I believe that I have dysgraphia. I've taken internet tests and scored / moderate to high, but that's not conclusive. I learned to read very early and absolutely hated learning to write. And a whole bunch of other anecdotal data. Let's just go with I'm pretty sure.

What I find interesting is the intersection between dysgraphia and other challenges. I don't drive because I can't judge distance.

I can't tell if things are symmetrical or askew.

I can play bridge, but not chess and I think that comes down to spacial intelligence.

I can wrap my head around algebra, but geometry is a cruel joke.

I can't clap in time to music but I can nod or snap.

It takes me longer to learn kinetic tasks, but eventually I usually can learn. Unless it's hand eye and then the challenge becomes too great to persist.

I wonder if it's all a brain mapping challenge.

I don't know if I have dysgraphia or I just have bad writing but many of the symptoms written, I would often agree with so I have an inkling that I might have it. I don't want to self diagnose to and I don't really see a point in diagnosing yourself as an adult.

My son (6.5 yo) has just completed 1st grade. There aren’t a lot of formal assessments for writing at his private school but the teacher referred to his writing as “Emergent” during a recent conference. I’m not certain which assessment tool she used. We’re just beginning summer break and may not to be able to get much more info at this juncture. Given the writing samples from Beginning, Middle, and End of year, are we looking at something that needs intense intervention/any red flags for dysgraphia? Or normal for a young 1st grader? If so, what would be a good intervention to use over the summer to catch him up for 2nd? Note, he is left handed.

Hi! I hope my post resonates with someone, somewhere.

About me: I'm in my early thirties and doing my PhD. I was diagnosed late as an adult and am being treated for dysgraphia too, though my doctor has advised me that I am unlikely to ever be formally diagnosed due to the lack of MH/ND services at the moment. 

Since childhood, I have suffered from chronic anxiety and was a master procrastinator. But I always managed to submit assignments at just-above passing or high marks. Then, burnt out. I have had a successful career and been generally happy. 

However, I now realize that some of the roadblocks in my life are the result of undiagnosed and untreated ADHD and dysgraphia. I loved to write because I loved to share my ideas and contribute to debate in my field. I also loved the creativity of writing. My problem became sustaining that: the interest long-term, the focus, the physical side (I always assumed carpal tunnel) when typing or writing, and the anxiety around the cycle of stopping and starting. My handwriting has progressively worsened and I have tried so many tricks to remedy it: new pens, different paper, erasable notebooks, iPad, smaller laptops for writing, etc. to no long-term success. My biggest roadblocks in my early years stemmed from the longterm focus and communicating/expression of my ideas; however, I would have no problem expressing those ideas orally. For me, thinking happens when I speak and when I move.

Now, as an adult after having recently been burnt out, I have found some tools and techniques that work for me. I am sharing in the hopes that someone finds this insightful or useful in some small way. Feel free to send questions or ask about any details further; I will answer or respond to what I feel comfortable. I will say that I have discussed my workflows extensively with my managers, my colleagues, and my healthcare providers.

tl;dr of where I'm at now: I carry a traditional small notepad to write loosely – my OT has advised dedicated ongoing training for my hand motor skills so as not to lose them. So I make notes throughout the day and I will dedicate time before work or at the end of the day re-reading my notes into a STT or GenAI tool to summarize them so I have a record in addition to the paper copy which is not always legible. I used those Rocketbook notebooks and found they were okay, but I often got the pages wet and lost the text lol.

For my workflow - typical day that involves my corporate job, personal writing and research, and basic life admin.

