Can you tell if your child has Dyslexia just by looking at their handwriting?

Parents who are concerned about whether or not their child has dyslexia will naturally look for signs and evidence, and will often look at their handwriting for symptoms. However, this can actually be quite misleading. 

For example, if a child persists in reversing letters – b and d, p and q, 3 and E, etc – many see this as a strong sign of dyslexia. While issues with handwriting are certainly considered when it comes to diagnosing dyslexia, they are not actually key indicators themselves. Letter or number reversals can occur for a number of different reasons, and concerned parents should look elsewhere for signs of dyslexia in their children.

This is a guide to help exactly those parents understand what to look for, and how to help an undiagnosed child.

So, what can you tell from a child's handwriting?

A child’s handwriting can tell you a great deal about how a child's eyes and hands work together.

As a parent, you can look out for these common signs of problems:

·   Are the letters on the line, or do they ignore the lines?

·   Are the letter sizes consistent, or do they vary?

·   Is copying inaccurate?

·   Are letters/numbers going in the wrong direction?

·   Are capitals in the correct place or inserted randomly?

·   Is there punctuation included at a child-appropriate level, including full stops and capitals?

·   Is the writing moving further and further from the margin with each line of written work?

·   Is there a lot of pressure on the pencil when writing?

This is not the whole list but the above indicators show there is a clear sign that the child's eyes are not perceiving information properly through their visual system and it is this that is causing the problems when they try to write themselves. As we said above, this is not necessarily dyslexia and may actually be indications of other difficulties or problems they are facing in their learning. 

What is Dyslexia, and how does it differ?

The characteristic features of Dyslexia are difficulties with reading and spelling. It is not the child’s visual perception of physical words and letters, as described above, nor how they reproduce what they have seen (their handwriting), but rather poor phonological awareness, weak working memory and slow processing speed.

When we read a written word and recognise how the letters make a sound which corresponds to a spoken word we know, we use a process called “decoding”. When dyslexic children are decoding, they get confused by letter sounds, and a weak working memory hinders their ability to remember what they’ve already worked out. Their slow processing speed of these sounds means they find it difficult to blend the sounds into a word to decode.

For this reason, the best clues of indicators of Dyslexia are shown in how a child spells, not if they show the problems in the list above.

When those with Dyslexia write they may not be able to retrieve the sounds’ correct spellings, so “was” may be spelt as “woz”, and “said” as “sed”. Phonetically, these sounds are correct, but the spelling doesn’t match. The fact is that English, as a language, is actually pretty difficult to learn. We do not have phonologically transparent spellings – by that, I mean that words don’t always look how they sound. There are thousands of examples of this, but take the word “once”, for instance. We pronounce is with a “w” sound at the beginning, but how would you know that there is not actually a “w” in it unless you have seen it many, many times while reading and have learnt that this written word matches with the sound, despite not seeming to have the right phonetic letters.

So, whilst we cannot determine if someone is dyslexic from their handwriting, we can tell if they have symptoms from how they spell. However, we also need to be careful because poor spelling can be caused by several factors, not least if the child dislikes reading and hasn’t been exposed to a word enough to understand how it is decoded. They might need more practise, like we all do sometimes with trickier words.

The trickiest spellings are high-frequency spellings. These are spellings we must just memorise and learn. They are not logical, and the rules of spelling are tricky so it makes it more challenging.

The biggest giveaway of Dyslexia in children

 When children undergo an assessment, they are tested on several skill sets, including their verbal ability. Dyslexic individuals have an imbalance of their fluent verbal ability, which characteristically is very high compared to their academic ability.

Parents with young children who have learnt to talk early and have had amazing conversations with their child before they even start school know they have a smart child capable of expressing their many good ideas – often, at great length! However, for some, this doesn’t seem to translate to when they start school. Their children do not flourish as expected. This is heartbreaking for both parent and child as they see their self-esteem ebb away.

This is likely a sign of exactly what we are talking about, and it is the biggest single indicator that something like Dyslexia might be at play.

The even bigger problem

For many very good reasons, I won’t go into here, we do not formally diagnose Dyslexia until the child is eight years old. Unfortunately for parents, that does mean that they may not be able to truly discover their child’s issues, and access Dyslexia-specific resources until they have already been at school for several years. However, a great deal can still be done to help the child and get them on the path to successful reading and writing, and there are plenty of resources to draw upon.

For example, our phonics integration program helps children bridge key problems with understanding sounds (phonological awareness), improves their processing speed, and helps them think in sequence to decode sounds and retain more for longer in their working memory.

Most children improve one year in reading for every three months of work they do with our programmes. Our phonic integration programme, Fast ForWord, is a neuroscience programme that adapts to the reader. It works on the idea that our brain changes with the correct exposure.

Raviv Practice London have been using this program for over fourteen years with amazing success. Here is a testimonial of one of the early parents I worked with: Ethan’s Mum

If you’d like to learn more about how programmes like Fast ForWord can help your child or to discuss anything about the topics here, please do get in touch.  

Dyslexia? Dyspraxia? ADHD? ASD? Speech & Language? Developmental Delay? Anxiety?

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