We all learn the basic writing skills in grade school and that alone is could be difficult for some. Then as you get older, the teaching curriculum adds more in-depth techniques to writing which also could be difficult. For those that were struggling before adding more information, people tend to feel overwhelmed with all the new information. Writing is a challenge for myself and my daughter because we both have ADHD. ADHD comes with lots of focus and organizational challenges such as writing. This is a task that people need to be able to formulate their thoughts and get them out onto your medium. With ADHD our brains are going faster than our bodies can get the information out. You don’t need a learning difficulty to struggle with writing. People have their strong suits and writing may not be that for them.
In the article, Writing is not natural, by Dylan B Dryer he talks about how as humans we turn writing into speeches. By using tones or voices to help the writer to give it more depth for our audiences. Humans have been communicating in writing for over two hundred thousand years. At the beginning of time writing were inscriptions, symbols, codes, and arrays. Before the alphabet was created for words, writing was done with symbols. There are so many different layers to writing, kinda like an onion, you just need to keep going and peeling the layers. It is not easy to get what you think about out onto paper and once you do it may not sound as good as it did in your head.
Writing is hard for everyone, for different reasons. For people who are not primarily English-speaking, it is a little more frustrating because they have to convert their native language over to English. Writing could also be difficult with individuals with learning disabilities. How a person was taught could also be a reason. A personal example I have is if you have a teacher as I did for two years that was supposed to teach you but did not, that end up putting you behind in the learning process then your piers. How individuals were raised could be another reason, an example would be If a child takes on adult stresses it could affect their ability to focus on learning. Remember that writing is hard for everyone and try not to judge your writing so harshly. “Writers can also benefit from the realization that they needn’t blame themselves for the shortcomings of the system they’ve inherited(Dryer)”. Dryer is just trying to tell everyone that the world is constantly growing and advancing and you may learn one way but a couple of years down the road, what you have learned is not the “right” way of writing anymore. So take it easy on yourself.
