Dysgraphia and Dysorthography: What the Notebook Reveals — and What We Need to Observe Beyond It

Two notebooks arrive on the teacher's desk at the end of the morning of class:

No first notebook, the words are spelled correctly according to the spelling standard, but the layout of the letters is irregular, with overlapping lines and lines that are difficult to decode. The child took an excessive amount of time to write a few lines, complained of pain in his hand and left part of the proposal incomplete.

No second notebook, the letter is drawn with clarity, impeccable alignment and uniform aesthetic spacing. However, the text presents omissions of phonemes, changes of letters and words that are agglutinated or segmented in an unsystematic way.

Given these two productions, the classic generic recommendation that “the student needs to improve their writing” is completely insufficient. Although both students need pedagogical support, they mobilize different cognitive and motor gears — and do not need the same type of intervention.

The notebook page offers valuable clues. However, to decipher them responsibly, we need to understand the path and effort that produced that record.

Writing involves different types of learning

The act of writing requires from the child a refined orchestration between neurobiology, cognition and language: recovering the shape of the letters from memory, coordinating the motor planning of the hand, selecting the conventional spelling of each word, structuring sentences syntactically and chaining thoughts to communicate an idea to a reader. [1].

In psychopedagogical practice, we divide this complexity into three axes of observation:

These dimensions interact continuously. When mechanical and transcriptional processes (such as holding a pencil or remembering basic spelling) still consume almost all of the child's mental energy, there is little working memory capacity left to plan the narrative or review the coherence of the text [1]. For this reason, short or simplified writing does not always reflect poor vocabulary; it often just reflects exhaustion in the physical act of transcribing.

What does dysgraphia mean?

The word dysgraphia does not have a single consensual definition in the international scientific literature. In certain currents of neuropediatrics and occupational therapy, the focus lies primarily on motor execution — that is, on the inconsistent formation of strokes, the excessive pressure on the paper and the slowness of manual writing. In other aspects, the term is used broadly to describe more general disorders of written expression [2, 3].

Because there is this conceptual variation, any pedagogical opinion or clinical report that mentions the word dysgraphia needs to specify exactly which skills were assessed and which specific obstacles were identified. [2].

In this article, we adopt the use of dysgraphia focused on persistent difficulties with handwriting, without reducing it to a purely mechanical handwriting problem. The excessive effort to hold the pencil, the muscle pain in the hand or forearm and the slowness that prevents the student from keeping up with the class in taking notes on the blackboard are noteworthy.

However, judging only the final aesthetic beauty of the notebook is misleading: a perfectly designed letter could have been constructed at the cost of enormous suffering, pause between each character and extreme slowness. Evaluate the fluency and functionality is as important as checking readability [4]. The educational objective is not to impose standardized and artistic handwriting, but to ensure functional, comfortable and communicative writing.

And what is dysorthography?

A dysorthography designates persistent difficulties in learning, fixing and applying the spelling rules of the language. This condition may involve limitations in phonological processing (perception of the sound structure of words), in the consolidation of visual memory of orthographic patterns and in the morphological application of words.

It is entirely possible to find a child with severe dysorthography whose handwriting is graceful and impeccable. Likewise, motor, spelling and reading difficulties can coexist in the same clinical picture. However, the presence of one does not automatically authorize the existence of the other [3].

To deepen this distinction with the area of reading, it is worth revisiting the guidelines we shared about What to watch out for in dyslexia and how to help the child, understanding literacy as a multifaceted process.

The Portuguese language gives us illuminating examples about the nature of the error:

• Write “hunting” instead of “home” preserves the correct sound of the word, demonstrating that the phonological pathway was activated, but the recovery of the conventional orthographic rule or memory failed.
• Omit letters (as in “duck” written as “pt”) indicates a weakness in auditory segmentation and phoneme-grapheme correspondence.
• Already write “suddenly” in a word, it is a difficulty in word segmentation (hyposegmentation).

These errors are precious teaching clues. Simply counting how many red errors there are on a sheet is much less informative than understand the internal logic that led the student to that spelling.

When is error part of natural learning?

Learning to write is not an act of passive memorization; It is an active process in which the child constantly formulates, tests and reformulates hypotheses about the writing system. Spelling deviations are part of this trajectory and need to be interpreted in light of what has already been explicitly taught to the class.

Pioneering Brazilian research by Profa. Dr. Simone Capellini and collaborators highlight the evolutionary nature of orthographic appropriation and the need for systematic and reflective teaching [5]. This perspective details why we shouldn't get ahead of ourselves: as we demonstrated in our article on when changing letters is part of learning and when it deserves attention, age, time of exposure to the rule and response to pedagogical stimuli are determining factors.

Before considering any possible disorder, educators and families should ask themselves:

• Was the spelling convention or letter movement taught explicitly and consistently?
• Does the difficulty manifest itself in all contexts (notebook, tests, spontaneous notes)?
• How does the student react when given a model and has the opportunity to practice with guidance?
• What is the real impact of this difficulty on the child’s autonomy and well-being?

