William Mistakespeare

This week the Studying With Dyslexia Blog welcomes guest writer Owen Kowalski from Plymouth, Devon.

Owen is a short story writer and helps people to engage with literacy by thinking in a different way with his website William Mistakespeare and his blog, The Life Dyslexic.

Owen writes about how difficult it was to engage with literacy at school and how he avoided studying about Shakespeare because the language was simply too difficult to understand being dyslexic and then something strange happened...

And Then Something Strange Happened.

When I was asked to write a blog about studying with dyslexia the first thing that popped into my head was ‘How do you study with dyslexia? You just study with Dyslexia, which in a way is true. I knew other children found studying easy and things came quickly to them. I also knew that what took them an hour to do, took me two or more.  

However, as I have always had dyslexia, I've never experienced studying without it, so accepted the way things were and got on with it. The best I could do was to remain engaged with the subjects that I was then studying, then the uphill slog through homework wasn’t so hard. 

Being interested was half the battle won. For me it was always History that I found the most interesting, understanding the big picture of small events that led to the final outcome was, and still is, fascinating. On the other hand I avoided anything to do with Shakespeare, I had enough trouble with standard English let alone attempting to grasp 'ye olde English' written in prose.  

Then something strange happened.

I wanted to challenge myself so I undertook a creative writing course. Free from the rigors of school I found writing easier. This course gave me the opportunity to explore my own ideas and something I wanted to do was write a story around dyslexia.  Having already created William Mistake-speare for my social media site, he was the natural character to use.  

William Mistakespeare by Owen Kowalski

Mixing Shakespeare quotes with dyslexic issues in a story about an aspiring writer not only reflected my own problems but soon spawned a world of its own. Here’s the rub, Shakespeare now engages me so the studying I do for these stories is already half done.

By Owen Kowalski