BACKGROUND Following a patient's death, some doctors routinely write a letter of condolence to the bereaved family. Practice appears to vary widely but this is poorly documented, particularly in the UK setting. We wished to explore the attitudes of oncologists and palliative care consultants towards writing letters of condolence to patient's families. METHODS A sample of oncology and palliati...

A case of pure dysgraphia is presented in which the patient could accurately copy letters which she could not write. The patient did not show any evidence of significant reading or speech impairment or any buccofacial or limb apraxia. Both oral and "block spelling" performance were intact. The writing impairment, which was bilateral, appeared to consist of a memory difficulty for the motor move...

Gaining facility with spelling is an important part of becoming a good writer. Here we review recent work on how children learn to spell in alphabetic writing systems. Statistical learning plays an important role in this process. Thus, young children learn about some of the salient graphic characteristics of written texts and attempt to reproduce these characteristics in their own productions e...