tell you a secret. It's something almost no one in my professional life knows. I'm dyslexic. Given that knowledge, my chosen career—writer—might seem odd. But while I was cursed with poor spelling skills, I’ve always been drawn to storytelling. The career-planning report that accompanied the aptitude test I took at 13 even tried to dissuade me from a “literary” career, but even back then I had enough bravado to overrule that piece of computer-generated advice.
The Controlled Reader projected text onto a screen at the front of the class just like a regular slide projector, but with one difference. Light would shine only through a narrow horizontal slit, allowing only a single line of text to be illuminated at any one time. Each line of text would flip into view for a second or two, then get replaced with the next one. The teacher could crank up the speed of the machine using a dial, forcing the class to read at speeds up to 130 words per minute.
A hallmark of dyslexia is the inability to discern phonemes, distinct sounds represented by specific letters. I struggle with this. I can hear the sounds, but I sometimes can’t translate them to letters on the page. The other day, I wanted to write the word "agitated." This is a word I know. I’ve said it aloud countless times without mispronouncing it, and I’ve read it often as well. And yet, when typing it, even sounding it out as I go, I hear a “d” and a “j” in it.
While Grammarly has offices around the world, I got lucky: Joel Tetreault, the company's director of research and development, is based in New York City, where I live. I enter a coffee shop off Delancy Street in the Lower East Side and walk to a door at the back where I'm buzzed in. I feel like I'm being admitted into a secret laboratory, like in some noir science-fiction story. I head up to the second floor.
I would have discovered Grammarly sooner had I bothered to visit the many websites for dyslexics that thrive on the internet. Though users of all stripes love Grammarly—the extension has a four-and-a-half-star rating from more than 30,000 reviewers in the Google Chrome Store—it has the status of a beloved rock star in the dyslexic community. Grammarly is up there with Dragon Dictation, the speech-to-text software which, as a fast typist, I never took to.
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