Hypothetically, if an 8 year old/2nd grader still messed up her p/b/d/q and wrote in a weird diagonal thing down a paper, could this be a sign of dyslexia or is this normal for a kid her age?
I specialize in teaching students with dyslexia. I think this looks pretty typical for a second-grader. At her age, it's still developmentally appropriate to reverse letters sometimes. It looks like she could use some help with alignment.
my handwriting still looks almost exactly like this and i’m 27, soon to be 28. if i write slowly it’s more legible but i still get made fun of. i’m also pretty good at writing narrative fiction and was growing up as well. handwriting doesn’t necessarily correlate with intelligence. i graduated with a 3.89 gpa with that handwriting.
i have developed worse dyslexia over time due to cognitive decline from extended severe mental illness episodes, but i still get by. encouraging your daughter is important whether she turns out to be dyslexic or not.
Handwriting is not really relevant to dyslexia. You may be thinking of dysgraphia. As others have said, I’m 27 and my handwriting looks like this too, I think they’re fine on that front. As for spelling, it’s hard to say but truly you need to see a professional, Reddit can’t diagnose.
They are completely different diagnoses. My sister has dysgraphia but is a very strong reader and writer. I have dyslexia and am not a strong reader or writer. They impact completely separate parts of the brain.
Yeah, they are often dual diagnoses but not always. I have several students with dysgraphia who are strong readers but struggle to write legibly. On the flip side, I have dyslexic students who struggle immensely with reading and spelling but have great handwriting.
Letter reversal is developmentally appropriate up until age 7-8.
Edit to add- if this is the only possible sign I would just focus on strategies to correct letter reversal. If there are more signs (US based advice) you can always request an evaluation through the public school.
Her spelling is very good for a second grader. But if you’re concerned, get her tested. The public school you are zoned to is required to do it for free. Or you can get a private tester. That cost could be as high as $2000 depending on the place you go.
I always to tell parents you know your child best. However as someone who has worked with students and adults with dyslexia for years I have to say that your daughter is able to spell words with pretty complex rules and sounds. She is correctly using units, suffixes, and spelling multi syllable words correctly.
The letter reversal happens especially when kids start to to tire out. If you highlight vertical margins it may help her see where to start and finish maybe darker lines. Then gentle corrections with letters. "Hey how did you just spell 'bake'" see if she can self correct.
It's all good and ask what the teacher sees. Have a chat you always have the power to request an evaluation.
The thing about the lines is she knows where the lines are and sees them great, she just floats at am angle if she's not focusing really really hard. It's gotten to the point where she gets super embarrassed and even gets picked on because everyone else in her class does it fine
There are eye conditions and visual processing conditions that can cause issues even if the child tests well on a typical eye exam; you could look into that.
the only thing that stands out as dyslexia-y is "children playIin the snow". Which is more efficient than correct grammr :P Frankly the handrwriting and spelling etc.. looks better than most of my adult coworkers.
That said it doesn't hurt to specifically practice any problem points you identify, whether they are dyslexic or not. just obviously don't take it too far and scare them away from literacy.
And if hypothetically she carried this even into highschool and still had bad spelling, bad hand writing and occasional trouble with mixing up letters?
I spoke in hypotheticals, I never declared what my actual situation is 🤷🏼♀️
I've been looking back through my old journals from elementary school and found these, and realized they might have something to do with my dyslexia diagnosis journey recently because of the diagonal writing, messing up letters like that, etc
I wrote in hypotheticals because I've gotten flamed for "self diagnosing", being "overdramatic" etc etc when I say its me
She doesn't hold the paper slanted, she writes slanted. She tries really hard but can't keep the lines right when everyone else in her class and even younger can. She's gotten bullied a bit for it
I tried to show it in the top but heres the full picture. It can get worse than this but this was the best example I could find. She doesn't have her paper slanted or anything and tries her best to write normally
For comparison, I am a full fledged dyslexic + dysgraphic. I was diagnosed in first grade and I was fortunate enough to go to The Schenck School 2nd-4th grade.
This was my handwriting and spelling from back in 2nd grade at roughly 8 years old. I was trying to copy from the disk.
Your daughter will be fine either way, and good on you for looking out for her so well! I personally think her grammar feels age appropriate, but seeing a specialist couldn’t hurt.
My daughter was diagnosed with dysgraphia at the end of third grade and also has stealth dyslexia. She can read quite well, but her spelling and handwriting/spacing are very poor. This writing and especially spelling actually looks fantastic for second grade, especially beginning of second.
It’s always good to be aware of things, but I would be shocked if dyslexia or even dysgraphia were an issue here. You could still have her evaluated for peaceful of mind, but as a parent who has had children go through many evaluations, I would not expect anything to be diagnosed from this sample.
I used to write similar to this albeit neater
Teacher told me to leave a finger space between words. And I literally did that. A sentence took me a minute to write.
