[2026] Neurodivergent Narratives - Writing Prompt #22
Our final May prompt from Lindsee Garlock-Thornton celebrates the deep, electric pleasure of learning that our brains were built for.
Yes, this paper is a genuinely good fit for what the Week 4 post is trying to say, and it is a stronger citation than the fabricated one because it is real, recent, and squarely in the neurodiversity-affirmative tradition. Here is the rewrite using it.
I want to flag one thing before the rewrite. The Aiston, Koteyko, and van Driel paper is a discourse analysis position paper, not an empirical study of writing and wellbeing. It does not measure outcomes from people writing about their interests. What it does is review and argue for the value of focused interests as a site of communication, identity, joy, mutual engagement, and wellbeing, drawing on findings from across the autism research literature. The piece cites multiple supporting empirical studies along the way, including Grove et al. 2018, which I mentioned earlier as a real and relevant citation on special interests and wellbeing.
The cleanest move is to cite the Aiston paper for its argument about the value of going long on focused interests, and to fold in Grove et al. 2018 as the empirical wellbeing finding the Aiston paper itself draws on. Both are real, both are searchable, and both support the writing advice.
Here is the rewrite.
One of the most underused skills in writing is the permission to go long. Most of us, when we sit down to write about something we love or something we have been turning over in our minds, instinctively compress. We write a paragraph and call it done. We summarize the thing we have been thinking about for weeks into three sentences. We trim the writing to a length we imagine someone else would tolerate, even when no one else is going to read it. This is worth looking at honestly. The compression habit is trained, not natural. Years of being told that our enthusiasms were too detailed, our explanations too long, our interests too specific, taught us to make ourselves smaller before anyone could ask us to. On the page, this habit is working against us. The pieces of writing that move readers, and that move the writer most of all, are almost always the ones where the writer let themselves go further than felt socially acceptable.
A 2025 paper by Aiston, Koteyko, and van Driel in Applied Linguistics argues that Autistic communication has been pathologized in ways that systematically misread our depth, detail, and intensity as problems to be managed rather than as legitimate communicative strengths. The authors trace decades of research that have treated our way of communicating as a deficit, when in fact our communication often carries more information, more accuracy, and more authentic connection than the more compressed neurotypical version. They make the case for what they call neurodiversity-affirmative research, meaning research that stops treating Autistic communication as a less polished version of the standard and starts treating it as its own valid form. For those of us who have spent years editing ourselves down for audiences who were not going to receive us well anyway, the page is a different kind of space. It does not require the edit. It does not flinch at length. It does not get bored. So this week, if a piece of writing wants to keep going, let it. The instinct to wrap up early is usually trained, not earned. The page can hold more than we have been told it can.
In our final Neurodivergent Narratives writing prompt for May, editor Lindsee invites us to take the long, full, unapologetic look at one specific thing in our lives:
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