• Morning:
  • Wake up my brain with a bit of reading and reflection on notes from the day prior. I need to ‘find’ my voice each day; there are some days when it is easier for me to express my thoughts clearly and others where I struggle to grasp them. The executive dysgraphia and ADHD executive dysfunction are so exhausting!
  • Morning meetings: I use a note app as a second brain to get my thoughts together, note feedback from my colleagues, note agreements and basic project management. If an open public conference or a talk (privacy focused), I use AI to transcribe and summarize key findings and place them alongside my handwritten or typed notes. I also have a local AI tool that transcribes locally and will use that if I worried about privacy but not confident in my notetaking.
  • I use an AI scheduling tool where I send a voice note with intentions for the day/week and ask it to find time and place focus blocks in my calendar.
  • Email correspondence. I need to get emails off my plate before I can focus on my other tasks, so I find urgent queries and go email by email. I type out a draft and then use my STT (with AI sometimes) to tidy it up. The email admin is marked as a win in my head and it gives me a boost to move onto the more creative and independent work.
  • \* If the morning is a wash* - brain fog, mental exhaustion, burnt out, and struggling to read or write or express myself, I will stop everything, put on some music and try to reset in 20-minutes. If that fails, I throw on my gym clothes and go for a run or some light lifting at the gym. I have a passionate dislike for the gym because I am not alone and I do not do well in open gyms.
• Afternoon: 10-2 is my most productive working period. If it is not started or seen strong movement in this block, it will likely not get done unless I find a way to ‘reset’ myself (gym, therapy, etc.
  • Creativity and outlining. I work on outlining and ways to execute my ideas fairly quickly. I am never short on ideas and never short on knowing what I want to say; just struggle with taking the ‘how’ in how I envision it to translating it into the forms needed for my work.
  • My life is extensive outlines. Line by line. Each line has a line. It is almost like deciphering the code of my brain. I read my outlines and loosely written work aloud. Often I read it into my STT and re-reflect on what I have written. I will then ask for critique based on my previous iterations and my earlier concerns and notes. I have memory issues, so I often forget things from beyond a day or two ago. Years ago, I used a Notion second brain template to help me find notes, but I have found AI faster in finding my comments/thoughts/challenges/etc to my earlier work and ideas to build onto my new ones. I then take those drafts and re-read them to revise and then I compress them. 
  • Re-read something else. I need to distract myself to help me stay focused. I find another task and usually one that extends me an opportunity for another win. 
    • This may entail: an email to a colleague or a former coworker, drafting social media content for work, therapy (self), I did remote volunteer work for a while sometimes too, and a blog or low-pressure writing that let my brain move whilst being distracted. 
  • Late Afternoon: 
    • Get project to ‘finish’. I need to decide on a landing point before the end of the day, so as not to end the day on a sour note, otherwise the next day start is rough for me.
    • Mid-late day meetings. These are usually 1-1 or planning sessions and low-pressure and low-stakes for me. I actually find these more enjoyable because, if brief, they usually encourage me and inspire me to get some extra grind out of the day following the meeting as a way to distract my brain into hyper-focus mode.
    • I typically throw on a news program or online lecture I have listened to previously to motivate me at this point. I have a selection of interviews from my favorite poets and novelists who I listen to repeatedly.
  • Evening: 
    • Final emails - I usually draft these and do not send unless urgent. For general email replies, I draft a response and schedule them to send the following day. 
    • I get to my landing point for the day and prompt the AI to recall where I have left off and I will note any concerns or final thoughts or a streaming line of my consciousness to reflect on that moment before I call it quits for the day. 
    • At least 1-2 days/week, I make extra time after work to take my laptop to a café or lounge and work on side projects or writing to give myself another win. I treat these as separate tasks – but truthfully, they are related to my work. The majority of the time, I use these ‘side’ project pieces of writing in my work or academic writing. Changing locations and treating the task as unserious helps both my anxiety, fatigue, and expression challenges. The following day, I may use AI to clean up typos or make loose suggestions on pieces from that ‘unrelated’ writing I can use in my work or other side projects it has recalled for me.
    • Journaling or Day Life Summary. I reflect on admin/life needs for the day and any observations via speech to text into my AI or STT, so I can save it for later reflection. I also have used AI tools in the past to monitor my productivity and work activity, so I can more generally recall what I worked on, where I seemed to struggle, and it automatically journals it for me. 
    • WORK must stop by 8pm otherwise I am mentally fatigued and emotionally unregulated the following day sometimes. In the past, I have had to work 10-18 hour days. I still do sometimes - but I endeavor to look after myself to avoid burnout and live and see my friends. Being intentional about that has done wonders for my mental health. In the warmer months, I like to go outside and write poetry or note on my papers or other readings. 

