Storytelling is not simply a language skill. It is a form of reasoning.
Research in cognitive science and education has shown that humans naturally organize information in narrative form. Stories help us understand cause and effect, remember complex sequences, and make sense of experience. Rather than storing isolated facts, the brain links information into meaningful structures—as what who done, why it mattered, and how things connect.
For many dyslexic thinkers, this kind of narrative reasoning is a particular strength.
Many dyslexic readers rely less on rapid word-by-word processing and more on meaning, context, and pattern. When reading, they tend to focus on the big picture — tracking characters, ideas, and themes rather than individual words. Studies have shown that dyslexic readers often excel at retelling stories, identifying underlying meaning, and making connections across a text, even when their oral reading speed is slower.
This meaning-based approach is closely related to what we’ve described as interconnected thinking — the ability to see relationships among ideas, events, and systems rather than processing information in small definitional bits. It’s not uncommon for a talented dyslexic thinker and writer to struggle with a blank page (or blinking cursor) because they have too many ideas in their head, rather than too few.
Strengths in being able to see the big picture and how events and themes relate to each other may translate into an intuitive grasp of how a story unfolds, how pieces fit together, and how stories can be told from different perspectives.
Strengths in mental simulation also translate into strengths in story-making. Because many dyslexic thinkers are able to imagine experiences vividly — picturing scenes, replaying events, and mentally “walking through” situations, there is a direct connection with presenting these stories to others, whether in short stories, screenplays, poems, or film, drama, or animation. No wonder so many of the world’s most talented writers and filmmakers are dyslexic.
Through other means, dyslexic storytellers can move people emotionally through nonverbal means by manipulating images, actions, movements, lighting, and color.
Recognizing that dyslexic students (and adults) may initially process information nonverbally should help explain why writing can be so challenging.
One of the hopes of the Karina Eide Young Writers awards is to provide an incentive for more dyslexic students to express their feelings in words.
Creative stories or poems can be dictated to another person and not typed or written by hand.
If you look at the talented writing of dyslexic students, you can see everything – flights of imagination, a strong sense of writers voices, humor, insightfulness, and gifts of being able to capture moods or multisensory experiences in words. Characters feel real. Moments feel lived-in. Readers or viewers are not just told what happened; they are invited to experience it. These qualities are at the heart of powerful storytelling, whether on the page, on the stage, or on the screen.
Recognizing these strengths helps shift how we think about writing instruction and creative expression. If ideas are rich but difficult to translate into written form, the solution is not to narrow the task, but to widen the pathways. Dictation, collaborative writing, visual planning, storyboarding, and oral storytelling are all legitimate routes into written expression.
One of the aims of the Karina Eide Young Writers Awards is to encourage dyslexic students to share their stories in ways that honor how their minds work—focusing first on voice, insight, and imagination, and trusting that mechanics can follow. When given the chance, dyslexic students consistently demonstrate what has always been there: a powerful capacity to tell stories that move, surprise, and stay with us.
