At my high school, I'm well known as a great writer and reader with quite a high level of vocabulary. And yet, I've been having some strange reading problems. When I read books, for some reason I sometimes have trouble with (usually easy) words like "understand," "hard," and "help." I know that I know what those words mean, in the mechanical sense; I could easily regurgitate definitions and synonyms for those words...But even so, I still feel like my brain isn't quite processing the meanings of those words, in the context of the book. I feel like I'm drawing a weird kind of blank on those words, like some connection in my brain just isn't being made, so that I can't really understand what I'm reading. I've noticed that this happens more often with simpler words and phrases (but it also happens with more difficult words too). Yet I have no problem using such words in my own writing. I noticed this problem first starting probably a couple years ago, and it has made reading a struggle, not a pleasure. Occasionally, I can read without any problems, but more often than not, I have trouble. Is it possible that I have a mile kind of dyslexia? Or maybe it's all in my head and just by worrying about it, I make it happen? Perhaps I'm overconcentrating I feel like maybe it's not dyslexia, because reading for schoolwork and the SATs is really no problem. It only happens with novels. But even so, could I be dyslexic? Maybe selectively so?
Tags: