Does an adult have dyslexia

DO THE TEST AND FIND OUT:

Adults often ask me if they could be dyslexic, too – so I sourced some points that can help. Even if only 10 of them apply to you, chances are that you are fortunate enough to be Dyslexic:

These characteristics are often inconsistent, and vary depending upon the day or situation.

At work, DO YOU:

  • Work at a job that will hide your difficulties or doesn’t require a lot of reading and writing.
  • Work in a higher position that requires a secretary to write etc.
  • Hide literacy difficulties from your colleagues, friends and family.
  • Become frustrated attending “boring meetings” and slow or orderly tasks – often feeling you  already have the answer and how to do it.
  • Get easily frustrated or anxious with new situations, boss or co-workers
  • Feel overwhelmed by new or unexpected tasks
  • Choose or prefer a visual, tactile, kinaesthetic career like: Designer, Architect, Engineer, Trade, Mechanic, Artist, Interior Decorator, Actor, Musician, Athlete, Sportsman, Inventor, Builder or Business Executive (usually with assistants).
  • Display lack of concentration or difficulty to focus on one task – may prefer to multi-task
  • Pass on promotion to avoid having to write reports
  • Avoid tests –  have difficulty passing standardised tests, sometimes blocking achievements or promotions.
  • Consider yourself highly successful and driven – or an ‘underachiever’, not living up to potential.
  • Come up with creative new ideas, that are out-of-the-box
  • Try to avoid reading Manuals, rather learning by experience, hands-on or demonstrations.
  • Watch the YouTube clip on how-to-do anything.
  • See yourself as practical, street smarts and a good judge of character.
  • Make choices intuitively or instinctively
  • Display a sixth sense, or read people’s energy
  • Remember having struggled in school, with reading, writing and/or Maths.
  • Rely on others to assist you, having become a skilful delegator
  • Make frequent spelling mistakes

At home, DO YOU:

  • Have poor recall of conversations or sequence of events, often arguing the opposite.
  • Have a dyslexic child or children and sometimes feel guilty seeing them struggle.
  • Feel insecure or avoid reading to your own children or helping them with homework.
  • Get easily distracted, stressed, frustrated and/or overwhelmed
  • Appear to “zone out” and retreat to your own world
  • Play computer or video games.
  • Get told you mispronounce words, without realising it.
  • Excel at sport
  • Have excellent memory of some events and hardly remember stories from your school days
  • Remember people’s faces, but not their names
  • Get accused of not listening
  • Find it hard to remember verbal instructions
  • Avoid reading out loud
  • Read silently or speed-read
  • Fun to be around, coming up with humour and games
  • Find that comprehension depends on the subject matter
  • Frequently have to re-read sentences in order to comprehend.
  • Quickly become tired or bored of reading.
  • Rely on your partner for literacy tasks
  • Like writing capital letters only or use poor handwriting to mask spelling mistakes.
  • Guess the use of punctuation marks
  • Find hard Maths easier than simple Maths.
  • Have left/right confusions
  • Lose track of time and are either always late or obsessively punctual, finding it hard to estimate time passed
  • Lack self-esteem
  • Function poorly in situations of stress or distraction.
  • Live rather disorderly or are you compulsively orderly

If you want to get more information about your learning style and to look at solutions to improve literacy and numeracy, click here for details of one-on-one dyslexia assessments which can be completed in person or remotely by Barbara Hoi from Sydney Dyslexia.