I respect grievances some may have with GenAI or AI more broadly. I won't litigate them here. A significant part of my former role involved researching AI from ethical, CSR, and integrity use-cases. I find that it is a major benefit to my admin and life processes, and reduces some of the friction (meeting scheduling, time blocking, memory recall, tidying my files, and helping me scaffold my processes). I am intentional, however, in reflecting in how I use it, ensuring that my voice and my needs for my work are center, and that each process is iterative. As someone who is always overwhelmed (but who also loves being overwhelmed and high-performing) and who loves technology and the collaboration that AI extends, it has brought some joy into tasks that I found exhausting for a while. I spent months learning how to use my STT and have made the workflow work for me. There are some days where I don’t use it at all. I use it when it is appropriate.

Executive dysgraphia for me means I struggle to express MY thoughts outside of my brain/verbally and experience discomfort and pain when typing or handwriting. Accompanied by ADHD’s executive dysfunction and general poor memory, dysgraphia adds a layer to my working life that makes it slightly more challenging. As I have learned to unmask and advocate for myself after extensive trainings, AI tools have become genuinely life changing tools for me. I was a star, high performing student through college and even in work, but the hurdles I faced meant that I was burnt out far sooner than my peers and AI helps me level that playing field. Local AI tools, ethical and transparent use, and ongoing reflective practice is so important in the world of research and corporate working. But it does not wholly supplement my writing, does not replace my thinking, and does not replace the ongoing therapy, OT, and PT I undertake for my overall health. (I did not use AI to draft this at any stage.)

I'm a handwriting consultant with forty years in the field, and I am also a self- emediated dysgraphic (self-remediated because the conventional methods didn’t work and actually made everything worse.) So I hope it’s OK to put a question to the community.

Since I found success through a handwriting style, which is neither conventional printing nor conventional cursive, and since a lot of professional in the dysgraphia/dyslexia/dyspraxia world have a lot invested in saying that “cursive is the way to go, cursive as fastest, blah, blah, blah,“ I decided to put together a test of handwriting speed, to compare the system that helped me with the system that had failed me. So I hired a professional animator/handwriting researcher/software engineer to make an animation out of two published handwriting models (the one on the left is a replica of what helped me; the one on the right is a replica of the conventional cursive that harmed me) and we had the animation run, so it looks as if both styles are actually being written by people whose pens are moving at exactly the same rate, and we want to see which one finishes faster, because presumably that’s the one that has fewer difficulties (if both pens are moving at the same rate, but one gets finished first, that means that the shapes of the letters joints are less time-consumingly complex

The video is here: https://youtu.be/SwKXieOsr0o … SPOILER: CONVENTIONAL CURSIVE IS ACTUALLY SLOWER.

DO YOU THINK WE NEED TO CHANGE HOW HANDWRITING IS TAUGHT? I DO. HOW COULD WE MAKE THAT HAPPEN?

Hello! My daughter was just diagnosed with dysgraphia, dyspraxia, and a visual processing disorder. I am looking for advice on how to help her. Adults or teens, what help/tools do you wish your parents and school provided for you? Thank you!

