Thoughts About Spelling
Beginning to Spell Together
As we undertake this experience together let’s agree that I am (or the person you are setting out to spell with is) intelligent and capable, in terms of intellectual ability, of having a normal conversation with you.
This is not obvious, for people seem to be hard-wired or deeply conditioned to judge intelligence by behavior. If I am chewing on something or waving my arms or calling out an irrelevant word when we sit down together, you may be sorely tempted to to judge my intelligence as poor. Resist the temptation, I implore you. People with autism know so much about temptation, and we empathize with you!
On the other hand I probably cannot keep up my end of the conversation without your help.
This brings up the question of the nature of your assistance. Think of it as putting the conversation within my reach, as you might push an elevator button for someone too short to reach it. Mostly you will help me overcome really severe motor-planning and motor coordination issues, but you are not a glorified keyboard-holder. There will be something about your human spirit, reaching out to connect with my human spirit, that is essential too.
There is no such thing as helping wrong, but we may spell a message that doesn’t really represent my thoughts and you need to check with me after every message.
Like any educational endeavor (maybe like any human endeavor), spelling together requires good faith to make it work. As we spell together, call out each letter and then each word and when a sentence is finished, read the sentence back and ask, “Is that right?” or “Is that what you mean to say?” or, leaving room for the human messiness involved, “How right is that?” Please don’t skip the step of reading back the whole sentence, as hearing it in a human voice may be crucial for me to complete my understanding of what I have just spelled.
Make it easy for me to repudiate something we’ve typed, and don’t be discouraged.
There are many reasons to repudiate a message, including that I meant it at the time but, after further thought or upon hearing it aloud, I’ve changed my mind. We still were together, working on communicating, and nothing can take that away from us. Just shrug off the time we spent and try again. Thank you.
The presence of your thoughts in my message is a risk we must be aware of.
Rarely, but sometimes, it can happen that helping me spell something that you want to say, or secretly want to say, or unconsciously want to say, may bring something of yours into the world as we use this strange way to communicate. We need not judge this harshly, but we need to acknowledge it. What we’re doing is helping each other get thoughts out, and and we may have quietly switched from helping me to helping you. We should welcome your communication, but we do need to sort out who is saying what to whom.
If our communication doesn’t work yet, it will.
Thoughts About Questions
Asking questions and helping me answer them is going to be the form of our first communications and the heart of our communication even when we two are fluent. This may seem more stilted or ritualized than what you were expecting, but it has worked for me and spelling answers has helped me decrease the tyranny of my autism. There is something about the act of answering a question that confirms the knowledge in my mind and renders it retrievable and usable for thinking and answering new questions.
There are many kinds of questions, and for our purposes we will categorize them in several ways. For example:
According to how much and what kind of memory is needed for answering the question:
No memory: Q.: What’s that sound? A.: A church bell.
General knowledge: Q.:Where it it coming from? A.: The church on Main Street.
Short-term memory: What did I just say?
Long-term memory: When we said goodbye last time, what did I say we would discuss today?
Shared reference: Ask a question in a language or on a topic we have both studied but not studied together.
Another way to categorize questions is according to how close they are to my physical being. I think spellers with autism vary in their relationship to this issue, but I find it much easier to answer a distant question like “Where is the Seine?” than to answer a close question like “What kind of ice cream do you want?” Ask me about ice cream and I am likely to answer with something that has worked for me before, rather than trying out different flavor fantasies until I know what I’m in the mood for.
Elizabeth Vosseler wisely divides questions according to how much new information the speller has to provide: questions with a known, single answer, questions to which there are several possible answers and questions to which there is an infinite range of answers. She calls these closed, semi-open and open questions, and her teams move from “closed” questions to “open” ones as they get good at each step. I have made much use of this idea in designing our lessons.
