Dysgraphia is a neurological disorder of a functional nature that affects writing, specifically tracing or graphing. Frequently, people who suffer from this disorder show difficulties in controlling writing, since writing control is a neuro-perceptive motor act that is affected in dysgraphia.
Do your children suffer from dysgraphia? Are you dedicated to teaching and do you have students with dysgraphia or do you suspect that they may suffer from it? In addition, it is common for you to wonder how dysgraphia and general difficulties in writing can be differentiated according to the person’s age. In this case, or if you are interested in knowing and informing yourself about the characteristics of dysgraphia, you can continue reading this article from : Dysgraphia: definition, types, causes, treatment and examples.
Definition of dysgraphia
Dysgraphia is a disorder that affects the development and acquisition of writing skills of people, causing, above all, difficulties in free writing, dictation and copying of an already written text.
Furthermore, dysgraphia must be differentiated from some cases, such as having poor handwriting, the general difficulties typical of the age at which the writing learning process occurs, the . Thus, dysgraphia is distinguished from these cases since people who suffer from this disorder have difficulties in automatically remembering and mastering the motor movements necessary to write letters or numbers and form words. Therefore, dysgraphia affects writing ability and spelling, both the writing of complete words and texts and of isolated letters.
Characteristics of writing in dysgraphia
People who suffer from dysgraphia usually share a series of characteristics in their writing. The characteristics of writing in dysgraphia are:
- Difficult to understand lyrics.
- Mirror writing: letters written as if they were the reflection of a mirror, that is, upside down.
- Incorrect or irregular spacing of letters and words: words together or syllables separated.
- Bad presentation: dirty and with marks from having erased words to write them again.
- Irregular letter both in shape and size.
- Uppercase and lowercase letters used incorrectly.
- Poor body posture and incorrect way of holding the pencil when writing.
- They write slowly and clumsily, with errors.
- Deletion or omission of letters.
- Inverted letters.
- Letter confusion: for example, changing an “a” to an “e.”
- Tilt of the letters.
- Inclination of the line, resulting in crooked text.
- Thick stroke and pressing hard or very gently, almost leaving no trace of what is written.
Types of dysgraphia
When we talk about the types of dysgraphia, we must differentiate two large classifications that each of them include different types of dysgraphia:
Acquired dysgraphia
Acquired dysgraphia consists of difficulties in writing due to consequence of a brain injury in people who already knew how to writeFor example, people who have suffered trauma to a certain area of the head. In acquired dysgraphia, we can differentiate central dysgraphia and peripheral dysgraphia:
1. Central acquired dysgraphia: This type of dysgraphia affects the linguistic aspects involved in writing words. Within central acquired dysgraphia we find three different types:
- Phonological acquired dysgraphia: This type of dysgraphia occurs when the phonological route is affected. In this route, words are not recognized in their entirety, but small units such as syllables and letters are recognized. This dysgraphia gives rise to difficulties in understanding the rules of grapheme-phoneme conversion, that is, in relating the sound and pronunciation of words with the way they are written, therefore, people who suffer from this dysgraphia often make mistakes when they write. unknown words, which are not part of your daily writing. For example, the letter “g” when pronounced alone has a different intonation than when it is joined to the word “cat.”
- Superficial acquired dysgraphia: This type of dysgraphia occurs when the visual route is affected, a route that allows words to be recognized, but does not allow decoding words without understanding them or without knowing them previously. For this reason, people tend to write slowly and even spell words, they have spelling errors, visual memory problems, difficulties writing difficult and unknown or unusual words in their daily lives, among others.
- Deep acquired dysgraphia: This type of dysgraphia occurs when the two previous routes (visual and phonological) are affected. This is characterized because semantic errors are made, for example, they replace soccer by basketball, giving rise to a substitution of words that are part of the same semantic field, in this case sports. In addition, there are difficulties in writing a word dictated by another person, even if its meaning is known.
2. Acquired peripheral dysgraphia: In this case, people who suffer from this type of dysgraphia show difficulties in remembering the movements required to be able to trace a letter or write words and phrases.