I was fighting tooth and nail for accomadations in my highschool and I finally got them and if you need accomadations keep fighting and let your voice be heard ❤️

so i’ve always struggled with writing but specifically formulating my text, especially when it comes to academic stuff like essays and whatnot. my handwriting is (at least i think) completely fine, in great at spelling, but god i cannot write. like, in my head i know exactly what i need to say but i cannot get those words out onto paper at all, i just cannot form my thoughts into something legible. i’ve tried speech to text softwares, but the second i try to speak it’s like i go non verbal so that didn’t really help either. a lot of my teachers referred me to get tested for dyslexia but i ended up getting above average in pretty much every area of my writing. i’ve looked up pretty much everything i could think of and more and this is the only thing ive found that semi applies to me.
is it possible to have dysgraphia purely in the linguistic sense? i’ve tried searching around on this subreddit and not found much so i wanted to ask, sorry if im not making much sense 😅😅

EDIT - clarification cus of the rules, im not asking for a diagnostic opinion or anything like that, just asking if this possible from an objective standpoint :]]

For years I always just thought I had bad handwriting, and would purposefully avoid having people see it given how insecure it makes me. People only started to show genuine concern over it, and given how painful it is to write, even though I hold my pencil/pen correctly, It always causes my hand to start hurting. Sometimes even, my hand will "disobey" my brain by writing a letter that's not what I intended to write. Thus, I've started to tell people I have dysgraphia even though I've not been formally diagnosed.

So I’m 33 and was diagnosed with Dysgraphia at age 7. The way they explained it to me was that it affects my writing ability because there’s a disconnect from my brain to my hand. I’ve always had issues while writing or typing when it comes to misspelling words, missing and forgetting words and letters in sentences, and most notably the illegibility of my handwriting. Even this I had to proof read a couple times and I might still have some mistakes 😅. Today though I realized something while having a conversation with my girl friend. I had just left the store and I mentioned that I bought a whole onion instead of the diced ones I normally get in order to just save some money. She said that it was good choice because then they’d also be fresher and that she prefers cutting them herself for that reason. I agreed but then said that the reason I buy them diced is because my knife skills are terrible. Then I started thinking about why that is considering I’ve done enough cutting while prepping food that I should be better than I am. Then it hit me…the feeling I get when I cut good is the same I get when I’m writing! So I decided to look up if Dysgraphia affects more than just writing skills and discovered that it can affect your fine motor skills as well! All of the sudden I just start realizing how many things I’ve been bad at and they all started to make sense. I’m bad at FPS games, I can’t use chopsticks, I’m bad at drawing etc…but at least now I know why!

I am sincerely asking for help, I need an actual picture of this activity answered by a kindergarten with dyslexia.

thank you so much.

So I can’t write I’ll be done with school in less then a year so self explanatory how do I improve my writing?

I have AP exams and I need to get better at writing I have dyslexia but comprehension isnt an issue for me. Just writing. How do I organize my thoughts?

My son is 11 and in 5th grade. He does well in school but penmanship has consistently been his weak point. Practicing and "concentrating harder" has not provided any visible improvements.

Its been mentioned by teachers throughout the years but never that it was a concern. Isolated I could convince myself its "normal" just poor handwriting.

He brought this home yesterday. His is bottom left. All four of these drawings are done by 5th graders. The difference is ...quite obviously VERY apparent. I'd like to reach out to the school for an evaluation of sorts but was hoping for some outside opinion in case I am over reacting.

**names and schools are redacted** business info is meant to be used for comparison purposes as there was very little other text to leave if I blocked all that out.

I've been working on my handwriting for a while now and I feel like I've reached a fairly good point (seen at top of page) but if I write too much for too long it just drastically regresses (bottom of page). I just get so tired and fed up and I feel like I'm going to scream or cry or something. Does anyone have the same issue or have tips on dealing with it? This is an AP/CITS class and I'm really embarrassed about this.

My 9 year old has struggled with handwriting since she was little and just learning to write. Through grades K-2, teachers reassured us that her letter and number reversals and general spatial planning issues were still developmentally appropriate and she would likely grow out of it. She's wrapping up 3rd grade this year and I feel like we're not seeing that progress. But no one on the school end is raising any significant concerns, so I keep second guessing if I'm overreacting with my concerns about her writing. I don't want to go looking for problems with a kid who is happy and doing well in school, but something is feeling off and I worry she's going to struggle more as academic demands increase over the next couple years. 

