L Is for Dyslexia: Difference between revisions

* The younger sister Maggie from ''[[In Her Shoes]]'' is shown to have a terrible employment history and fails a screen test that involves reading from a teleprompter. She is dyslexic. But practice in reading slowly with a former (blind) English Professor helps. (In the book, sitting in a library and reading slowly at her own pace also helped).

* The Australian crime movie ''[[The Hard Word]]'' featured a criminal nicknamed Tarzan. A P.O.V. shot established that Tarzan reads words as if they're spelled backwards. During the big caper, one of the crooks must key a 4-digit security code that's written on a piece of paper. Tarzan insists on doing this job, so he reads the number with its digits reversed, and he mis-keys it accordingly. In real life, if a dyslexic consistently perceived alphanumerics in reverse order (rather than randomly mixed) he would never notice: if a dyslexic's brain consistently perceived the word "cat" as "tac", he would eventually recognize that "tac" is pronounced "cat". Actual dyslexia doesn't work that way.

 

 

{{quote| Taked baby. Meet at later bar, night or day sometime.}}

* The ''[[Quantum Leap (TV)|Quantum Leap]]'' episode Jimmy, where Sam leaps into a dock worker with Down Syndrome. Another of the workers has a severe hatred of Jimmy even beyond the usual prejudice of the time, and it turns out to be because he's dyslexic and can't read, and thus feels like the retarded but literate Jimmy is actually smarter than him. It uses the "jumbled up words" explanation, though you can fanwank that Sam was trying to not sound too smart while inhabiting such a person.

* Max and George in ''[[The George Lopez Show]]''

** Portrayed rather realistically. George went his ''entire life'' without knowing he was dyslexic. It's explained in the show that whenever he had a hard time reading, he'd ask someone else to do it for him. It was only when Max was diagnosed that he discovered this. It's treated pretty well on the show, but is still the point of a few jokes. One involved searching for a specific street number, and being unable to remember or recognize it.

* Samuel R. Delany, in an essay in ''Writer's Digest'', said that he is dyslexic, and pointed out that there were earlier societies (such as the Vikings) in which it was possible to be dyslexic and not notice.

* Terry Goodkind, surprisingly enough. He was an amateur painter before publishing his first [[Sword of Truth|book.]]

* King Carl XIV Gustav of Sweden admitted publicly that he was dyslectic in 1997, something that had been suspected by journalists for many years. He did for example misspell his name when signing his accession document and at one point wrote his name as "Cal Gustf". A common nickname for him in Sweden is "Knugen" after he misspelled Kungen (the king).

* [[Tom Cruise]] believes his dyslexia was cured by Scientology.

[[Category:This Trope Name References Itself]]

[[Category:Disability Tropes]]