Personal Experiences

What started as an experiment aimed at trying to improve my own writing experience has brought about a significant change in how I write. All sizeable pieces of work I now produce begin with cell-writing. Indeed, I now use cell-writing, or a form or it, for virtually everything I write – certainly things that are important and which need careful construction.

Even for smaller piece of text, I sometimes adopt an approach similar to cell-writing. In a text editor, I often write individual sentences on separate lines. When I am happy that everything is in the right order, I then join things up to give the conventional appearance. In fact, I now write most things on separate lines as a matter of course as if they are separate cells. When I write the odd note in a text editor for pasting into my cell-writing later, I write these in sentences on separate lines.

The way I go about writing has also changed. I take more of a bricolage approach. That is, I tend to write smaller units of work and piece these together rather than try to write one long piece as a single entity. Breaking things up in this way makes the task of writing much easier. This may be how many people write – either because this is how they were taught or because they naturally gravitate to that approach. However, I have had to find this approach largely for myself by reflecting upon what I have written and how I have gone about writing it. Writing will never be a simple task for me but I can now find more pleasure in doing it knowing that I can surmount the it poses.

Having used cell-writing for some years, I now find my writing style to be quite different. In the past, my sentences tended to be longer and more complex. The effect of using cell-writing has been to make me write in a more concise way. That is not to say that the odd long sentence does not appear from time to time. However, I can now spot them before they become a problem because of the amount of space they occupy within a cell. Here I am being guided in my writing by spatial cues; not just the words. Now when I produce long sentences it is because they are necessary not because my writing is getting out of control.

In addition to what I have said above, there appear to be unexpected benefits from using cell-writing. One of the things I have noticed in the written work of others with dyslexia is their tendency to write long, convoluted sentences. These tend to meander and often go off at a tangent. Sometimes they wander through a number of loosely related points before simply petering out. One is sometimes left wondering what the sentence was really about. Sometimes one can see – by reading behind the words rather than the words themselves – something of what was in the writer's mind; something that they did not get written. My sentences were often like that before I began cell-writing.

One of the other unexpected benefits of cell-writing is that one can see more easily just how long a sentence is becoming. If it is getting too long, it is likely that it is also getting convoluted and losing meaning. Thus, cell-writing can be of particular help to those who, for one reason or another, are prone to writing more than is necessary to make a point. If one sees that a sentence is taking up too much space on the screen, one can reasonably assume that it is getting too long for its own good. Although one can see the size of one's sentences when using a word processor, I find that the indications that a sentence is getting too long are not as strong. If, for example, the sentences one writes all begin in the same column, one has a fixed reference point when it comes to comparing sentence length. In a word processor, a sentence can begin anywhere across the screen: there is no such reference point.

Another benefit of cell-writing is the ease with which one can experiment with sentence order. Sentence order – and therefore with the way in which something is expressed – can be changed simply by dragging and dropping cells. By reading sentences in different orders, one can determine which order works best. This is not easy, even when it is possible, with ordinary linear writing methods. My sentences do not necessarily come out in an order that best suits the point I want to convey to the reader. Finding the best order sometimes requires a degree of experimentation.