I’m a Voracious Reader
Am I Hyperlexic?
“The flowers are beautiful,” I read aloud.
“Wait,” my mom said. “What was that last word?”
“Beautiful,” I repeated.
“How on earth did you know that?”
I shrugged. I had no idea. The letter combination on the page had just looked right to me.
I was four years old.
I was seven when I read my first novel, Anne of Green Gables. I adored the story of a red-haired girl who loved to read, and I went on to devour all the other books in the series.
Throughout elementary and high school, I always always got 100% on every single spelling test without studying. One of my English teachers once asked the class to create a spelling mnemonic for a word “you have trouble spelling.” I literally could not think of a single word that I had trouble spelling.
I can even spell words like supercalifragilisticexpialidocious and antidisestablishmentarianism without resorting to spellcheckers or Google.
After I have seen a word written down, I can recall a “picture” in my mind’s eye of the letters in order as if it were written down in my head. With shorter words (up to 5 or 6 letters), I can see the whole word at once, while longer words look like a camera is panning over the…