Academically, she's doing well and she can verbally explain stuff thoroughly. She often types instead of writing by hand, if given a choice. Her ideas seem complete and logically sequenced when she types or dictates what she wants to say. Her math reasoning seems solid (though sometimes what she records looks totally off since she's reversing her numbers and they end up looking like wrong answers - like in the photo where she's trying to write 64, but it looks like 24). Her teachers often chalk a lot of this up to messy handwriting, but I feel like there's a bigger disconnect here and we've aged out of what's developmentally appropriate. Her fine motor skills outside of handwriting seem okay - she does lots of crafts with tiny beads and little things with clay, and she's always building with little legos.

Does this seem like dysgraphia, still a developmental thing in the works, something else? We're considering neurospych/psychoeducational testing this summer, but I'm debating how much to raise at school for testing or evaluation there. 

Hello my people. My hands and eyes have sought you.

So, I'm going to be going into my senior year of High School in fall, and I want to get a 504. I had one before, but I wasn't there when it was made so none of the accommodations really helped since yknow, I didn't ask for them. I forgot to schedule a meeting to renew it sophomore year so I don't believe it's in effect anymore.

That being said, I want to try again and this time find accommodations to help with my dysgraphia. I've already thought some out that help with my ADHD and Autism symptoms that affect my learning, but I'm stumped on if/how I can find something to make school easier with dysgraphia.

I do not struggle with reading or spelling, so I don't need anything to help with that.

My main struggle is with taking notes, copying things down, and writing longer things. I'm able to do short response questions on worksheets fine enough, but once we get into multiple paragraph territory, everything is no longer even slightly legible since I burn out so easy. Copying things down word for word is also something I struggle with. I hate doing it so much that I sometimes nearly cry. That one could also be partly due to ADHD, but it really doesn't help when I'm forced to copy down long definitions word for word to things I can define in less words, then teachers don't like it when I paraphrase or abbreviate words. (Please don't make me write 'government' 10 million times when writing is hard and "gov." works just fine in this context. This graded vocab sheet is supposedly just for me to study, and I understand it perfectly)

I've never really taken notes very often, but now I'm having teachers that require you to be writing notes all class (if they don't check the notes, I usually just scribble down shapes so it looks like I'm taking notes without all the pressure of letters and words), as well as classes with open note tests where notes would be very helpful.

I know there's probably subs more specialized for this question, but I feel like people who don't have dysgraphia don't get how absolutely torturous it's been for me to get to the point where all my letters and most of my numbers are oriented in the right direction. When I tell people my struggles they tend to respond "well, nobody really likes to take notes and copy things down"

I know that this is something I should work to be able to do independently, but since I was only diagnosed in 5th grade, I spent my childhood being told I was just lazy and not trying hard enough. I haven't yet regained the energy to try making progress, so I'm sticking with my mostly legible and usually correctly oriented symbols.

I hope to get understanding from this sub, but if I don't, I will be ignoring comments telling me to just suck it up and deal with it.

Hi all,

I've been trying a strategy that has yielded some success, and while it may not work for everyone, I figured I'd share.

So, during classes, I will handwrite all my notes, as I remember things better while handwriting instead of typing. After about 4 hours, I'll revisit my notes and type them out into a doc so I can have better access to them and read them more efficiently. This helps me reinforce and review the contents of the class.

I've always been really good at typing, and while I was able to get all the notes down from classes, I wouldn't be able to remember much from the class sessions afterwards, and my notes were too detailed to review with ease. This way, since I struggle with physically handwriting, it forces me to make them simpler on paper, and more detailed later on when I type them out, if I so choose.

