Young and dyslexic? You’ve got it going on

The text at a glance

Zephaniah grew up dyslexic at a time when teachers did not know the word, in a system he remembers as having ‘no compassion, no understanding and no humanity’. He was told to ‘Shut up, stupid boy’ for asking questions, steered towards football instead of thinking, and expelled from his last school at thirteen. Borstal followed, yet the belief held: ‘I never thought I was stupid’. He dictated his first poems to his sister, learned to read properly at twenty-one in an adult education class, and only then discovered that his difficulty had a name. The article ends where it began, with the man who is now a professor of poetry telling young dyslexic readers to see themselves as makers: ‘Us dyslexic people, we’ve got it going on’.

Methods that matter

Voice: the survivor who refuses to be bitter

The article’s most disarming move is forgiveness. ‘I don’t look back and feel angry with the teachers’, he writes, calling the past ‘a different kind of country’; by blaming a system rather than individuals he keeps the reader’s sympathy even as the indictment sharpens. The humour works the same way. ‘I didn’t stab anybody’ startles a laugh and, in the same breath, sketches the violence around him; ‘Do I need an operation?’ mocks his own confusion at diagnosis rather than anyone else’s. A voice this unselfpitying is very hard to argue with.

Structure: a circle that turns an insult into a title

The thesis arrives in miniature in the opening lines, ‘We are the architects, we are the designers’, before the life is told broadly in order: school, expulsion, borstal, reading at twenty-one, the career. The pivot is the prison reflection, ‘If you look at the statistics, I should be in prison’, a blunt audit of disadvantage that makes the success more striking and the advice more authoritative. Then the ending circles back to the architects and designers, closing on the phrase that gives the article its title. The shape enacts the argument: a boy labelled stupid ends by handing out the label he prefers, and the anecdotes accumulate into a case rather than a mere life story.

Language: the teachers convict themselves

Zephaniah barely needs to accuse anyone: he quotes them. ‘Shut up, stupid boy’, ‘How dare you challenge me?’, ‘why don’t you go outside and play some football?’: the direct speech lets classroom cruelty and low expectations speak in their own voices, and the reader sides with the curious child against the closed adult. Against that, the tricolon ‘no compassion, no understanding and no humanity’ hammers the system with its repeated negative. The boldest reframing is the parallel with racism: ‘If someone can’t understand dyslexia it’s their problem’, he insists, just as he does not sit around wondering how to become white. And the style itself proves the argument: ‘Us dyslexic people, we’ve got it going on’ breaks the rules of standard English on purpose, in an article about literacy, to show that word-perfect writing is not what intelligence looks like.

Key quotations

Quotation	Method	Why it matters
‘We are the architects, we are the designers’	Repetition, collective pronoun	Recasts dyslexic people as makers and visionaries; the reader is invited into a proud community from the start.
‘no compassion, no understanding and no humanity’	Tricolon of negatives	The triple negative positions the institution, not the child, as the problem.
‘Shut up, stupid boy’	Direct speech	Casual classroom cruelty preserved verbatim; a teacher’s word doing a lifetime’s damage.
‘I didn’t stab anybody’	Understatement, dark humour	Startles a laugh while hinting at the violence around him; honest but never self-pitying.
‘If you look at the statistics, I should be in prison’	Statistical framing	The blunt list of disadvantages makes the success more striking and lends the advice authority.
‘I never thought I was stupid’	Short declarative	The article’s core of self-belief; the plainness is the strength.
‘your “creativity muscle” gets bigger’	Colloquial metaphor	Reframes difficulty as training: a concrete, optimistic image of how dyslexia builds creative strength.
‘Us dyslexic people, we’ve got it going on’	Slang, non-standard grammar	Deliberately rule-breaking English in an article about literacy: the style is the argument.