimes happens to me when my wife & I are doing the Telegraph quick-crossord over tea. I'll have glanced down and read a clue as e.g. 'signal' and, while I'm pontificating, my wife will point out that it's 'single'.
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>> e.g. 'signal' and, while I'm pontificating, my wife will point out that it's 'single'.
A signal failure then.
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Ambo's right I think. As a child (and I was a good reader!) I went under the apprehension for years that Boots was "The Disappearing Chemist".
The eyes take in x bits of information per y milliseconds. The higher levels of the brain only get a tiny fraction of x to think with, after the subconscious levels have chucked most of it away. Consider the amount of information in the 'video' you see when driving a car, and the amount of processing you would have to do the comprehend every scene, even sampling once a second, if you had to take it all in consciously.
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Deliberately increasing your concentration to take more of it in is probably what "mindfulness" actually is.
Still, single letters can make quite a difference. See:
www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/howaboutthat/11808382/Mother-accidentally-requests-wee-blind-girl-on-daughters-21st-Birthday-cake-after-autocorrect-fail.html
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My brother who is dyslexic says: The fact that you can correct yourself when you re-read it slower, proves you are not dyslexic! - no matter how many times he reads a word or sentence it always "looks" the same! - His writing, to me, can sometimes be almost unreadable! - just like reading Facebook comments - some young folks speeling is atrocious!! - gawd knows what their English Teachers think when they read a post from one of their old pupils!!
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It seems simple to me in this instance. Jane is probably the only Russel you have known of OR you want the article to be about her. Either way, you read Jack as Jane.
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I was listening to his eminence, The Great George Galloway on LBC this morning, yeah.
He was talking about our future prime minister, Jeremy Corbyn. He was speaking to the future PM's brother Piers Corbyn but my brain heard it as Piers Morgan. They were talking about the weather apparently, and I thought wtf does Piers Morgan know about the weather.
Piers Corbyn owns WeatherAction as you lot know, but I didn't.
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>> read the first word as "Jane"
>> Jack Russell rescued by fire service after becoming trapped in hole for 6 hours near
>> Barrington
Only a sex mad pervert would substitute "jane" in there
On second thoughts, it would have to be a very aged sex mad pervert to remember Jane Russell
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Some of this is about how one learned to read. While there's a current focus primary education on making words from letter sounds, ie phonetics, we don't all 'get' reading by that route. Some of us recognise the patterns of individual words, a pattern known as look and say. Whichever it was it tends to stick with you.
I was very much at the look/say end of the scale. On the one hand that's probably given me my ability to read and absorb stuff quickly but on the other I cannot, to this day, proof read either my own or anybody else's text as I tend to see the word that's meant to be there rather than the miss type.
Suspect the OP is in same category of reader.
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OP he say - well, interestingly, my proof reading is, even to me, pretty darned good. I have the ability to glance at a page and instantly see anything wrong, whether that is spelling, punctuation or inelegant grammar. That's not to say I don't make mistakes myself of course, and inevitably there will be such in this post, but pass me a menu, a poster or a page of newsprint and I will almost certainly see any errors in less than a very few seconds. My eye is just drawn to them.
As to learning to read, I don't recall how it came about now, other than a burning desire to progress through the colours assigned to the books. Perhaps they were called Rainbow Readers or perhaps I'm making that up, but I do recall being allowed to read the yellow book, or whatever, but the secrets of the green or red book were literally locked in a cupboard until each child was ready. It became a competition, I suppose, to get to the end first, which I think in my class, I did.
Perhaps someone who recalls sixties educational methods recognises something from that?
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>>Perhaps someone who recalls sixties educational methods recognises something from that?
Only all of it. Although not, perhaps, the name. But I don't have a better suggestion.
Not only that, but in the school library* the bookshelves were also colour coded, by the teachers I assume, and one was only permitted access to the shelves of the colour one had reached.
We had the same with Maths cards. There was competition between me and another boy called Graham Russell to see who could stay ahead. As I recall he won more often than I, but it drove us both to achieve much more than we would have otherwise.
*bit of a grand word; I mean the shelves on wheels which lived in the wide corridor outside our classrooms.
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I taught myself to read. Once you have learned the alphabet it's a doddle. Of course we had books at home, and the parents were only too encouraging.
My first wife had been severely punished in childhood for trying to teach the servants (in Kenya) to read. Her mother was an unspeakable woman, one of nature's fascists. Imperial colonialism is really no joke.
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>>Some of this is about how one learned to read...........
I'm not really sure, but I think we did both.
We certainly learned new/difficult stuff by sounding out the letters/syllables, but I think we then retained it and recognised it again in the future by recognition.
There was huge focus on writing it correctly, "phonetic spelling" was categorically not allowed.
Last edited by: No FM2R on Tue 18 Aug 15 at 19:48
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I don't recall so much detail as Mark, but I do remember wanting desperately to be able to read the stories my mum read to me at bedtime for myself. My main motivation was funny stories. Laughed so much as a kid at books( and often still do).