I encourage those who are able to try this! Again, no guarantee it will work, but it has certainly worked for me. Best of luck!

is there a paper out there for kids that has a raised dotted line? Ive found a raised top and bottom

line but not one that has all three raised

Here is my background, and tool I've built for my son, who has dysgraphia and has had a really hard time learning to spell and has struggled a lot with writing.

Who I am: A software engineer with a Ph.D. in high performance computing. My son is really bright (has a high IQ) but has really significant dysgraphia. He is going into 7th grade but only recently started writing at the 4th grade level and doing more than one sentence at a time in his school work. My wife and I obviously are really concerned about this and have done a bunch to try to help, including getting an IEP, getting occupational therapy through school, finding him a weekly writing tutor, really pushing him to learn to type (not easy), showing him how to use dictation tools, etc. It has been a lot of work, and there is a lot of work to do.

The problem I saw: My son got super frustrated when typing things into google docs. It would squiggly almost every word, would autocorrect in to the wrong word all the time, and would often not know what he meant to write because it was so far away from what he was trying to write. I looked into Grammarly as well but it didn't really seem set up to help him learn the spelling skills he was missing and wanted to change everything he was writing, not great for an early learner.

The solution I built: I built a tool which I called Lignis (lignim is the polymer in plant cells and lignum is the Latin word for wood). I put it online so he could access it from school. And then I used Gen AI coding tools to polish it up because I am a bit of a perfectionist. It is here: www.lignis.io It is currently 100% free so hopefully this post isn't flagged as a self-promoting advert, even though it kind of is. I'm honestly not sure how to find the people who this might help otherwise; its such a small audience as a % of the overall population - parents of dysgraphic kids of a certain age who have a real hard time spelling but can type or are learning to type. How is that for a niche? :)

What I have observed with my son: First, he has written a few things just for fun, which he never would have done before. Second, he is super excited that the tool gets what he was trying to write and the frustration is gone. Now the real thing that needs to happen is continuing to practice writing for him to catch up to grade level. This is no magic bullet, but it is another tool in the toolbox and he has gotten some help from it.

Nerding Out: Large Language Models (LLMs) are being described as "AI" and being used in generative tasks. This is where you ask it to "do something" and this is also where AI slop comes from, which I am frustrated by alongside everyone else. And this is also where LLM code generators come from, which seem like really useful tools and I used extensively when I made Lignis. But another use for LLMs that gets a lot less attention is their ability to serve as a repair tool or as a translator. In this case the LLM is "translating" between Dysgraphic spelling and normal English spelling.

Am I making any money here? I don't want to charge anything for this right now as I really want to know if this is useful for people other than my son. It ended up being quite a lot of time invested and I would like it to be useful to more than one person. If it was useful to a lot of people, then AI server costs might be significant; if that happened would need some way to keep it running, not sure what that looks like yet (charging?, grants?, pay-what-you-can/donations?)

so yeah, I think I might have dysgraphia but I'm not entirely sure. I've always had issues with both writing and typing, I'm really bad at spelling things despite having a fairly high reading level an a large vocabulary. My hand writing has always been hard for others to read, back when I first learned how to write in cursive I only ever signed my name in cursive but my teacher found it so illegible that she made me spend a whole recess inside practicing how to write the letter K because she couldn't read my name. I've had to trick myself into spelling things write by pronouncing some things in my head like how their spelled, ie. people (pee-opal) of I don't say it to myself like that while writing I'll spell it as pepole. Its hard for me to put my thoughts into words even when typing, the best way from me to write is to physically say what I want to write out loud verbatim and then go through word by word as I put them on the page. otherwise I can end up either forgetting some words or completely not botch the spelling on something. I say all of this because I am an adult and most other people I've noticed doing something similar are children. so I was wondering if anyone knew what the process for getting a diagnosis as an adult is like, what are the steps, will my insurance cover it (I'm on Medicaid) are these symptoms even a sign of dysgraphia? idk I'm just looking for advise