As a child, I never read "Harry Potter," "Box Car Children," "Magic Tree House," or any other popular children’s series of the early 2000s. I dreaded summer reading lists because June to September just wasn’t enough time. My poor mom tried everything to get me to sit down a read a book, but I just hated it. I now see that it wasn’t the plot, the characters or even the act of sitting still and holding a book that was the problem -- it was the font.
The only series I ever read was "Captain Underpants." Once I was embarrassed, but now I understood why "Diary of a Wimpy Kid" was the only non-assigned book on my bookshelf my senior year of high school. I remember getting really excited to see the "Diary of Wimpy Kid" movie even though it came out in 2010 because that would be the first time I had read the book before seeing the movie. Unlike other books, when I read "Diary of a Wimpy Kid" and "Captain Underpants," it wasn’t frustrating. When I read these books, I didn’t need to read each line with so much focus and attention that I forgot what the aforementioned sentence said. I never understood why this was until two years later, I was diagnosed with dyslexia.
In short, dyslexia is a learning difficulty that affects one’s ability to read and spell. It is a spectrum disorder which affects people in many different ways. Mixing up words and letters is the most common understanding of dyslexia but it also makes text appear fuzzy, missing, moving and more. Essentially, dyslexia makes words on a page much harder to process, scan, understand and retain. Dyslexics will be troubled by spelling, reading aloud and transcribing ,amongst other things. It is a frustration that an estimated 10 to 20 percent of people in the United States live with, including myself.
In researching about dyslexia in efforts to combat my impediment, I have found that the presentation of words affects one’s ability to comprehend them. So I looked into buying magnifying glasses. But when I Googled "glasses for dyslexia" I found Right Dyslexia Glasses. I have yet to try them, but I hope to do so soon. In a review of the glasses, a mother, Erin, wrote about her experience with her 10-year-old son. Her son “skipped lines, had trouble with phonetics but a fabulous auditory memory, and generally avoided reading.” I thought to myself that this sounded a bit like my challenges. But a portion of her review shed light on my affinity for the "Diary of a Wimpy Kid" and "Captain Underpants" series:
“There has only been one series of books that my son would pick up on his own -- "The Diary of a Wimpy Kid." One day I just asked him why he wouldn't read anything but these books unless forced to. His response was that he could see the words better in this series in which the font is larger because it is designed to look like a child's handwritten text. Continued conversation on the matter revealed that my son could ‘see the spaces between the words better with this text.'”
After reading this, I was no longer embarrassed to have this series on my bookshelf. It wasn’t that I had been avoiding complex plots or characters by reading these books, but it was that these books never gave me headaches or triggered tears of frustration. The text on a page in "Diary of a Wimpy Kid" and similarly "Captain Underpants" has larger spaces between each line than an average book, more spacing between letters, larger text and a less formatted font. This text presentation freed me of my normal hinderances and allowed me to quickly read through the books, giving me confidence and the opportunity to read with a level of fluency that better reflected my schooling, intelligence and age.
So, instead of handing your dyslexic self, child or friend a copy of a latest hit drama, hand them a copy of "Diary of a Wimpy Kid" or "Captain Underpants" and let them experience the feeling of reading with fluidity. Reading these books can show a person with dyslexia that their struggle is not inescapable, and that these books truly do have some of the most exciting plot twists that books can offer.