I recall her reading me the Piglet falling into a hole story, where he shouts "holl holl, a herrible huffalump" and so on, and laughing myself silly. But I really wanted to read Mr Twiddle. As a side note you can ignore, I'm almost embarrassed (only almost) to admit I found a Mr Twiddle this summer in a bookshop, and whilst Mrs C was shopping I read the story about him wanting a lovely pear as it was such a warm day, but he asked the cobbler by mistake, and it was all about whether he wanted green ones or yellow ones, and of course ended up after all the wordplay confusion with him having to go home to Mrs Twiddle with new yellow shoes he wasn't supposed to buy and her putting them in the coal cellar along with Twiddle and the cat, and I laughed and laughed again.
So I'm sure it was all worthwhile.
I'm actually reading Jennings at the present. Out loud to Mrs C. My Mr Wilkins comes out a bit Meldrew and my Binns and Blotwell, they of the "early bedders and shallow Enders club", are demanding squeaks, but it's all good fun.
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I think my scheme might have been this one. Everyone else's from the fifties on is probably there too somewhere.
schoolreading70sbooks.weebly.com/through-the-rainbow.html
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>>I'm actually reading Jennings at the present
Excellent.
I'm on a campaign of reading old books.
I did all of the Enid Blyton, Dick Francis, Alistair Maclean and Asimov last year.
So far this year I've read Just William and Biggles. I started on Jennings a week or two ago.
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Good choices! Were you a Bunter man? I could bear a little of him, but only a little. Loved William, still read him from time to time. Richmal Crompton had a great turn of phrase. Biggles I liked a lot, also Gimlet.
Blyton still conjures up childhood images for me, terrible as the writing is. I bought myself a copy of The Magic Faraway Tree last year and enjoyed it, albeit not in quite the same way as the first time round. Also liked the Five, and the Seven.
Also have a penchant for Asimov and his ilk, and indeed have a 49p Amazon SciFi mega pack kindle book I'm reading at the minute which is packed with great forties and fifties SciFi stories by him and others similar. Super value that.
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Swallows & Amazons et seq., No FM?
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Funnily enough I never read it. Dunno why. I think it was read after I left one school and before I joined another.
At present I'm focussing on rereading stuff. If I get into stuff I should have read it might become a bit unmanageable.
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>> Funnily enough I never read it.
If you're half the man you seem to be you'll enjoy those novels as an adult. They are set in the 1920s-30s in the Lake District, and are interesting but chaste, appropriate to the pre-adolescent children depicted in the books and in their target readership. Arthur Ransome was a remarkable character, had been in the SIS in Moscow in Lenin's day and married Trotsky's secretary. In imagination he turned his back on all that super-heavy stuff and lived in clear sunshine with clear little voices. It's utterly charming stuff.
It may take a fairly imaginative modern nipper to make the leap of nearly a century in social mores and behaviour. Perhaps things haven't changed as much as I fear... try them on yr children FMR.
Last edited by: Armel Coussine on Wed 19 Aug 15 at 17:00
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>> It's utterly charming stuff.
Comic Strip did a funny, waspish takeoff of Swallows and Amazons on the box I remember. Perhaps it really is too sepia-tinted for harsh modern young folk.
The politically correct were always a bit down on it too. It was too bourgeois for them.
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The nice little Swallows and Amazons film made years back was shown recently. We enjoyed it. Also turns out a remake movie is due practically any minute too. No idea if they've modernised it other than changing the name of one of the girls (inevitably).
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>> changing the name of one of the girls (inevitably).
Prats. What's wrong with the name t****? It's a diminutive FFS, Felicity or something. Tchah!
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Wel, I'm afraid she is now Tatty. Although there is a sort of.reason for that choice.
www.telegraph.co.uk/news/bbc/11697288/BBC-changes-name-of-lead-character-in-Swallows-and-Amazons-from-t****-to-Tatty.html
Edit
Tell you what though, the child who is playing her has a real name that will trip people up for the rest of her life. She'll be spelling it all out slowly from here to eternity.
Last edited by: Crankcase on Wed 19 Aug 15 at 18:34
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>> Prats. What's wrong with the name t****? It's a diminutive FFS, Felicity or something.
She was named after a real person called Mavis Altounyan. Mavis is an old fashioned rural word for a thrush. It was in use at a time when little children used to call little birds "titty birds".
So Mavis' nickname became Titty.
Now you know.
Last edited by: No FM2R on Wed 19 Aug 15 at 18:41
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>> try them on yr children FMR.
That'll happen.
No 1 is currently reading a Storm of Swords by George R. Martin (part of the Game of Thrones trilogy) and No. 2 is half way through FireWorld by Chris D'Lacey. So even the 10yr old is reading a 500 page tome. I'm embarassed at my own reading habits.
Quite depressing really, I was looking forward to sharing my Famous Five memories.
But when I have a gap, then I'll have a go at S&A.
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>> On second thoughts, it would have to be a very aged sex mad pervert to remember Jane Russell
Heavens to Betsy!
'Some Like It Hot', Jane Russell and Marilyn Monroe, not a bad movie at all at all.
What a pair (and were I vulgar I would add, what another pair).
OO-boop be-doo!
La Russell was most celebrated for her legs, la Monroe for her breasts. Men are tiresome limited creatures forever going on about body parts.
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Is this dyslexia? - Ambo
