It is very common for children with dyslexia to experience difficulties with writing. This is because reading and writing rely on many of the same fundamental processes, and reading itself is a crucial skill used throughout the writing process. Understanding these connections is key to helping your child succeed. 

We highly recommend reading the research article, "Why Children with Dyslexia Struggle with Writing and How We  Can Help Them." There are excellent examples and visuals to break down the research on dyslexia and writing. Link is above!

Here’s how dyslexia can impact your child's writing:

• Spelling Challenges

  • Dyslexia primarily involves difficulties in processing sounds in language (phonological processing). This makes it hard to connect letters to sounds for reading, and similarly, to break down spoken words into sounds to spell them (encoding).

  • Children with dyslexia may make spelling errors that show they haven't fully processed all the sounds in a word, such as spelling "jump" as "jup".

  • English spelling can be complex, with many sounds having multiple spellings and conventions. Children with dyslexia often struggle to grasp these patterns.

  • It's important to remember that reversals of letters (like 'b' and 'd') or words (like 'saw' and 'was') are common in many younger children and do not mean dyslexia is a visual processing problem. 

• Handwriting Difficulties

  • Children with dyslexia often struggle with writing quickly and forming letters correctly.

  • While it might seem like a motor skill issue, poor handwriting can be linked to spelling difficulties and the demands placed on working memory. When a child hesitates frequently due to uncertainty about spelling, it can make their letter writing less fluent and harder to read.

• Problems with Planning and Organization (Executive Function)

  • Executive functions are skills like planning, organizing, setting goals, and monitoring one's work. Children with dyslexia can find these challenging.

  • This can lead to writing that is disorganized, lacks fully developed ideas, or repeats information. For example, a child might write ideas as they think of them, rather than first creating an outline or plan.

• Working Memory Limitations

  • Working memory is like a mental workspace that holds and manipulates information while you're doing a task. Writing places significant demands on working memory.

  • If a child with dyslexia has to concentrate heavily on spelling a word or forming letters, fewer working memory resources are available for generating ideas or organizing their thoughts. This can lead to forgetting what they wanted to say or difficulties in structuring sentences and paragraphs.

  • Difficulties with the "phonological loop" (holding sounds in memory) can affect spelling.

  • Challenges with the "visuospatial sketchpad" (holding visual information like letter shapes or organizational diagrams) can also contribute to difficulties.

Advocating for Appropriate Supports: A Multifaceted Approach

Because writing difficulties in children with dyslexia are complex and interconnected, a combination of interventions is often most effective. These interventions can either remediate a skill (directly improve it) or compensate for a skill deficit (provide strategies to reduce the cognitive burden).

Here are effective research-based strategies you can discuss with your child's educators:

1. Supporting Spelling Development:

• Phonics Instruction: Focus on teaching letter-sound relationships (sound-spellings), decoding words, and practicing encoding (spelling by sounding out). This helps children solidify the connections between sounds and letters.

• Morpheme Analysis: Teach children to recognize meaningful parts of words (morphemes) like prefixes, suffixes, and base words (e.g., re- in replacement). This can help them spell words even when phonological processing is challenging.

Digital Accessibility Tools to Reduce Cognitive Load (does not replace interventions or remediation)

• Spell-Check: For computer-based writing, using spell-check can be a compensatory strategy, but your child needs to be able to approximate the spelling well enough for it to offer correct suggestions and identify the right word.

• Keyboarding: Learning to type can help compensate for poor handwriting by allowing students to produce higher quality texts. However, direct instruction in keyboarding is essential before expecting it to be an effective compensatory tool.

• Speech-to-Text Systems (Dictation): Programs allow students to speak their ideas and have them transcribed, significantly reducing the burden of handwriting and spelling.

3. Interventions to Address Planning and Organization (Executive Function) Skills:

• Sentence Combining: Provide simple "kernel sentences" and teach your child to combine them into more complex sentences. This reduces the cognitive load of generating ideas and spelling, allowing them to focus on sentence structure and organization.

• Self-Regulated Strategy Development (SRSD): This approach teaches students to plan, organize, set goals, self-monitor, and self-reinforce their writing. It uses mnemonics and self-talk to break down the writing process into manageable steps, freeing up working memory for text production.

• Text Structure Instruction: Teach children about different text structures (e.g., description, compare/contrast, cause/effect) to simplify organizational choices for their writing. Programs like Structures Writing provide information frames to help students organize their thoughts and reduce the cognitive load of generating ideas, vocabulary, and spellings.

By understanding these challenges and effective strategies, you can partner with your child's school to ensure they receive the comprehensive support needed. This combination of interventions can significantly improve your child's writing (and even reading) skills, empowering them to express their ideas and communicate effectively through the written word.

Citation

Hebert M, Kearns DM, Hayes JB, Bazis P, Cooper S. Why Children With Dyslexia Struggle With Writing and How to Help Them. Lang Speech Hear Serv Sch. 2018 Oct 24;49(4):843-863. doi: 10.1044/2018_LSHSS-DYSLC-18-0024. PMID: 30458545; PMCID: PMC6430506.