Sometimes I start wondering whether I have a mild form of dyslexia.
Say it with me now: huh?
Yeah, well, sometimes I end up reversing letters, both in individual words and between other words. "Reversing" as in "switching one letter out for another", not as in "writing my Rs backward". As in, I'm sitting here ordering titles like I do every single day and I type "Asiam anerican li--" oh, wait. This happens pretty often, where "pretty often" = "multiple times a day". I always catch it right away, and I always go back and change it to what I know is right, but still.
I run one word into another, too. I'll be writing so fast that everything blurs and I find myself writing or typing the first half of one word and second half of another. This might just be a case of thinking faster than I can write. That seems pretty obvious; it's been my theory for a long time. This happens much more often when I'm just writing than typing, too. I don't know what to do with that information, but it's there.
In contrast, most of the switching letters out thing happens when I'm typing. So that could just be a case of typos, especially with letters as close to each other as m and n. But I know, when I make the typo of s for a, or vice versa, that it's a typo. There is nothing to switch out if I only type one letter wrong. And just jumbling letters is different from switching two letters that belonged in very different places within the word, and getting the rest of the word right.
But here there is something to switch out. It's not that n and m are typical letters for me to switch out, either. It happens with lots of letters, none of which are necessarily right next to each other on the keyboard. I would have to type for a while to see what else I came up with--I just made the Asian American lit mistake now, so it was the convenient and accurate example available. But I don't think it's just a case of simple typos.
It's also possible that I just think faster than I'm typing, the same way I do when I'm writing. I know I type faster than OCLC online registers information, for instance, because it doesn't clear the screen fast enough and then I get error messages. It makes sense that I have all the letters (for the words in the phrase that fit my idea) in my head, and my fingers want to get them out as quickly as possible, so as to keep up. this makes sense. But why would I be switching specific letters, then?
I don't know. My handwriting is hard to read, but not anything like the example pages you see for dyslexia. I don't have a hard time reading at all. But I don't know anything about this type of diagnosis (or, you know, any diagnosis). It seems pretty unlikely that I would have gotten this far in the vast world of professional English without anyone noticing, or at least having some comprehension problems or something. So I don't actually think I have a learning disorder, no. It's just the only clinical explanation that comes to mind. And it's very weird to see myself making these mistakes when I know perfectly well that I meant to type something else.