A reader asked:
Having aspergers and and ADD has made communicating with people very difficult, especially in relationships. I’ve found that writing helps but reading is hard because I get lost in blocks of words and unable to focus. Are there things that can be done to help with communication and reading replies etc?
Sometimes it helps to paste the text into a document and then use either white space or color coding to help you keep track.
Here’s how I do color coding:
- I paste the text I want to read into Word
- I turn all the text blue
- As I read the text, I turn it black again
- That enables me to keep track of which parts I have and haven’t read
Formatting the text can also help. This is how I do it with emails:
- I hit the reply button so that I can edit the text
- Then I put in paragraph breaks where I think there are conceptual breaks
- This means I can move around on the page more easily when I want to re-read a particular part