Or: problems Asperger people may have interpreting and completing tasks (such as school essays) despite innate intelligence and skill

I came across a very interesting blog article today by Xanthippa on the differences between ability and capability present in someone with Aspergers. Aspergers people are often highly intelligent, but other factors – sensory considerations, inadequate people skills, personal organisation skills, problem solving skills, anxiety, etc – mean that their actual capability of completing a task is lower than their natural ability at it.

I posted this comment in response:

Very interesting. Your phrasing “the difference between actual ability and capability” is very succinct and I think differentiates between the two better than the way most people try to explain it.
Apparently when I did IQ tests in primary school, I scored in the 95th percentile in some areas and the 25th in others, not because I was any less intelligent in those areas but because my capability of expressing it in those tasks was less.
For me, it is very, very frustrating to be highly intelligent, but not very capable. If I were living by myself (which fortunately I am not) I would no doubt find myself doing things like forgetting to pay bills or buy groceries, and any time I had a problem – ordinary things like broken appliances, or power outages – I would not know what to do about it. And it is just so horrible to know that I am intelligent enough that I should be able to do things, but I’m simply not capable. In high school I was known for being quite brilliant at some things, but stuff like my organisation was so bad that it meant I always had fairly average grades; not bad ones, but nowhere near what I should have gotten based just on my ability to write essays and things. My disorganisation, my inability to work out what to do next if I had a problem, all these things brought my grades down. And it’s like that with everything I do.

The worst part is, of course, when people act patronizingly or as though you’re stupid, when intelligence isn’t the issue at all. It’s all the other factors that people never consider.

To use an example that happened many, many times over the years, let’s take school assignments. To start with, I might have trouble interpreting the question. My school set jargon-heavy task sheets that everyone, not only myself, had to have interpeted by the teacher as they were so impenetrable*, and half the time there was no obvious connection between what was listed on the task sheet and what was on the standardised assessment-criteria form. The head of the English Department also liked to put related quotes on these task sheets that may or may not have have particular relevance to the assignment itself. It generally took me a couple of days of reading the task sheet and criteria sheet and discussions with the teacher to clarify any particularly obtuse sections and make sure that I properly understood what I was supposed to do.

Once that was done, I had to actually begin the task. In English, this was usually based on a piece of text and didn’t necessarily require research; in other subjects, such as Ancient History, it did. Learning an efficient research process took me a few years – good note taking, bibliographies, etc – but once I had that down pat I was pretty good at it. So let’s assume I was looking at an English text. This tended either to be a novel, a piece of poetry, or a play (usually Shakespeare. Romeo and Juliet was boring, but Macbeth was awesome. I can remember telling someone at the time – I was very into Star Wars at that point - that there were clear parallels between Macbeth and Anakin Skywalker, but let’s not go there.) Problem: this stuff is all about the emotional/social content. I’m not good with that. Not only did I have even less understanding of social interactions and behaviour than I do now, but I have always had difficulty interpreting emotions including my own. I remember in year 12 my Mum had to read the Great Gatsby and explain to me what each of the characters was feeling and what social interactions were occuring in each scene. There’s one scene where Daisy’s lover (Gatsby) and husband are in the same room together, and Gatsby wants to tell the husband that he and Daisy are together and that Daisy is leaving him, but Daisy likes her current arrangement quite well, thanks. So she’s trying to separate the two without her husband suspecting what is going on. She tries to convince her husband and Gatsby and the other people in the scene to go into town, in separate cars, her motive being that she doesn’t want Gatsby to have an opportunity to tell her husband abotu their affair. I missed all that completely. It’s one of the most important scenes in the book, but I was there going, “why is she so desperate to go into town? what’s it matter?” when in fact the scene is about Gatsby trying to tell the husband about their affair and Daisy trying to prevent him. There’s all these layers that I completely missed. The entire book is like that. Now the Great Gatsby is an extreme example, as most books do offer some subtextual clues as to what is happening in the different layers of the story, but if one does not have much insight into human behaviour, than writing an essay on that behaviour as detailed in the novel can be a seriously difficult task.

But let’s say that, despite that difficulty, you somehow manage to come up with content. That content has to be written in concise, appropriately formal language. It has to impart its ideas with clarity, using the structure and style of an essay. The length also has to be appropriate – it can’t be fifteen pages long or two paragraphs, which means you have to monitor the number of words, and decide on the level of depth appropriate to the essay. (Our school always gave us a word limit, usually between 1000 and 1,500 words, and I was pretty good at the rest, having been coached in the particulars of assessment writing by my former English teacher mother.)

At this point, you’ve got a pretty decent draft. What you have to do next is review that draft and check that it conforms to the task and criteria sheets in all points, that the draft uses appropriate language and format structure, and whether or not there’s anything that should be in the essay but isn’t, or is in the essay but isn’t actually very relevant. (Also: according a point or idea in the essay the number of words and the amount of depth that matches its importance. No blathering on about an unimportant point so that there’s no room for the important stuff.) If you’re lucky, your school will allow you to take your draft to your teacher for review before you need to submit it. If you’re even luckier, you’ll have a teacher with a good grasp of the subject they’re teaching and the ability to impart information and understanding to their students. (I was lucky. My teacher deserved a medal. He informed me that I was the reason for his accelerating hair loss – “see this bald patch, Ace? This is because of you” – thanks to the stress of keeping me on task and making sure I understood everything, which was always an amusing display as he rubbed his bald patch for emphasis, but he did so with dedication and empathy and without him I wouldn’t have passed, let alone done so wonderfully well.) But doing something with the feedback you get from your draft can be a another problem. Teachers tend to leave cryptic comments on your drafts. “Edit for language” may be scrawled in the margin, or on a paragraph about the behaviour of a character in the text, “motivations – accurate??” These kinds of comments simply mystify. If you can convince your teacher to expand on these comments and explain in more detail, you still need to edit your draft to reflect their suggestions. So your language structure or wording might be inappropriate: how do you make it appropriate? If part of your reasoning in the essay is wrong, how do you rewrite that bit and make sure the rest of the essay still makes sense?

Finally, when all the problems of actually writing the essay are gone, there’s organisation. One usually has several assignments at once. How do you manage your time to get them all done by the deadline? I had a lot of trouble getting everything in by the due date. It’s also important to make sure everything necessary for your assessment has been handed in – not only the essay, but also an appropriately structured bibliography, all your notes, your draft, the criteria and assessment sheets as well.

As you can see, it’s not only a matter of being intelligent and having good writing skills. There’s a whole lot of factors involved in doing well on an essay. (I haven’t even mentioned it, but having a good relationship with the teacher is also important, however that opens up a whole new range of issues I’m not going to go into right now.) And every seemingly straightforward, simple task can be like that for someone with Aspergers Syndrome. When your entire world is that complicated, it means that despite your intelligence, your capability of completing a task at an adequate level may be far below your actual ability.

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* “An etymological descent into hell,” my English teacher described one such task sheet, not realising that anyone in the class might actually understand what he had just said.