When people talk about ADHD, it's typically about how it makes it difficult to maintain focus (or the flip-side, the tendency to hyperfocus on something).
For me, another notable aspect of ADHD is non-linear thought. Much like my tendency to jump between activities, my thoughts tend to also jump backwards and forwards and all over the place. This is not necessarily a bad thing: it tends to lead to some particularly creative insights and connections; but it also can make certain activities, in particular writing, Hell.
As an example, I really struggle with "stream of conscious" writing. My stream of conscious is more like a turbulent storm. So instead of starting at the top of the page and working downwards, I tend to write my documents from the inside out—inserting individual sentences into logical place as they arrive. As a consequence, documents tend to "evolve" over time and it's difficult to predict when they will be "done" (it also partially sucks for writing fluffy filler-text).
I've also noticed that it causes some odd grammatical quirks:
- Word superposition: inability to decide which word is better/clearer
- Nesting: a series of nested (typically using parenthesis (or sometimes brackets)) thoughts
- Misordering: words
grammaticallyend up in grammatically incorrect order - Punctuation soup: commas; semi-colons; brackets; em-dash—they're all good
- Superfluous grammar: when a sentence has
got someunnecessarily grammatical structures
Thankfully these can all be caught during proofreading. It just takes a bit longer.
Edit: It's fascinating how the difficulty shifts throughout the day. My focus is generally better in the evenings, which also tends to be when my writing is most fluid.
