SPED NEWS: Does Dyslexia Enhance Creativity?

Lloyd Everitt, known for his appearances in the long-running show Dr. Who and being the youngest actor to ever play Othello at Shakespeare's Globe Theatre, suffers from dyslexia. Some might argue that acting and dyslexia don't go hand in hand. But for Lloyd Everitt, this did not hold him back from being one of the UK's brightest young TV stars.

Reading and memorizing lines for a part is very taxing. One can only imagine how hard it is for a person suffering from dyslexia. The words get jumbled up and trying to decipher and correct those words would take and consume a lot of time.

According to an article in WalesOnline, in order to cope up with his condition, Lloyd Everitt came up with a rather unorthodox manner in memorizing his lines. Much like how the Egyptians used symbols, Lloyd Everitt draws and assigns symbols to words to make them simpler with regards to his condition.

What's more, he wasn't diagnosed with dyslexia until after he was an adult. He said that he had always had trouble with spelling but he loved writing stories. He later found the value and ingenuity of the method he had devised when he auditioned for the role of Othello. Landing the role and being the youngest ever to play the part, he also found himself restructuring the entire script with his rather unorthodox script memorizing methods.

Lloyd Everitt divulged that his method is almost like another language that only he knows. He stated that every word in his said dictionary of symbols is given the exact same symbol every time.

Taking an article from The Yale Center for Dyslexia and Creativity into perspective, it is said that people with dyslexia tend to be more creative despite their difficulty in reading and identifying words. They also tend to be the more emphatic bunch of the population. Being dyslexic, these people tend to go out and improvise in order to compensate for their condition which hones their improvisation and innovative skills.

With this, it's no wonder Lloyd Everitt climbed up the ladder and became one of the youngest talented stars of the UK. Being dyslexic paved the way for him to discover ways to make up for what seemed to be a disadvantage to some people. He showed that even a disability can become a strength.