Even though successful people such as Leonardo Da Vinci, Albert Einstein and Winston Churchill had dyslexia, many people with it still think they are on their own.
Private dyslexia specialist Christina Alexander said dyslexia was often thought of as an embarrassing and awful secret.
Many people were talented but could not do everyday things because of dyslexia. They needed to be "empowered", she said.
Ms Alexander will conduct two Dyslexia Summer Schools to increase understanding and knowledge about dyslexia.
She said dyslectics' needs were often neglected and many could not break into a literate society.
Retention of knowledge was important for people in any field, especially spelling and times table for children, she said.
"If you don't automatically recall [the answer to] 6x8, then it takes your mind off the problem by trying to count it all on your fingers, thumbs and toes," Ms Alexander said.
Dropping syllables, reversing or interchanging letters were part of poor sequencing, she said.
"Sequencing is such an important thing really... Perhaps [a dyslectic] can tell you an imaginative and exciting story orally, but when they go to put it on paper, they find it difficult," she said.
Ms Alexander said dyslectics also had trouble with printing and running writing.
She said the running writing was often a mess with confusing loops and crossbars and the printing was done slowly, untidily, with varying sized letters spaced unusually.
"A circle with a stick can become a 'b', 'd', 'p', or 'q', and it gets very hard when you get to polysyllabic words," she said.
Backtracking slowed dyslectics down so they lost the momentum of reading or writing, she said.
Ms Alexander teaches in an innovative way, which relies on sight, hearing, feeling and speaking, rather than just reading or writing one word at a time.
The training sessions are for people with medical, parental, educational and societal interests.
The four-day Summer Schools will start on January 17 and 21. For more details, phone 3378 3915.
Many methods for helping people with dyslexia have failed because the treatments were not devised at grass roots level with the "battlers" themselves, a dyslexia consultant has said.
"The most disastrous [treatment methods] are the ones that are 'done-down', " Christina Alexander says in her new book, A Dyslexia Consultant's Mailbag: 100 Letters Answered.
"People say dyslectics will never be able to do anything, so don't worry about them.
"The vast underestimation of dyslectics, who are often gifted, appals me.
"Schools for retarded people always bulged with intelligent dyslectics with high untapped potential, condemned to sweeping factory floors in car factories when they are often suited to designing the next model...for they are innovative and problem solving and great critical thinkers.
"...If only somebody will teach them the simple skill of manipulating words and numbers on paper."
Ms Alexander said too many people trying to help dyslectics with "boiled-down" books such as Treasure Island, where simple words replaced hard ones so that the book was at an eight-year-old's reading level.
"This ruins the richness of the language and keeps dyslectics 'down there' because they are never challenged, never taught our lovely, rich language and they tend to write simplistically themselves," she said.
Many people thought diagnosing people as dyslectic was a poor excuse for lazy, backward and easily distracted children with scrambled ideas, Ms Alexander said.
She said she heard a "conditioned teacher" use the following definition for people with dyslexia - "Slow learners under a fancy name. Parents can't take having a thick kid. I know their game."
A letter published in Ms Alexander's book was from a grandmother who said her grandson Mark had became upset and humiliated when he was forced to read alound in his Year 2 class.
"His teacher at the time was young and inexperienced and probably didn't know how to cope," the grandmother said.
Ms Alexander said that was the problem with some teachers.
"With all the goodwill in the world the teachers are stuck in the one narrow groove," she said.
Ms Alexander said her new book enabled dyslectics to cope with reading, writing and arithmetic away from "inadequate" teaching at school.
She said the book filled the gap between indecipherable psychology and the "sad autobiographies of famous dyslectics".
The book is available through mail order by telephoning 3378 3915.
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