ABSTRACT
This book highlights the impact that dyslexia can have, both positive and negative, upon individuals, families, employers, employment chances, education, the health service, the criminal justice system and society in general. Dyslexia was frequently referred to as the middle-class disease, with the idea that educated middle-class parents needed an excuse for why their child was not reading. Developmental dyslexia is almost certainly heritable and genetically transmitted in an autosomal dominant pattern, that is, one only needs to have one parent with the gene or gene cluster to inherit that condition. Dyslexia is a processing difference, often characterised by difficulties in literacy acquisition affecting reading, writing and spelling. A difficulty for those trying to assess the overall prevalence of dyslexia is that it is usually depicted on a sliding scale between mild and severe, so distinguishing any clear-cut moment at which dyslexia is present or not is very difficult.
