I have dysgraphia, which is similar to dyslexia, but it only affects writing. It takes me a frustratingly long time to write emails. I've literally spent two hours writing a 100 word email before.
In general, I can write an email quickly, coherently, or succinctly, choose two.
My writing ability in a particular medium about a particular subject improves with time, to the point where I feel as though I don't have a learning disability. However, I find myself back at square one if I try to write in a new context. It's really maddening.
The worst part is that other people don't understand it at all, yet they think they can speak somewhat authoritatively on the issue because they (like all people) have had difficultly learning something in the past.
Kind of. There are two types of dysgraphia, physical, and cognitive. For people with physical dysgraphia, they do effectively sidestep their limitations.
I have cognitive dysgraphia. Basically most people don't think about writing once they've learned to write, they just write. That is, they've automated the physical component of turning words into text.
I, on the other hand, have an extremely diminished ability to translate language into physical expression. Basically whereas forming letters for other people is always automatic, I always need to think about what a letter looks like and then draw it.
I've been trying to use speech-to-text software for probably 20 years now. It has definitely improved, but it has never gotten to where I want it to be. For one thing, written speech is fundamentally different than the spoken word. There is a lot of implicit formatting that speech-to-text completely misses. Adding in this formatting adds back in all of the overhead that I hope to avoid by speaking in the first place.
One of the biggest issues is that speech-to-text works great when your vocabulary is limited. I think this is one of the reasons why it has always been a reasonably popular option for doctors and lawyers when compared with other fields. I think speech-to-text suffers when it comes to general-purpose writing because the vocabulary is so much larger, and understanding what word is intended requires a lot of context.
I've tried recording, and it works reasonably well, but it is really slow. The best coping strategy I've found is to write down all of my ideas on notecards (or any paper really) and then arrange them in a logical order. I then type out a rough draft using the notecards. I then print the rough draft and then type out my second draft (rather than editing my first).
Fundamentally, my dysgraphia shows up in testing as substantially lower working memory when writing than when performing other tasks. (To the tune of two standard deviations or so). I think my method works because it sidesteps the need to hold information in my head while writing.
In general, I can write an email quickly, coherently, or succinctly, choose two.
My writing ability in a particular medium about a particular subject improves with time, to the point where I feel as though I don't have a learning disability. However, I find myself back at square one if I try to write in a new context. It's really maddening.
The worst part is that other people don't understand it at all, yet they think they can speak somewhat authoritatively on the issue because they (like all people) have had difficultly learning something in the past.
It's exhausting.