Dyslexia, writing and performance Quotes

“However, I have also begun questioning  whether by labeling myself as a dyslexic artist  I am reinforcing negative perceptions. By describing myself as a dyslexic artist and making performance about being so, am I advocating the potential of dyslexics? Or, am I conforming with society’s perceptions by depicting my work as ‘The Other’ to other artists? Folb provides an interesting insight to this discussion: Dyslexic”
― Aby Watson, Dyslexia, writing and performance

“to change our natural and creative writing style to conform. By not conforming to society’s standards of value to be published, we are making a statement about how we perceive the value in our writing: that it does not need to be published to be valued. As”
― Aby Watson, Dyslexia, writing and performance

“Many of these writers are concerned with the gaps between the words, the aporia, with language as, in some ways, an inadequate system but the one that we are stuck with”, to postulate that the writer who is dyslexic is not a failed writer but rather it is the language that fails the writer. (cited in Folb, 2012:128). This”
― Aby Watson, Dyslexia, writing and performance

“Folb suggests that the difference in how dyslexic people articulate themselves is not important; rather, what they have to say is the crucial part.”
― Aby Watson, Dyslexia, writing and performance

“Benedict Phillips also expresses his belief in the importance of dyslexic people representing other dyslexic people.”
― Aby Watson, Dyslexia, writing and performance

“I didn’t know that I was to become a poet, that in many ways the very thing that caused me so much confusion and frustration, my belabored relationship with words, had created in me a deep appreciation of language and its music, that the same mind that prevented me from reading had invented a new way of reading, a method that I now use to teach others how to overcome their own difficulties in order to write fiction and poetry.”
― Aby Watson, Dyslexia, writing and performance

“Those who are good at spelling might regard it as the very corner stone to good prose, whereas a dyslexic might view spelling as subsidary to the point they want to get across. Nevertheless the dyslexic will always be faced with the dominant subjective position which subjugates them, and it is this negative appraisal of dyslexics which leads the dyslexic to become excluded from society’s rigid systems of what is acceptable.”
― Aby Watson, Dyslexia, writing and performance

“In this perspective, spelling mistakes are not indicative of a pathology. Rather they are regarded as inappropriate to some, but not all, circumstance. They do not tell us anything about the quality of information that is given by the writing. They are the skin or surface of the information. It is the way in which they are interpreted by the reader, as either a hindrance, or sign of laziness, incompetence, and so on an so forth, which poses the difficulty for dyslexics. What”
― Aby Watson, Dyslexia, writing and performance

“In the past, dyslexia was understood primarily as a pathological problem that concerned the medical profession. The understanding of dyslexia originated from the term ‘word blindness’ that German neurologist Adolph Kussmaul introduced in 1878 to describe his patients that had difficulty reading; for those that couldn’t and those that used words in the wrong order (Kussmaul 1878, cited in Lawrence, 2009).”
― Aby Watson, Dyslexia, writing and performance

“often results in the perception of disabled people as dependent, deserving of pity and/or praise for overcoming their difficulties’ (Ibid.,) By”
― Aby Watson, Dyslexia, writing and performance

“This leads her to take up the work of Michel Foucault and his theorization of authorship which she uses to unpick the notion of the individual. She argues that dyslexics writers, rather than being failed writers, are writers who have been failed by contemporary ways of thinking about language and authorship. Watson’s”
― Aby Watson, Dyslexia, writing and performance

“In becoming published we exposed ourselves, and our ideas. In breaking the ‘rules’ of writing, the value of our perspective was put into question. As such, our paper reveals an ambivalence towards ourselves us ‘as authors’, which derives from a history of being advised away from a career in writing, academia, and therefore the possibility of being an authority on dyslexia. It draws attention to our desire to write, and speak about the experience of being dyslexic, at the sometime as bringing our author-ity into focus. While ‘dyslexic writing’ was a way into thinking about the problem of negative cultural perspectives towards dyslexia, the sentiment was difficult to access.”
― Aby Watson, Dyslexia, writing and performance