North Shore Stroke Recovery Centre

Writing Techniques by Michael Karnatchev

At first, a person with aphasia may go to the bank and ask the clerk to write a cheque. Later, the person thinks that it is now time to try writing their own cheque. The cheque is short and the structure is well known – date, name of the person or company, amount and signature.

Here are two techniques to help you:

1)     The first one is to use the Google search engine (googling)

2)     The second is known as reverse dictionary.  The "reverse dictionary" is organized by concepts, phrases, or the definitions of words. 

For example, in our case we are looking for “numbers” and a list of such words like one, two, ten, total, dollars, etc.

We usually know the meaning of the word, it is in our mind, but we need a clue to write it. Sometimes this is the incorrect word to Google search engine, but it may give Google an idea about the spelling, usage, the colour, the shape, etc.

Let’s start with some examples:

1)    The Google search engine (googling)

Figure 1.

Let’s say you typed in the word “handred”.  Open your web browser. Go to www.google.ca and type “handred” (see the figure 1).  Google suggests the correct word “Did you mean: hundred”. Next copy and paste the word in a dictionary to verify the meaning of “hundred”. In this example we use the Google dictionary (see figure 2 below).

Figure 2.

2)    Reverse Dictionary

Have you ever been stuck thinking of a word? You know the sound of word and you can't write it down. Let’s you want to write a cheque for $230 dollars. The first number is 2. Your intuitive guess to write 2 as “to” is wrong. “To” means “close” or “infinitive” or “toward”. The next candidate is “too”, but it means “very”.  This is where OneLook Reverse Dictionary rescues us from a difficult situation.

OneLook reverse dictionary is organized by concepts. If you can't write/spell “2”, use “number” as concept instead. Go to http://www.onelook.com/reverse-dictionary.shtml Enter the concept “number” in the search box (see figure 3 below). Check the list of results with the best matches usually at the forefront of the results. In our example “two” is listed under number 68. To get the best results in the shortest time use a filter. The most common filter is the asterisk (*), which equals any number of characters. For instance, type “t *number” to get all words and phrases that begin with “t” and are numbers (see figure 4 below). Now “two” is listed under number 8.

Figure 3.

Figure 4.

Try these techniques and you will be able to crack any crossword!