I wrote a book about handwriting because I was concerned about the fact that handwriting is not being adequately taught in many schools. And as I researched the topic, and spoke to a lot of educators, what struck me was the amount of pressure teachers are under in the 21st century.
It’s tempting to be nostalgic about the days when students were drilled in the Palmer Method and most of them graduated from high school writing a legible script. But today’s classroom is immensely more complicated; teachers have to cope not only with endless testing but with a much wider range of material to cover. And along with everything else, they have to teach computer skills! The more research I did, the less wedded I became to the idea (always a dubious one, anyway) that because things were done a certain way back in the good old days, they should be done that way now.
Students need to learn typing – they even probably need to call it “keyboarding.” Hardly a one of them will escape a future in which they earn their livings by sitting at a computer. I write my own books directly on the keyboard, use computer programs for editing, keep on top of a substantial email correspondence, pay bills online – and I wouldn’t have it any other way.
But I think it’s too soon to declare legible penmanship a lost art. Maybe the problem lies in calling it an art rather than a simple necessity like knowing how to add and subtract. Hardly a day goes by when the average person doesn’t have to write something on paper. We take notes at meetings, we make lists, we address an envelope, we send a thank-you letter, we keep diaries. A radio talk show host who interviewed me this morning had jotted down some things he wanted to discuss but confessed he couldn’t read it back so had to wing it. In more extreme (but not entirely far-fetched) scenarios, the computer crashes, the power goes out, we start to get shooting pains in our wrists….
We need to use our handwriting, just as most of us need to cook dinner every night. Why not try to do it well? The “slow food” movement is gaining momentum. Why not “slow writing”? Is it so hard to write legibly?
I believe that devising a readable, even beautiful script for ourselves isn’t really very difficult, nor must it resemble the dear old Palmer Method, with its curlicues and flourishes. In the course of writing Script and Scribble, I became smitten with a variation of the 16th-century script known as Italic – a partly printed, partly cursive style that’s famous for its elegance, legibility, and speed. (And if it’s taught in schools, kids don’t have to learn printing in first grade and make the transition to cursive a year or two later: it’s all one script.) Like most people’s, my handwriting had deteriorated through lack of use, but in a week or so of casual practice, I reformed it completely.
I’ve managed to retain what I learned by using my new Italic as often as I can. Even making a grocery list presents an opportunity, not because it matters that “onions, bread, coffee” be beautifully written, but because it keeps me in practice for times when good handwriting is important – like the note of sympathy I had to write a few days ago. It takes a little longer, but – once you’ve mastered it – not much. We’re a nation of printers, a nation of apologizers for our penmanship, but we don’t have to be. It’s just not that big a deal to write well!
But kids are another story. I understand the time pressures teachers face, and I know that follow-up and reinforcement are not easy to build into the school day. Compared to other items in the curriculum, handwriting can seem pretty trivial – and there’s no standardized test to evaluate it. Still, I can imagine an ideal classroom, one in which the students write a fluent Italic script from first grade onward, they’re encouraged to use it daily for short periods, and what they write is pleasing to them, a source of pride, a skill that will serve them well for as long as they need it.
Who knows what the years ahead have in store for any of us? Home computers drain more energy than almost any other usage, and it’s increasing. Repetitive stress injuries and carpal tunnel syndrome aren’t going away. Most college students still take notes with pen and notebook. The pleasure of curling up with a diary seems to be an enduring one. Love letters will never stop being written, by hand, on paper, and sealed with a kiss.
Penmanship isn’t dead. It’s not feeling great, it’s struggling to breathe, it’s limping along. But we can keep it alive. And we should.
KITTY BURNS FLOREY is the author of Sister Bernadette’s Barking Dog: The Quirky History and Lost Art of Diagramming Sentences. A veteran copy editor, she has also written nine novels and many short stories and essays. She lives in Connecticut. Her web address is www.kittyburnsflorey.com/
I’d like to (mostly) agree with you in a counter-intuitive way. I have horrible handwriting and poor spelling which has been made worse by spell checker.
But I prefer using the old fashioned blackboard. All of the mistakes I make add a human dynamic to our class.
I’m reminded of the greatest Japanese homerun hitter who violated the American baseball rule of “don’t step in the bucket.” He said that in Japan the process of overcoming the backward step was benefical becuase it sharpened concentration.
I don’t know about whether he was right precisely. But I do know we must value and preserve a whole variety of the ways that humans have learned and communicated over the generations.
I think you’re way overstating both the amount of stuff that we need to write and the extent to which we’re unable to do it because of poor handwriting. For my part, essentially all I ever write by hand is on the boards in my classrooms, and my printing, while not elegant, is perfectly functional. And certainly my inability to write in cursive doesn’t prevent me from writing thank-you notes. And kids are much more likely to put their diaries online than in a book these days, I’d guess.
I think any argument in favor of increasing handwriting instruction time needs to depend much more on demonstrating its practical value and much less time appealing to sentimentality. I, like most kids, don’t *miss* the good-old-days of pretty handwriting because we don’t *remember* those days (if they ever existed.)
“Most college students still take notes with pen and notebook”.
Not from what I’ve observed in recent years. My DH was in grad school from 2003-2006 and hardly ANY of his classmates took notes by hand.
I do agree with your basic premise, however.
I’ll bet more than a few college professors have banned laptops from their classrooms, or at least shut off the WiFi. When I was teaching as an adjunct, it was pretty clear that a large number of my students with laptops were not using them to take notes.
There’s no mention here of the cognitive benefits that handwriting brings to literacy/language development/etc – and it’s an important part of why handwriting needs to stay in the curriculum. David Wray and Jane Medwell have done some work in the UK that’s worth reading.
