What to do if your eyes skip lines of text...

A student of mine struggled to transfer corrections he had made on his printed draft to his electronic version. Whenever he corrected a sentence, the electronic text would shift making it difficult for him to find other places in the document. To solve this issue, we stopped printing drafts and instead, worked together on his laptop; however, listening to him read his work aloud, I realized that he was skipping lines when he got to the right margin and moved his eyes to the left. This was the first time I encountered this disability: I now know two more people who deal with this reading problem. Another student holds a piece of paper under the line that she is reading and moves the paper down a fraction of an inch to view the next line. She does this when reading books and when reading a computer screen. Finally, a friend of mine went from a C average as an undergraduate to a A average in her master's program after investigating her diagnosis. She coped by highlighting her textbooks at the end of a line and the beginning of the next in one color, then changing between six colors for each ending/starting pair. This technique took a long time and her textbooks looked odd, but her grade point average soared and so did her confidence.