What Is Dyslexia? The Things I Wish I Had Known

By Stacey Masliansky

“What is dyslexia?”

This is a question that popped into my head frequently while I was pursuing my Master’s Degree in Literacy from 2006–2010.

I remember asking one of my professors this very question. The answer I received was that dyslexia was a medical diagnosis determined through an fMRI, or functional magnetic resonance imaging. Not knowing any better, I accepted that answer. For the first ten years of my career, that was essentially my understanding of dyslexia.

At the time, I was a high school English teacher. My instructional time was spent teaching literature and composition, with an emphasis on critical reading and analytical writing. I thought a lot about comprehension. I thought about writing. I thought about whether students were engaged with the literature we were reading. What I didn’t think enough about was whether some of my students could actually read the words on the page efficiently and accurately.

That gap in my understanding affected how I interpreted what I saw in my classroom. When students refused to read an assigned text, I often chalked it up to disengagement or a lack of motivation. If a student avoided reading aloud, didn’t complete the assigned chapters, or seemed uninterested in a book, I assumed the problem was that the student didn’t want to read.

When I think about some of those students now, I feel sad. I had opportunities to help them, and I didn’t recognize what I was seeing. At the same time, I have to remind myself of something Maya Angelou famously said: “When we know better, we do better.” At that point in my career, I didn’t know better. What I sometimes interpreted as laziness, avoidance, or disengagement may very well have been a student’s way of coping with years of struggling with something that had never been adequately explained or addressed.

The Student I Think About Still

There is one student in particular I still think about. Her father once asked me whether I thought his daughter might be dyslexic. Based on what I knew about dyslexia at the time, I didn’t think it was likely.

I had a very narrow picture of what dyslexia looked like. I thought of students who reversed letters, struggled to read simple words, or seemed unable to read at all. This student was in high school. She could read the texts assigned in class. She wasn’t flipping words on the page. She couldn’t possibly be dyslexic.

Or so I thought.

Looking back now, I can see the red flags that were right in front of me. Yes, she could read her class texts, but her reading was choppy. Her word recognition was inaccurate, and she frequently self-corrected after using her understanding of the sentence to figure out what a word probably was.

Her spelling told me something, too. When she took notes, her writing was filled with spelling errors, not just with difficult words, but with high-frequency and phonetically regular words. Her father had also described a family history of reading difficulties. And she performed much better when she was asked to listen and respond than when she was expected to independently read.

I had all of this information. I simply didn’t yet know how to put the pieces together.

That experience stayed with me, and eventually, my understanding of dyslexia began to change.

When the Curtain Was Pulled Back

Eventually, the curtain was pulled back for me. I learned what dyslexia actually was. I learned how common it was. I learned what dyslexia could look like in real students, not just in a textbook definition. And once I understood more, I couldn’t stop thinking about the students I had taught.

By this point, I was a licensed reading specialist working in a private tutoring practice. I remember thinking, If I could complete a master’s degree in literacy and come out of that program without a solid understanding of dyslexia, who was actually receiving this training?

So I started asking questions.

I talked to friends in education, including elementary teachers, special education teachers, reading specialists, and others who had spent years working with students. I expected that surely someone would say, “Of course. This is what we learned about dyslexia in our teacher preparation program.”

Instead, I discovered that my experience was not unusual. Many talented educators had simply never received extensive preparation in recognizing dyslexia or understanding how to provide effective instruction for students with dyslexia.

That realization changed the direction of my career. It also changed the way I looked at the students in front of me. I began to understand that if I wanted to help struggling readers, I first needed a much clearer understanding of what was actually making reading difficult for them.

So, What Is Dyslexia?

Today, the International Dyslexia Association (IDA) defines dyslexia as a specific learning disability characterized by difficulties in word reading and/or spelling that involve accuracy, speed, or both and vary depending on the orthography. These difficulties occur along a continuum of severity and persist even with instruction that is effective for the individual’s peers. (IDA 2025)

There is a lot packed into that definition, but perhaps the most important place to begin is with the phrase word reading and spelling.

That distinction matters because dyslexia is not simply a problem with “reading comprehension.” It is not a synonym for “doesn’t like to read.” It is not laziness, and it is not a lack of intelligence. It also does not require a child to reverse letters or be completely unable to read.

Dyslexia can look very different from one individual to another. Some students may have significant difficulty accurately decoding words. Others may eventually become accurate readers but remain painfully slow. Some struggle significantly with spelling even when their reading appears stronger. Others experience difficulty with both.

The 2025 IDA definition recognizes this variability by describing dyslexia as “occurring along a continuum of severity and by identifying difficulties with accuracy, speed, or both” (IDA 2025).

This is a very different picture from the one I carried with me for the first decade of my career. Back then, I was looking for a clear and obvious sign that a student was dyslexic. I didn’t understand that a student could be intelligent, capable, and seemingly successful in school while still experiencing significant difficulty with the words on the page.

Understanding that difference matters because when we misunderstand what dyslexia is, we inevitably misunderstand what students with dyslexia need from us.

And for me, that is where this conversation needs to begin.
Each week, during Dyslexia Awareness Month, we will dig in a little bit deeper to fully explore “What Is Dyslexia?”