The ed-tech crowd especially rails against handwriting as an obsolete skill – and certainly not a “21st Century Skill.” It’s a dishonest, ignorant approach that has little opposition.
Handwriting isn’t just under fire, it’s sitting at Dunkirk with no lull in the battle and just a handful of boats on the way.
I feel that teachers take some of the blame in schools for allowing students to submit papers that have been word-processed. I’m not trying to say that every paper a student turns in should be handwritten, but I know that when I was in high school my teachers encouraged us to type even our rough drafts unless we had “good handwriting”. Most of us were so afraid that our handwriting may not be legible to the teacher and our grade would suffer. For this reason, while I prefer to hand write my rough drafts, I would always type them to please the teacher.
I also agree with Crimson Wife about college students relying on computers to take notes. In some of my classes, even when the professor isn’t lecturing, students have their laptops out.
It’s an indictment of our education system that we can’t even get kids to write legibly. I am reminded of this every time I get an exchange student (it doesn’t matter which country they come from): their penmanship is excellent. We’re fooling ourselves if we think we’re having our kids spend their school hours much more meaningfully with their “find the main idea” drills and whatnot that they do in language arts classes. While our kids scribble answers on worksheets pursuing that will-o’-wisp Critical Thinking Skills, European kids are learning a useful handicraft (that shows no signs of becoming obsolete despite our utopian cornucopia of technology) while STILL outpacing American kids on just about every other measure of achievement. Give me a break –until that happy day arrives when even Post-Its get dashed off on mini-keyboards, let’s endow our children with the ability to write in a non-crappy manner. Not only does it make communication more lucid, but it brings beauty to our lives –and isn’t that a worthy aim of education?
A psychologist friend commented once that when major corporations require a short essay, they aren’t so concerned about the content. They do a handwriting analysis to decide who gets the job! I know that it’s hard to treat someone like an adult if they have the handwriting of a third-grader. Not “neat” vs. “sloppy,” but developed and refined vs. herky-jerky and haphazard.
Perhaps part of the reason for poor handwriting is the fact that our little ones MUST now sit in groups rather than face the board and learn to write. Here in NYC they’ve all but done away with the chalkboard – so teachers have to write on small paper. In addition, handwriting is not part of their curriculum. Of course it should be!Thankfully I use a program called, “Sing, Spell, Read & Write” in my classroom – Sue Dickson- the author, has done an outstanding job of teaching handwriting in this program! (Go to Youtube and do a search, there you’ll see her method! It’s great!)
Best, Christine D’Amico
My son is the only one in his sixth-grade class who can write in cursive. I had to teach him because the school wouldn’t. For awhile, his legibility was deplorable, but I worked with him until it improved. Now it’s beautiful, and he’s proud of his penmanship, too.
I tell him it’s important because he will likely have to occasionally jot down information, and if he can’t read his own writing, then that could possibly have undesirable consequences.
I think it’s a bit of a cop-out to say it can’t be taught due to time constraints or lack of ability.
I was so excited to see the title of this article. I am an Occupational Therapist and help children with handwriting problems and believe firmly handwriting should not be eliminated from school. A problem children face today is they don’t have the intrinsic hand strength probably because they were not put on their bellies to sleep due to SIDS. Those of us who were allowed to be on our bellies pushed up into our hands giving proper input into our small muscles in our hands. Even my own child didn’t get enough time on her belly despite my greatest efforts. Children need weight bearing activities into their hands prior to writing activities to stimulate the small muscles to produce fine graded movement. The D’Nealian and Palmer cursive methods were developed with a fountain pen and the lines had to be diagonal for the ink to flow. Diagonal lines can be very difficult for children. Using the Italic style of writing would be very difficult for the little ones because of all the diagonal lines. I use a system call Handwriting Without Tears that takes the diagonals out of the letters and teaches the letters in groupings that are developmental instead of alphabetical. Unfortunately this system has not been adopted in my state. Fortunately for my daughter, she has a mom who can help her and a teacher that took the HWT class. If the schools won’t teach them parents must!
Any consideration of handwriting should take into account the fact (documented in SCRIPT AND SCRIBBLE, as I recall) that the fastest and most legible handwriters avoid cursive.
Highest-speed highest-legibility handwriters join only some letters, not all of them — making only the easiest joins, and skipping the rest. Further, highest-speed highest-legibility handwriters tend to use print-like shapes for letters whose printed and cursive forms disagree — the results often look startlingly like the Italic style that Ms. Florey’s and other recent books on handwriting endorse (and probably would look even more like Italic if people writing this way had received training in doing so instead of having it either ignored or discouraged.)
Can some devotee of cursive please explain to me why (as far as I know) those who advocate cursive haven’t taken into account the higher speed (as well as greater legibility) that documentably result from using print-like letter-shapes and encouraging (rather than disallowing) the occasional pen-lift wherever this permits greater speed and/or legibility than requiring a join?
If moving diagonally poses such vast difficulties for children (as Lori wishes us to believe), can Lori or anyone else explain why children have no difficulty whatever with reaching diagonally to take a toy or cookie from the right or left side of a shelf above eye-level or a table below eye-level?
I’ve never seen a child who could move only horizontally or vertically but not diagonally — have you? However, as someone who’s taught Italic handwriting for years to little ones (as well as older children, teens, and adults) who’d failed and wept over “Handwriting [allegedly] without Tears,” by now I’ve seen many, many students who found the shapes and movements required by “Handwriting with[out] Tears” and other print-then-cursive programs far more difficult than anything whatsoever in Italic.