ISO dysgraphia writing tutor recs

[Anonymous]

Can people please clarify how typing helps a language disorder?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:My kid with dyslexia and dysgraphia is a first year college student, and he’s been surprised by having to go back to handwriting. He has classes where every assignment, every test, must be handwritten. I don’t know if accommodations would get him out of that - he has refused to go to the disability office. I say this just to encourage everyone to keep on with the handwriting and overall skill of writing by hand. They may need it in high school and college.

I think this has to do with trying to stop cheating.

In any event, having poor handwriting is different from a language based disorder.

Poor handwriting can be a component of a disability -- it could be a fine motor problem, or it could be one result of a a language processing disorder that makes it difficulty to accurately correlate sound/symbol connections, or it could be a contributor to broader problems with the production of writing in terms of idea organization or attending to conventions of writing (because a student finds it so difficult to write legibly that it takes so much cognitive energy just to physically write that there is not much cognitive space leftover for the generation and organization of ideas.

Handwriting or keyboarding is not an either/or proposition. Our IEP team kept trying to push a keyboarding accommodation in lieu of special instruction in handwriting, which they did not want to have to do. I kept insisting on both, saying that my kid needed the accommodation but that I also wanted him to be able to write a grocery list or a postal address or a put a note in a bottle if he was ever stranded on a desert island.

Ok. But poor handwriting is totally distinct from a language disorder.

This is really oversimplified and not necessarily true.

I have a kid with very severe dysgraphia. He also has poor fine motor skills, so I'll agree with you that these are two issues. But they are not "totally distinct." The way the language disorder specialist explained it to my son early on is that there was a misfire when his brain sent his hands the message to write. My kid can't even trace a straight line.

But given that handwriting is inseparable from writing (at least before a kid learns to use a keyboard), it is hard to parse differences anyway. My son had the worst handwriting in his class in kindergarten. But in third grade it was worse - in absolute terms, not relatively speaking - than it had been in kindergarten. As he got older, the more effort he put in to spelling, word choice, logical thought, and so on, the less he could give to actual handwriting. For what its worth, I was the absolute last person to give up on handwriting. Years after the OTs, neuropsychologist, and teachers gave up and said don't bother, I continued to have him practice *every day* including workbook after cursive workbook. With painstaking and impractical effort, he can copy something in aa workbook. Without a model, though, you wouldn't believe what his writing looks like. In the end, keyboarding was the game changer for him. I was able to separate all the components of the writing process to practice them without adding handwriting into the mix. It took a few years, but I was actually teach him how to write, not just how to make an argument but how to do it elegantly and with style.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:My kid with dyslexia and dysgraphia is a first year college student, and he’s been surprised by having to go back to handwriting. He has classes where every assignment, every test, must be handwritten. I don’t know if accommodations would get him out of that - he has refused to go to the disability office. I say this just to encourage everyone to keep on with the handwriting and overall skill of writing by hand. They may need it in high school and college.

I think this has to do with trying to stop cheating.

In any event, having poor handwriting is different from a language based disorder.

Poor handwriting can be a component of a disability -- it could be a fine motor problem, or it could be one result of a a language processing disorder that makes it difficulty to accurately correlate sound/symbol connections, or it could be a contributor to broader problems with the production of writing in terms of idea organization or attending to conventions of writing (because a student finds it so difficult to write legibly that it takes so much cognitive energy just to physically write that there is not much cognitive space leftover for the generation and organization of ideas.

Handwriting or keyboarding is not an either/or proposition. Our IEP team kept trying to push a keyboarding accommodation in lieu of special instruction in handwriting, which they did not want to have to do. I kept insisting on both, saying that my kid needed the accommodation but that I also wanted him to be able to write a grocery list or a postal address or a put a note in a bottle if he was ever stranded on a desert island.

Ok. But poor handwriting is totally distinct from a language disorder.

This is really oversimplified and not necessarily true.

I have a kid with very severe dysgraphia. He also has poor fine motor skills, so I'll agree with you that these are two issues. But they are not "totally distinct." The way the language disorder specialist explained it to my son early on is that there was a misfire when his brain sent his hands the message to write. My kid can't even trace a straight line.

But given that handwriting is inseparable from writing (at least before a kid learns to use a keyboard), it is hard to parse differences anyway. My son had the worst handwriting in his class in kindergarten. But in third grade it was worse - in absolute terms, not relatively speaking - than it had been in kindergarten. As he got older, the more effort he put in to spelling, word choice, logical thought, and so on, the less he could give to actual handwriting. For what its worth, I was the absolute last person to give up on handwriting. Years after the OTs, neuropsychologist, and teachers gave up and said don't bother, I continued to have him practice *every day* including workbook after cursive workbook. With painstaking and impractical effort, he can copy something in aa workbook. Without a model, though, you wouldn't believe what his writing looks like. In the end, keyboarding was the game changer for him. I was able to separate all the components of the writing process to practice them without adding handwriting into the mix. It took a few years, but I was actually teach him how to write, not just how to make an argument but how to do it elegantly and with style.

Agreed, if your kid has a language disorder and poor fine motor then they definitely need keyboarding …. But that’s not enough for your kid. My kid sounds a lot like yours in handwriting (also writes worse in 8th grade than K lol) but he has always been a solid writer and never needed supports in the content or structure of his writing. So I wouldn’t ever say he has “dysgraphia” - he has poor fine motor skills.