Originally Posted by
IO540
Incidentally, how can you tell dyslexia rather than just somebody who cannot write (a serious Q)?
I do not know, but in practice there are often plenty of other signs to tell whether a person is intelligent and educated.
For example, Mad Jock's posts, despite their atrocious spelling and often highly colloquial register, still make him appear as a cultivated man on account of the reasoning ability and non-trivial knowledge shown in them.
Interestingly, from an armchair linguist's point of view[*] I have noticed that, even across languages, it seems to me that the incidence of poor spelling amongst educated users seems to be higher for those who speak "non-standard" varieties of the language.
To take the previous example, Scottish people seem to have more difficulty than English users of a similar cultural level, and I have noticed the same trend in Spanish, e.g., while proofreading theses from both Spaniards (including those for whom Spanish is not their primary language) and Latin Americans. Mind you, I'm not a native speaker of either tongue.
[*] I always wanted to be a humanities sort of person but was rubbish at it so ended up doing science.
