The Forums › Forums › Emotional Journey › My Story › ADHD, working memory, and words. A battleground. › Re: ADHD, working memory, and words. A battleground.
I belileve that I am much better at writing than speaking. Although I am not fast at either. Writing allows me to reorganize my thoughts. I read and reread and reread what I have written almost to the point of being OCD. I figure about an hour per page (250-300 words) for things I want to get right. I’ll put it away and read it the next morning and then later in the afternoon and invariably find things to change. Evening is the best time for me to be creative. I’m sure its bad advice and I don’t recommend it, but if I have, say four to six oz. of 80 proof on board, I find that writing and speaking is so much easier. I don’t know if the spirits grease the neurons or silence the distracting voices. They do seem to allow me to have insights more readily and help with creativity. Words come fairly readily for writing, but with speech not enough so to consistently speak fluidly. When speaking, I often leave sentences unfinished after I think I have gotten most of the idea across. A year ago, I might have thought this was due to laziness, but now I believe its ADD.
Just as a skilled artisan is able to create beautiful works of art from simple and mundane materials as stone and wood, so is it not necessary to have a genius IQ vocabulary to produce elegant prose. A simpler vocabulary allows for a broader audience and ease of understanding. Those that use big and “fancy” words do so because they want to show off or lack the creativity and skill to do otherwise.
So although I know what you mean by not being able to recall a particular word on demand, I would say work with what you can remember and upon rereading what you have written, you may recall the word for which you were looking. As for speaking, I can’t help you there. We’re probably in the same boat. I try to keep it short and simple there.
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