The point of all these categorizations is to make us aware of the load each communication request is asking us to carry. As you get more experience as a Communication Partner you will be able to help spellers more and more by understanding how to carry as much of our load as possible — without absolving us of having to come up with our content on our own.
So don’t be disappointed, this way of talking leads to fluent communication soon enough, but do get used to the idea that you will be asking many, many questions, some of which feel odd, because you think we both already know the answers. Try to realize that there is a difference between us each knowing the answer and us both knowing the answer. Again, I am emphasizing the relationship we are building.
A Thought about working on Different Days
If we are progressing on different days, let’s start each day with some practice of the previous day’s steps. After all, what we are really doing is getting used to each other so we can do physical work together, and we must become each other’s musical instrument.
Beyond the Exercises
Be prepared for a long answer. A lot of us, myself included, like to type long and beautiful answers. If you are in a hurry, come back when you aren’t.
Spelling is tiring. It will tax my motor skills, my eye-tracking and visual processing skills and your memory, spelling-bee skills and patience. Note that I did not say it will tax our intelligence. In fact, the best way to emerge refreshed and energized, instead of tired, is to keep the discussion on a high level.
Some topics may upset me. That does not mean we should avoid them, but if I jump up and run away, extra patience and kindness from you will help get me back into a spelling frame of mind.
Autism, in my experience, can be a ferocious condition to live with. Always respect the seriousness of what we’re going up against, and be proud of the contact we achieve and the knowledge we make together. None of what we succeed in may be taken for granted.
Regressions are a fact of life, at least for me. If one day I suddenly can’t spell, go back to the beginning and we’ll start over. Our progress will be much faster the second time.
Avoid asking questions of fact to which I know the answer and you don’t, such as asking me how many siblings I have, or what I ate for breakfast. Confronted by your ignorance, I may ask myself what answer you want or expect, rather than consulting my own sense of self. More about message-passing (as this problem is called) on the Pitfalls page.
Please don’t try to speed up the process. If I start a word get me to finish it, if I start a sentence get me to finish it, and let’s not use abbreviations. Call out words aloud and read sentences aloud and always ask me to confirm whether a sentence is one I want to own as mine. Feel free to check things using torn pieces of paper.
Strange episodes of intellectual mental contact between us may occur. Some people have reported knowing my whole answer before I’ve finished the third word. Relax and let it happen, but we must complete the whole sentence, including you reading it aloud.
Helping Me When I’m Tired
Spelling is tiring: the constant hand-eye coordination and the effort to think sequentially against the inclinations of my autism are all ongoing challenges. To counter this, Communication Partners may be tempted to help me by moving the board slightly to help me finish a word when it is obvious what it is, as in the video in Lesson Two. With that kind of help, I work very hard on the first few letters and can rest a little while finishing the word. This was hugely helpful for my first years of spelling, but I no longer need it and would appreciate it if you generally hold the board still. It is necessary to put our task within my physical ability, but it is not necessary or even useful to make it easy for me.
Your Interests Matter
Throughout this site I emphasize the relationship we are building by spelling together. This is quite different from the idea you might get that you are there to serve me in my quest to express myself. I have been “served” in that way, of course, in specific situations like taking an exam when the last thing I or anybody else wants is input from my Communication Partner, but it is an arid experience, useful, in my opinion, in only a few artificial situations and not what I hope you and I will be doing.
One consequence of this attitude is that your interests really matter. During my “mute period,” the 12 years before I learned to spell, my parents used to say “Danny is really good at getting with the program, once he figures out what the program is.” I think that character trait served my extreme dependence very well. And I found things to enjoy throughout the day depending on what my caregivers decided we were doing. I discovered early that there is no point in trying to get my favorite pasta dish in my favorite candy store: you have to adjust your quest to your circumstances. Fast-forward 12 years and the same principle applies to spelling with different Communication Partners. Why should I try to discuss something with you that doesn’t interest you? Let’s talk about things that excite you so I can enjoy seeing the world through your eyes.