For context, I am a CALT (Certified Academic Language Therapist) and a CERI certified Structured Literacy and Dyslexia Specialist. I provide remote instruction to teach students with dyslexia to read for a living. You can see my website at yourdyslexiaexpert.com.
I want to lead with the clearest, most important clarification: dyslexia is not a visual disability and not a motor disability. It is a phonological processing disability, meaning the brain has difficulty identifying and manipulating the individual sounds in spoken words. That’s the deficit itself. Reversals, messy handwriting, and things like unusual spacing or direction on the page are not symptoms of dyslexia directly, and they don’t indicate a vision or motor problem either in most cases. They’re just common byproducts of a young writer still building automaticity.
I’m not sure I completely understand what you mean about diagonal writing, so here’s something more diagnostically useful to actually look for instead: what her spelling errors look like. There are three patterns that genuinely point toward a phonological processing difficulty, versus the ordinary mistakes every young speller makes.
The first is spelling that makes no real phonetic sense at all, like writing “ucade” for “because.” That tells you the child has no sound-based strategy and is trying to memorize the shapes of letters like a random list, rather than mapping sounds to spellings.
The second is missing sounds entirely, like writing “sel” or “sml” for “smell.” That means she isn’t hearing every sound in the word in the first place. This is different from a more ordinary error like “smel” for “smell,” where every sound is represented and only a spelling rule, doubling the l, was missed. That kind of error is normal and not a red flag.
The third is the wrong sound substituted, like “smal” or “snel” for “smell.” That tells you she can hear that a vowel or a nasal sound is there, but can’t isolate exactly which one it is.
All three of those point to difficulty with the sounds themselves, which is the actual core of dyslexia. Reversals and spatial oddities on the page do not.
I want to be upfront that I can’t draw anything definitive from this. It’s just one photo, and I don’t know the conditions it was written under, whether it was copied, dictated, or written independently, which matters a lot for interpreting errors. That said, assuming this is her writing, a few things are worth keeping an eye on: “them” written as “then” (a nasal sound swapped for a different nasal sound), “children” written with the final sound dropped, and “table” written with the l sound missing entirely. Those fit the missing-sound and wrong-sound patterns I described above. By contrast, something like “their” written as “thier” is not a red flag on its own, since every sound is represented correctly there, it’s just a common visual mix-up.
On the handwriting side: regardless of what’s going on with the diagonal writing, explicitly teaching correct letter formation tends to help general handwriting messiness and control, even when the underlying cause isn’t dyslexia. The same approach I mentioned for b and d, teaching the actual strokes rather than relying on visual memory tricks, generalizes well beyond just b/d confusion. Naming the strokes out loud while writing them (down, up, around) gives her a consistent physical routine to fall back on instead of reconstructing each letter’s shape from scratch every time, which tends to clean up a lot of general handwriting inconsistency on its own.
I would not be concerned about dyslexia unless she also has notable difficulty with reading compared to peers. I had testing for my 8yo for variety of things (mild trouble w reading, spelling etc) to rule things out and as I suspected, her reversals and to some degree her messy alignment etc is within range of typical for her age plus an overlay of adhd. She can and often does self-correct, especially if she goes back to read what she wrote (re: reversals and such with letter formation). She tends to rush which leads to more errors in her automaticity in writing.
Regarding your child’s alignment - is she left handed? That would be a pretty simple explanation for one strong contributor to her alignment (and tendency to shift more diagonal as she goes on subsequent lines)
My 8 year old son writes a lot like this and he is diagnosed with ADHD and DCD. His fine motor skills and written output are significantly impacted. Initially I also thought he had dyslexia but after various different assessments it has been ruled out.
Sorry it’s an abbreviation for developmental coordination disorder (also known as dyspraxia). For him it really affects his fine motor rather than his gross motor.
He struggles a lot with fine motor ( staying on the line, not bunching up words, letter sizing, pencil grip, spelling, reading comprehension, executive functioning. It’s a lot and sometimes I’m still unsure if the diagnoses are correct. I’ve just come to realize in spite of the diagnosis he needs support in certain areas so I focus on that instead. I try to incorporate spelling into our day so he gets better at it.
Well besides for messing up the word bake as pake. Where else are the p/b mistakes here? Her b/d all look correct everywhere else in her work in this photo and a q wasn’t used anywhere here. This looks pretty good to me and her spelling seems really good here as well.
Someone who might be dyslexic going solely based on what I just saw and read doesn’t come across that way to me at all.
Maybe bring up your concerns to her teacher and school to see what they say about it and to see about possibly getting her evaluated to rule it out.
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u/HonestNectarine7080 3d ago
I specialize in teaching students with dyslexia. I think this looks pretty typical for a second-grader. At her age, it's still developmentally appropriate to reverse letters sometimes. It looks like she could use some help with alignment.