Developmental dysgraphia
Developmental dysgraphia occurs in people who are in the process of learning to write since they had never learned to write before, it is usually children up to seven years or, in exceptional cases, in illiterate people. Within developmental dysgraphia, we can differentiate three different types of dysgraphia:
- Phonological developmental dysgraphia: people who suffer from a phonological or superficial developmental dysgraphia usually present the same difficulties as people who suffer from an acquired phonological or superficial dysgraphia, although they differ since in the evolutionary ones it is the natural learning process and in the acquired ones it is of people who already knew how to write before suffering a brain injury.
- Superficial developmental dysgraphia.
- Mixed developmental dysgraphia: On the other hand, unlike deep acquired dysgraphia, in mixed developmental dysgraphia there are no semantic errors. Mixed dysgraphia is the most common among developmental dysgraphias, since the difficulties that occur in one of the routes (visual or phonological), as a consequence, hinder the development of the other route.
Causes of dysgraphia
As we have mentioned previously, there are two possible causes of dysgraphia (acquired or evolutionary) and there are several causes that can cause either of the two:
- Lateralization problems.
- Motor difficulties: difficulty in movement, both of the fingers and hands, and difficulties in balance and general organization of the body.
- Personality factors: causes related to and the characteristics of the person suffering from dysgraphia, for example, whether the person is fast or slow.
- Pedagogical causes: there are causes related to the education received in relation to writing, such as having been subjected to rigid teaching and not adapted to the individual differences of each student, submitting to demands set by the teacher, the family and social pressure among colleagues how to write well and quickly, among others.
- Difficulties in visual-perceptual ability: problems identifying what you see. For example, difficulties in interpreting what a ball is when the person has it in front of them or sees it in a photograph.
- Difficulty retaining a word in memory and difficulties in the ability to retrieve a word that we are supposed to retain in memory.
- Visual-motor coordination: difficulties in the ability to coordinate body movement with vision.
Dysgraphia treatment
It is of great importance to diagnose and treat dysgraphia as soon as possible, due to its negative effect, especially in the academic field. But before starting to treat it, one must carefully observe what difficulties the person presents, in order to be able to make a concrete approach focused on the specific characteristics of each patient, that is, to be able to carry out an adapted and person-centered treatment. .
To properly treat dysgraphia, intervention must be done in different areas:
- Gross psychomotor skills (global movement capacity): teaching the patient what the correct posture to be able to writewith the aim of being able to correct your poor posture, for example, how you should sit, the distance between your head and the paper, position of the paper, how you should hold the pencil, among others.
- Fine psychomotor skills (more detailed movements, which require more control, generally movements with the fingers): this type of movements must be treated since they affect the dependence on the hand and fingers, with the aim of getting the patient to acquire precision and coordination when writing. Some examples of exercises to strengthen fine motor skills are cutting out paper in a certain shape and reviewing lines.
- Perception: it is important to work on perception since the difficulties that patients show in relation to temporal, spatial, visual-perceptual and attentional perceptioncan cause errors or difficulties in the fluency, inclination and orientation of writing.
- Visual-motor skills: the function of visual-motor skills is coordinate eye movement with body movement. If this function is affected, especially when it comes to the movement of the hands and fingers, it makes writing difficult for people and, therefore, work must be done to improve this coordination.
- Graph-motor skills: it is necessary to treat graph-motor skills to be able to correct basic writing movements. To do this, it is recommended to perform exercises that stimulate the basic movements of letters, such as writing a letter joining points already marked, reviewing letters or figures already written or drawn, following borders that involve loop movements, among others.
- Graph-writing: to deal with the graph-writing area, calligraphy exercises are usually used, in order to improve all the letters that make up the alphabet.
- Writer improvement: in this case, it is intended improve writing fluency and spelling mistakes. It is recommended to perform exercises such as copying letters, joining syllables to form a word, matching a word with its corresponding drawing (for example, matching the word “ball” with the drawing of a ball), among others.
- Relaxation: it is common for the patient to become fatigued between activities that involve a lot of effort, therefore, it is recommended relax the wrist, fingers, etc. For this, these can be useful.
Examples of dysgraphia
Example of acquired dysgraphia
A girl has a motorcycle accident in which she hits her head, causing brain trauma and affecting precisely the area of the brain that is responsible for writing. She goes into a coma for a few months and when she wakes up her family realizes…