How ChatGPT Became My Writing Buddy With Dyslexia

I’ve always had a ton of ideas I wanted to share through writing, but my dyslexia has made that incredibly frustrating. Nothing kills your momentum faster than staring at a word for five minutes wondering why it looks wrong, or reading your own sentence three times and still not being sure if it makes sense.

For years, I’d start writing blog posts only to abandon them halfway through. The mental exhaustion of constantly second-guessing every word choice and sentence structure just wasn’t worth it. Spell checkers helped with the obvious stuff, but they couldn’t fix the weird sentence structures my brain sometimes creates.

Then I started messing around with ChatGPT, and honestly, it’s been a game-changer for me.

Here’s my not-so-sophisticated process: I’ll dump a bunch of half-formed thoughts into ChatGPT - sometimes just bullet points or sentences that probably make little sense to anyone but me. Then I ask it to organize those thoughts into a coherent draft. It’s like having a writing partner who can read my mind but doesn’t judge my spelling.

The key part (and what I was afraid of at first) is that I still sound like me. I’ll take what ChatGPT gives me and rewrite chunks, add personal details, or change parts that don’t quite capture what I meant. Sometimes I’ll go back and forth with it several times on a single paragraph until it actually says what I want it to say.

I’ve also started using it as my editor. I’ll write something myself, then paste it in with a note saying “Can you fix any grammar or spelling issues but keep my voice?” Nine times out of ten, it catches stuff I completely missed - like when I use the wrong version of “their/there/they’re” even though I KNOW the difference (dyslexia is fun that way).

The biggest change isn’t actually in my writing itself - it’s in my confidence. Before, I’d hesitate to share anything I wrote because I was embarrassed about potential errors I couldn’t see. Now I can focus on the ideas I want to share instead of getting stuck on whether I’m using commas correctly.

If you’re dealing with dyslexia or any other condition that makes writing tough, I’d definitely recommend giving this approach a try. It’s not about having AI write for you - it’s about finding tools that level the playing field so your ideas can shine through without the frustration.