Does anyone have a spelling disability.......

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Spelling and writing were always my strengths. I recently participated in the Adult Literacy Council spelling bee and did well. Our team placed fifth. I am also the person people seek out for spelling help.

I'm a mediocre speller. I'd give myself a 'C'

I don't think it has anything to do with AS one way or the other in my case. (And yes, Firefox had to spellcheck "mediocre" for me )

Excellent speller! And grammarian. And compulsive about correcting people. The tendency has *always* caused me problems.

You're not a parrot if you actually understand what you're saying. You seem like a bright guy and can write articulately, so I would tend to assume that's the case. Don't sell yourself short!
We were talking about Williams Syndrome lately in one of my classes, and my teacher told us about this girl with Williams Syndrome she worked with. One of the pecularities of Williams Syndrome is that expressive language (using language) is much better than receptive language (what you understand)- this is *very* unusual. So this girl who had a severely deficient vocabulary and didn't understand much of what was said to her used all sorts of words that my professor had never even heard of. When questioned, the girl was unable to explain what the words meant, and didn't give any evidence of understanding them. Now *she* could be considered a parrot because she used the words without understanding.

I don't have any learning disability that would cause difficulties with spelling/writing. I am close to what is sometimes called "absolutely literate" or "innately literate" in Russian literature on autism. If I am attentive to what I am writing in the three languages I am fluent in (Russian, English, Lithuanian), I make no grammar/spelling mistakes whatsoever. I am also picky about using the right grammar in languages I've started to learn recently and am reluctant to use words or phrases when I am not sure whether they are correct or not.

However, it is all too easy for me to stop paying attention to what I am writing. It happens at the slightest distraction, or whenever my thoughts start wandering away a bit. Then I start making the oddest spelling mistakes - I "spoonerize" my spelling, transfer letters/sounds from one word to the next (as in those classic examples, "black bloxes" for "black boxes" or "Noman numeral" for "Roman numeral", etc.), join two words into a single neologism, want to write one word and end up writing another that sounds similar or begins the same way (for example, I might want to write "were" and write "where" instead, or "anything" instead of "anyhow", "paint" for "plant" etc.). I have no idea if this is ASD-related or not, but it probably does bear some connection to how my brain is wired. I remember we had a psycholinguistics course as part of our English philology program, and at some point the lecturer told us about various "slips of the tongue and brain". I just sat there and thought, oh dear, all this is about me.

When I have no time to mind what I am writing, for example, when I'm writing too fast - say, if I am at a lecture and am trying to take notes of everything that is being said - what I put down is practically unreadable. Illegible handwriting aside, it probably looks like something written by an aphasic.