The assessment must always take into account sociolinguistic and cultural factors. Regional linguistic variants or educational gaps should never be labeled as pathologies [6].

What to look for besides the finished page?

Recent studies on the diagnosis of writing difficulties highlight the plurality of methodologies and the lack of a single test that serves as an absolute "gold standard". [4]. A reliable diagnosis can never rest on a single isolated task or on the photo of a notebook page sent by cell phone.

This ethical rigor reflects what we emphasize in our article Diagnosis is Not a Guess: The Importance of a Careful Assessment.

In psychopedagogical care and in the classroom routine, the attentive eye must focus on the act of writing:

• Copy of the blackboard: Can the child transcribe from the vertical to the horizontal plane without losing the line and without having to look at the board letter by letter?
• Dictation: How does it convert auditory information into graphic symbols without the support of printed text?
• Spontaneous writing: What happens when she needs to create her own narrative from her imagination?

We often come across students who orally report a brilliant narrative, rich in details and expressive vocabulary, but who record only a superficial line in their notebook. This gap between what the child knows and what they can record on paper is one of the biggest signs of motor or spelling overload. [6].

The intervention needs to match the real difficulty

Intervening in writing requires method and focus. In case of difficulties in handwriting (dysgraphia), the evidence indicates that the work must involve the practice of writing itself in functional contexts. A renowned systematic review published in Canadian Journal of Occupational Therapy demonstrated that interventions that use only preparatory motor exercises (such as mazes or pincers) without direct practice of writing do not generate significant improvements in handwriting fluency [7]. It is necessary to practice the lyrics in real words and situations with a communicative purpose.

For the spelling (disorthography), the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association (ASHA) advocates balanced integration between phonological, orthographic and morphological knowledge [6]. The Brazilian spelling intervention study conducted with elementary school students confirmed significant gains when the teaching of linguistic regularities is worked in a structured and reflective way, allowing the student to understand the principle of the rule instead of just memorizing it mechanically [5].

How to transform correction into teaching?

Correcting all the errors in a text simultaneously overloads the student and masks the next pedagogical objective. An efficient approach works towards gradual goals:

• If the goal of the week is the rule of “m” before “p” and “b”, select words like field and drum, analyze the sounds and make sure the child understands this mechanism before using accentuation or advanced punctuation.
• If the objective of the activity is to structure a narrative, focus first on the beginning, middle and end of the story; After your ideas are clear, do a second reading focused on spelling check.

The evidence-based practice guide from Institute of Education Sciences (WWC) highlights that teaching writing requires instructing the student to plan, write and revise, connecting these steps to the construction of basic motor fluency [1].

Provide accessibility while learning advances

The school needs to ensure that difficulty in writing is not an insurmountable block to access to general knowledge. In a History or Science assessment, for example, what is at stake is mastery of the subject's concepts: allowing the student to respond orally or use computer typing is a legitimate act of pedagogical justice.

Adaptations such as extended time for exams, synthesis of content to avoid exhaustive copies and use of technological resources are essential reception measures, as we discussed in depth in our article on Inclusive Pedagogical Practices in Basic Education [2].

A computer or tablet keyboard can speed up registration for students with severe motor dysgraphia, but it does not replace teaching: spelling and textual cohesion continue to require teaching mediation and monitoring.

At home, parents can revive the emotional meaning of writing: invite the child to write a message for their grandparents, a shopping list for the market or the caption for a family photo. Asking at what point in the task she feels most tired and sharing these observations with the school strengthens the bond of trust between everyone.

Who participates in the interdisciplinary assessment?

Investigating writing difficulties requires a team approach [2, 6]:

• Psychopedagogy: evaluates the subject's relationship with learning, cognitive styles and response to didactic mediations;
• Speech therapy: deepens the analysis of oral language, auditory processing and phonological awareness;
• Occupational Therapy: examines fine motor coordination, grip on a writing instrument, postural tone and sensorimotor adaptations;
• Neuropediatrics and Psychology: complement the differential diagnosis when related neurodevelopmental disorders are suspected.

Writing under construction needs direction

When faced with a scribbled page, with letters that are difficult to read or persistent exchanges, our first impulse should never be empty criticism. We need to ask ourselves calmly: What did this student try to tell us? Which stage of this journey is generating overload?

Evolution does not always translate into a perfect text. Progress appears in the reduction of fatigue when writing, in the handwriting that becomes understandable to a colleague, in the confident application of a newly learned rule or in the renewed courage to record a story that was previously trapped in the imagination due to the shame of the error.

This ethical and loving commitment reflects our conviction about why difficulty in literacy does not define a child's potential. When we offer effective methods, support and patience, we guarantee that each student preserves their authorship and discovers in writing a bridge of freedom and expression for life.