Trying to understand dyslexia
I'm writing a character who has moderate dyslexia. It isn't an aesthetic or a character quirk but rather something that very much drives the plot of the story , so I really don't want to get anything wrong and just want to refine my understanding .
From what I've been able to pick up , it looks like dyslexics have a problem with tying abstract concepts to a representation of that representation.
For example one may be able to comprehend five as a quantity, but recognizing that it is tied to "5" and "five" is difficult.
Similarly it might be easy to remember that 5+1 = 6 when 5 , 1 and 6 are quantity, but hard to connect the quantities to the symbols ( which is why many dyslexics can calculate well enough but often write something completely different from their answer]
It also looks to me like dyslexics tend to see something as a single unit rather than a union of units
For example , rat ,tar and art are basically the same as a set of [ t, a , r ] if you ignore the order of letters . Same with 47 and 74 . [ p q d b] , [m, w, nn] is inheritly same character/s ; just rotated varyingly
Perhaps this might be why so many dyslexics can rotate and comprehend 3-d structures well and remember stories/ episodes of interconnected information while failing to remember isolated information like names and phone numbers , and why some dyslexics feel like they " hallucinate" by adding letters of peripheral words into the one they're reading , or feel like there are words/ letters that appear and disappear* ( when instead their brain is seeing certain disconnected characters as a unit)
Again , this is my understanding and I understand it could be *very* flawed , so I hope to be corrected
* I've read that many dyslexics hate when people say that they perceive letters as blurring/ disappearing/ warping / moving but I've read others who say that it is as close an approximation of what they see . So Uf some one could help me with this I would grateful .
I'm sorry if any of this is too vague , I'm not wonderful at self expression