La escritura especular o escritura en espejo es un método de escritura que se logra trazando el lápiz sobre el papel en la dirección opuesta a la que es usada por la mayoría de los amanuenses, de tal manera que el resultado es una imagen en espejo (invertida) de la escritura habitual. Su empleo más común, cuando el idioma se escribe desde la izquierda hacia la derecha, es por parte de personas zurdas. A veces se utiliza como una forma extremadamente primitiva de cifrado. Su ejemplo más común en la actualidad puede verse al frente de las ambulancias, donde la palabra "AMBULANCIA" aparece en escritura especular con el objetivo de que los conductores que se encuentren delante de ella lean la palabra en el sentido normal en sus espejos retrovisores. Leonardo da Vinci es famoso porque en muchas de sus anotaciones personales utilizó este método que combinaba con el uso de siglas y abreviaciones para hacer más difícil su lectura por otras personas. Sólo utilizaba la manera estándar de escritura si tenía previsto que sus anotaciones fueran leídas por otras personas. Leonardo da Vinci era ambidextro, y solía escribir con la izquierda, lo que provocaba que la tinta manchara fácilmente si escribía en escritura estándar, es decir, de izquierda a derecha.[cita requerida]

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Mirror writing is formed by writing in the direction that is the reverse of the natural way for a given language, such that the result is the mirror image of normal writing: it appears normal when it is reflected in a mirror. It is sometimes used as an extremely primitive form of cipher. The most common modern usage of mirror writing can be found on the front of ambulances, where the word "AMBULANCE" is often written in very large mirrored text, so that drivers see the word the right way around in their rear-view mirror. Research suggests that the ability to do mirror writing is probably inherited and caused by atypical language organization in the brain. It is not known how many people in the population inherit the ability of mirror writing (an informal Australian newspaper experiment identified 10 true mirror-writers in a readership of 65,000). Half of the children of people with the ability inherit it. A higher proportion of left-handed people are better mirror writers than right-handed people, probably because it's more natural for a left-hander to write backwards. 15% of left-handed people have the language centres in both halves of their brain. The cerebral cortex (thin layer of dense brain cells covering the whole brain) and motor homunculus (relates to voluntary movement) are affected by this causing them to be able to read and write backwards quite naturally. In an experiment conducted by the Department of Neurosurgery at Hokkaido University School of Medicine in Sapporo, Japan, Scientists proposed that the origin of mirror writing comes from damage caused through accidental brain damage or neurological diseases, such as an essential tremor, Parkinson’s disease, or spino-cerebellar degeneration. This hypothesis was proposed because these conditions affect a "neural mechanism that controls the higher cerebral function of writing via the thalamus."Another study by the same university discovered that damage was not the only cause. The scientists observed that normal children exhibited signs of mirror writing while learning to write, thus concluding that currently there is no exact method for finding the true origin of mirror writing.

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