In Search of Words
Footnote Visual Thinking Techniques
Self published 2007
I first met Oliver West at the Greenbelt Festival. My wife came across him giving a talk on dyslexia as we were trying to come to terms with the diagnosis of my eldest child as dyslexic and trying to work out what this meant.
So keen for any help we grabbed a copy of his book. On first reading I thought - what? On the second reading I thought mmmm!! On the third reading I thought, ‘This is seriously good stuff’. So what is it that makes this book so good?
Three things
1. Oliver West is dyslexic and as such has felt the frustration that this condition/outlook brings in a rigid education system. (I’m beginning to think industrialised rather than rigid.)
2. The book is just beautifully set out for a dyslexic (or as West puts it, visual thinker).
3. The method that he proposes has all the simplicity of a great idea – and it works.
It is not a book talking to adults about dyslexia. It is a book talking to dyslexics about being dyslexic. Its dedication is a lovely expression of this. ‘This book is dedicated to all those children who can’t sit still in class.’ Count me in. Count my son in. I lost count of the number of detentions that I received for ‘messing about’ ‘being disruptive’and the time that my son was described as ‘being helpful, sometimes too helpful’. To quote the book, ‘Dyslexic children in a classroom will sometimes subconsciously process information visually and act upon it without realising they have done so, spontaneously leaping out of their chairs to run across the classroom and give someone a ruler because they have noticed he doesn’t have one.’
Structure
How many chapters in the book? Well good question. The answer is none. There are only two sections. It took me a couple of reads to grasp this and I am not sure if it was intentional or organic, but it makes the book so easy to read. You just meander through it.
The book itself is a model of its own theory. West’s book is set out two columns to a page. This is so easy to read compared to a normal full page, one column of text. It is spaciously laid out, accompanied by simple sketches and diagrams and a good dose of humour (how many stand ups are dyslexic I wonder – I digress).
Perceptively the two halves of the book reflect two ways of viewing the world. The first half deals with dyslexics and their characteristics. Its typeface is standard for our culture. The second half is a presentation of West’s‘footnotes’ technique. Its font is grey instead of black (easier on the dyslexic eye) with larger font size and increased spacing.
The Basic Premise
When I met Oliver West he said that he had devised footnotes because mind mapping hadn’t quite worked for him. The basic premise of footnotes is that you can divide an A4 piece of paper into 8 or 16 parts by simply folding and re folding. In each of the squares that you create you can place an image that reflects a thought or an idea and when you have as many as you need you can cut up these squares and re-arrange into the sequence that you need to communicate our ideas to the non dyslexic world. It is simple, flexible and portable. And you don’t even have to be great at drawing – trust me, I’m not.
The Real Gem
But for me the real gem of the book came in 3 simple paragraphs with the heading ....and Hyper-focus. According to West, once all distractions have been shut out, a dyslexic has the ability to be extremely highly focussed on something or someone.’ I have lost count of the times that I have been called ‘obsessive’ or told to ‘calm down’ and be more ‘balanced’, MORE IMPORTANTLY, if this can be grasped as a learning style what couldn’t dyslexics achieve? It echoes Ronald Davis’s point about dyslexia being ‘The Gift of Mastery’ (review coming soon).
Finally, at the back of the book there is a nice reflection from his mum. Dyslexia doesn’t happen in isolation, it affects families and community dynamics and it is perhaps worth pondering that the family could be a life saver for a dyslexic. At school if you don’t fit the system you’re a problem, at home you can be given space to be who you are – unless you’ve got pushy parents – but that’s a different issue.
My only real gripe is that the book lacks an index – always a help.
Dyslexia in Adults
Education
and Employment
Gavin Reid and Jane
Kirk
John Wiley & Sons, 2001
I have come across
only two books on dyslexia prior to my diagnosis, One, was Oliver West’s ‘Footnotes’ ad the
second was Tom Davis’, ‘The Gift of Dyslexia’.
Both are to be reviewed on this blog and both were read as general interest.
This book was my first purchase after diagnosis and so my
interest was very different. I needed
both information and a reference point.
The edition that I picked up via Amazon was a second hand
2001 copyright and so has been in print for 11 years. A lot appears to have happened in this time,
not least a growing awareness that dyslexia may have some unique and valuable
positives for which the negatives may be the price. This book hints at that but cautiously.
In short this book is a classic example of doing what it
says on the tin.
Structure
The book is divided into 9 chapters and is dyslexic friendly
in that it breaks down chapters into bite size chunks which is a recommendation
method of study and so becomes an example of the kind study skills that the it
recommends in chapter 5.
Chapters 1 and 2 give a good general introduction into the
nuts and bolts of dyslexia, the tricky issue of defining it and how it is
tested for. Having been tested before I
purchased this book it has proved useful to be able to pick it up and compare
its comments to the tests I took.
Chapter 3 is a little disappointing because of its language
of the need to accommodate and support people with dyslexia. It (unintentionally?) gives the impression
that that support is a concession. I
work with people who have a terminal diagnosis and I am convinced that more
often than not I learn more from them than they learn from me. It is often those on the margins who bring
the greatest gifts to mainstream life.
Chapters 6 and 7 make a very interesting juxtaposition. Chapter 6 deals with the negative aspects of
dyslexia in terms of mental and emotional health and chapter 7 begins to open
up the possibility of a positive aspect to being dyslexic. I am not aware of knowing many adult
dyslexics yet, but some of the material in chapter 6 certainly echoed my own
frustration in life at sometimes feeling ‘trapped in my head in’ when trying to
get ideas onto paper and wondering why it just wouldn’t come out as I wanted it
to. Even more frustrating has been the
experience of thinking that I had written something in an exam only to discover
later that I hadn’t
Chapter 8 is for me the most encouraging. It contains the words of people with dyslexia
telling their stories in their own words and it was definitely helpful to find
someone who had been diagnosed at almost the identical age to me.
Chapter 9 details resources available but unless there is a much
updated version of this book these are largely doomed to irrelevance. Life changes all the time.
All in all, definitely worth having on the bookshelf
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