Backwards letters: a typical stage, or a sign of something more?

“She keeps writing her b’s and d’s the wrong way round. Is that dyslexia?”

Parents ask me this more than almost anything else, and teachers ask it too. It makes sense. Backwards letters are easy to spot, and they’re part of the popular picture of dyslexia. But the research tells a more interesting story, and a more reassuring one for most families.

Your child’s brain is doing exactly what it was built to do

Think about a chair. Whether it faces left or right, it’s still a chair. A tiger running left is the same tiger running right. Being able to recognise something whichever way it’s facing is really useful, and our visual system is very good at it. Researchers call this mirror invariance.

Letters break that rule. Flip a b and you get a d. Turn it upside down and you get a p or a q. Same shape, different letter, different sound.

In 2010, the neuroscientist Stanislas Dehaene and his colleagues scanned the brains of adult readers. They found that the part of the brain that recognises written words still treats mirror-image pictures as “the same”, but has learned to treat mirror-image words differently. Their interpretation is that learning to read means gradually unlearning mirror invariance for letters, and that this explains why the mirror errors young children make are usually temporary.

(The chair image is a simple way of explaining the idea. It isn’t taken from a particular study, but the science behind it is Dehaene’s.)

Why some letters get flipped more than others

It isn’t random. Researchers have found that young children reverse capital letters that face left, like J and Z, far more often than letters that face right. Jean-Paul Fischer found that 5 and 6-year-olds reversed J and Z around half the time.

In 2018, McIntosh and colleagues at the University of Edinburgh tested this with made-up symbols, so children couldn’t rely on letters they already knew. Four and five-year-olds were about three times more likely to reverse a symbol that faced left. The likely explanation is that most letters in our alphabet face right, so children pick up a general sense that letters face right. When they’re not sure, they follow it. That’s a sign of a child learning patterns, not a child who can’t see properly.

Do children with dyslexia see letters backwards?

No. This is one of the most persistent myths about dyslexia.

In the 1970s, Frank Vellutino and his colleagues tested the idea directly. They briefly showed children short words written in Hebrew, which none of them could read, and asked them to write them from memory. Children who were struggling to read did just as well as children who were reading well. Their visual memory for the shapes was fine. Vellutino’s wider work pointed instead to the language side of reading, such as linking letters to sounds and naming words.

Current understanding agrees. The 2025 UK consensus definition of dyslexia describes the most commonly observed difficulty as phonological processing, meaning working with the sounds in words. Seeing letters “the wrong way round” isn’t part of it.

Sally Shaywitz, one of the leading dyslexia researchers in the US, makes the same point. Reversals are common in young children, and there is no evidence that children with dyslexia actually see letters or words backwards.

So when is it part of typical development?

Reversals are very common through Reception, Year 1 and Year 2. For most children they fade gradually as they read and write more, and by around 7 or 8 they’ve become occasional slips rather than a regular pattern. There’s no exact cut-off age. It happens gradually and depends a lot on how much reading and writing a child has done.

One wobbly d in a piece of writing tells you very little. It’s the overall pattern that matters.

When might it be something more?

Reversals on their own don’t point to dyslexia. What I’d pay more attention to is reversals that are still frequent beyond about age 8, alongside other signs such as:

• finding it hard to learn and remember letter sounds, even with lots of practice
• struggling to blend sounds into words, or break words into sounds
• reading that stays slow and effortful, with lots of guessing from the first letter or the pictures
• spellings that are learnt for a test and forgotten a week later
• difficulty with rhyme, or with remembering sequences like the days of the week
• reading and spelling difficulties that carry on despite good teaching and extra help
• other people in the family who found reading and spelling hard

When reversals hang around, it’s often because a child’s letter knowledge isn’t secure yet. Children who find reading hard tend to read less, so they get less practice at fixing the direction of letters. In that case the reversals are a sign of the reading difficulty, not the cause of it.

If several of these sound familiar and your child is 8 or over, they’re exactly what a dyslexia assessment looks at. I assess children and young people aged 8 to 25 in Leigh-on-Sea, with families coming from across Southend and Essex. Find out about assessments for children.

What helps at home

• Tackle one letter at a time. Get b completely secure before working on d. Practising them side by side can make the muddle worse.
• Use the same starting point every time. Ask school how they teach letter formation and stick to it. How a letter is formed by hand helps fix which way it faces.
• Link it to the sound. Saying the sound while writing the letter connects the shape to the sound, which is the link that matters for reading.
• Keep it low-key. Correcting every reversal can knock a child’s confidence. Most of them fade with time and practice.

If you’re still wondering

If your child is 8 or over and you’re noticing a pattern, not just the odd backwards letter, an assessment can give you a clear picture. I look at the underlying skills, like how your child processes the sounds in words, their memory and how quickly they can retrieve information, as well as their reading and spelling. That way you understand what’s really going on and what will help.

You can read how an assessment works, or go straight to the For parents page to get in touch. I’m always happy to have a quick chat first.

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Research referred to in this post

• Carroll, J. M., Holden, C., Kirby, P., Thompson, P. A., Snowling, M. J., et al. (2025). Toward a consensus on dyslexia: findings from a Delphi study. Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry.
• Dehaene, S., Nakamura, K., Jobert, A., Kuroki, C., Ogawa, S., & Cohen, L. (2010). Why do children make mirror errors in reading? Neural correlates of mirror invariance in the visual word form area. NeuroImage, 49, 1837–1848.
• Dehaene, S. (2009). Reading in the Brain: The New Science of How We Read. Viking.
• Fischer, J.-P. (2011). Mirror writing of digits and (capital) letters in the typically developing child. Cortex, 47(6), 759–762.
• McIntosh, R. D., Anderson, E. L., & Henderson, R. M. (2018). Experimental confirmation of a character-facing bias in literacy development. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 170, 207–214.
• Shaywitz, S. (2003). Overcoming Dyslexia. Alfred A. Knopf.
• Vellutino, F. R., Pruzek, R. M., Steger, J. A., & Meshoulam, U. (1973). Immediate visual recall in poor and normal readers as a function of orthographic-linguistic familiarity. Cortex, 9(4), 370–386.