The teaching failure lies making what you struggle with a required component of education, and measuring you on it in the same way as others, while providing you with no alternative route to success that doesn't require you jumping through hoops.

To give an analogy: someone who can't walk has a disability, but it would be a failure of the instructor to make 5K running the only way to get a passing grade in physical education, while simultaneously not making barbells available.

And looking at your very well-written and perfectly structured comment, I struggle to accept its conclusion. If all you need to write this well is spell-checker — a tool more common than a ballpoint pen at this point, and one that's been around for decades — then the instructors that didn't teach you to use it were failing at teaching.

If you can speak well, and they never even suggested dictation software (again, something that's been around for a long time), it's a teaching failure.

Writing is not about spelling words the same way dictionary spells them. Writing is about communicating ideas clearly, and your written prose is great.

You can't write without a spell-checker; your tutors can't write with a quill, most likely. There's no difference.

That you think that your prose is poor — there's the teaching failure.

Do you see what I mean now?

I've had similar problems with spelling but have never been diagnosed with anything. Sometimes I've memorized a words spelling but when I write it down it looks wrong to me. So I look it up or use a spell checker.

The biggest problem for me has been noticing spelling mistakes in variable names. I can't find the bug yet it's just two letters swapped.

Oh and the frustration some people have when they spot an error.