I started reading really early was was reading college-level stuff when I was 10, much to the delight of the school librarian.

I know that It took me a lot longer to learn to write, however. I was always quite a bit behind. My spelling and punctuation were usually fine, I just took a very long time to decide what words to use. I also remember that I’ve always spoken slowly. I still do. I take a long time to formulate what to say and how to say it, often leading to very long pauses in conversations. I often tend to try to plan out the whole conversation in my head, beforehand. This sometimes leads to never saying anything out loud, because I forget that what was said in my head wasn’t actually verbalized.

You and I are similar in this — I remember things that I’ve seen the best — and also in our lack of other sorts of visualization. I recall you talking recently about being unable to mentally rotate objects; this is a deficit of mine that drives my hubby absolutely bonkers. His engineering mind just can’t fathom my verbal one.

My reading and writing though has generally been pretty good. In Kindergarten, I remember the teachers hassling me about reading individual letters. There was a picture book that we all used to fight for “Jack and the Beanstalk”. One day, after several weeks of planning, I managed to position myself and the book in close proximity so that when we were told to go and get a book, I could get it. I surprised myself by being able to read it. That day, I went from a non-reader to a reader.

I stayed reading picture books for a few years, even though many of the kids in my class were moving up. I read a few fairytale and myths collection books in the kids section of our library but other than that, I stayed with picture books.

Then my mother banned picture books.

As a result, I skipped all the remaining books in the children’s section of our library and started reading adult fiction. Starting once again with mythology, I moved onto other subjects and was reading Stephen King by age 11. By 13, I’d moved onto the more gruesome and explicit territory of James Herbert and Graham Masterton.

I did eventually go back and read some children’s books but by then, I was no longer in the correct age range.

I have the filmographic mental process that Temple Grandin describes… the pictures, with only an occasional spoken sound track. I do visualize the page information is on, though, and see the words then. If I can’t remember the page, it takes me a lot longer to come up with the info, if it happens at all. I do call up a picture of a word when I wonder about the spelling, but it’s not the usual course of things.

I also have to struggle with words to describe the picture I am seeing, which leads to severe frustration and crankiness when the person I’m talking to doesn’t get what I’m saying! I used to just repeat what I said LOUDER, but now I just softly growl as my mental gears slowly grind and try to figure out another way of saying something that the other person might understand.

So naturally, in the great way of life to give you what you need, my partner has significant cognitive impairments which we are still trying to figure out, but it often shows up as positional dyslexia (I just made that term up) which is to say… the front door is the front door most of the time, but then it switches and it’s the door that she’s closest to, but neither of us know that til she goes to the wrong door. %-\ I’ve told her to pull and had her walk towards me, asked her to close something only to have her open it wider… this is the source of most of our fights. We’re beginning to understand why… I have to think hard to figure out what to tell her in the first place, and then she does the opposite?! Aaargh. LOL

I am getting a lot of practice re-saying things.

Wish I saw the word pictures, ’cause I spell like crap for crap, lol. I grew up on the “sound it out” method… but so many words aren’t spelled the way they sound!

This, though, I completely identify with:

“According to my mother, I didn’t speak a single word until I was 2 1/2 years old. Then, when I started speaking, I spoke in full and complete sentences.”

That made my mother SOOOO mad. She loves baby talk. She was glad when my little brother was born and started speaking and spoke mostly in baby talk… until we found out that it was because he needed tubes in his ears and could barely hear, and was only repeating words the way he heard them. Once his ears drained and he could hear properly, he spoke in very articulate complete sentences. My poor mother never really got any “baby-talk” time out of any of us, LOL.