The advantages of being dyslexic

Abstract

I am deeply honored to receive the award from The Orton Society, especially since it is in the name of Dr. Samuel Orton. He was a great man, and his work is still too little appreciated. In reviewing his writings I am constantly impressed with the meticulous care with which he studied each child, and by his creative imagination which permitted new insights into the causative mechanisms of language disabilities. Last year at the annual banquet of this Society I talked briefly about his theories in the light of current knowledge of how the brain works. At the risk of being repetitious I should like to recapitulate the general theme of his theory of cerebral dominance. You will recall that Dr. Orton studied a group of patients in whom letter and word reversals were an extremely prominent phenomenon. He coined a new term for these patients, and stated his theory about them as follows: I have offered the term strephosymbolia to define the cases of retardation of reading skills in which there can be demonstrated a confusion between dextrad and sinistrad orientation of letters; a tendency toward sinistrad reading of all or parts of words; and an unusual skill in mirror writing.I Somewhat similar cases had previously been described by Hinshelwood and others under the name of "word blindness." Dr. Hinshelwood had considered that this condition could be diagnosed only when there existed a very serious disorder of reading. Dr. Orton took exception to this approach, pointing out that there was a continuum of difficulty from the most severe to the least severe, and that, in fact, there was a tendency toward strephosymbolia in almost all children at some phase in the development of writing skills. Although Dr. Orton was careful to point out that there were many different forms of reading disability, it is clear that he considered "strephosymbolia" to be a major component in the overall problem. His explanation for this tendency toward distorted or backward writing was an ingenious one. He noted that all language functions are ordinarily