Dyslexics Read Books Back to Front

If you,  your child, friend, family member or student is Dyslexic you might have noticed that books or stories that have chapters can be confusing or hard to comprehend.   Dyslexics think in the “big picture” or the whole story. In order to understand the chapters they need to know the beginning and end of the story before they read the middle of the book.

When we assess adults we will ask them how they read a book.  One gentleman said “You are going to think it’s silly. I do it wrong.” We encouraged him to tell us and that we wouldn’t think it was silly or wrong.  He said, “I read the beginning, then I go to the end which ruins any surprises in the story and then the middle.  If I don’t do that, nothing makes sense and I tend to lose interest. Also if I don’t read the end first I forget the chapters I’m reading immediately, and I keep forgetting where I’m at in the story and get bored!”

My sister, Cate reads like this but she doesn’t have typical Dyslexic issues. She is very right-brained in her thinking style and reads the beginning, end and middle of books. She even reads text books and self-help books this way.  One day she phoned me up and told me about this great book she was reading about doing a 30 day water fast.

Cate was telling me how to prepare for the fast and how excited she was about trying it.  A couple of days later she called me again.  She had read the end of the book and it was describing how much better and healthier she would feel after cleansing and detoxing her  body with a water fast.  A few more days  she had started reading the middle chapters.  She said  she couldn’t  work, cook, clean or any other energy draining activity for this time period in order to preserve energy. She was a bit concerned. Another couple of days later she called again and said that apparently she would have to be under doctor’s care  for this fast.

Wow, this was beginning to look a little complicated. Her last call was to tell me that in order to do the fast she would have to prepare for a week or so with a special juice diet (no solid food!), not go to work, be under a doctor’s care, admit herself to a hospital and lay prone in a hospital bed with the curtains drawn, dim lights and do nothing including read or watch TV!  I laughed for days.

Anyway, back to reading books “backwards”.  Whoever the Dyslexics are in your life, encourage them to read the end before the middle and not resist their impulse to do the “wrong thing”. They will get much more out the story once they have the “big picture” and they will not only remember the book better but also much more detail than the average person.

These are the people that annoyingly watch a “who dunnit” movie where the story starts with the end and they guess the outcome in the first half of the movie and tell you!  By the way, I’m Dyslexic and I still remember watching the movie “Sixth Sense”. I knew Bruce Willis’ character was a ghost in the first 10 minutes of the movie. I saw him being shot at the beginning of the movie and all the hints and details that followed gave away the plot because I knew the “big picture”.

Cheers!
Karen (Karey) Hope
Co-founder of Dyslexia Victoria Online