My experiences with handwriting lessons in elementary school were frustrating at best, emotionally scarring at worst. It sounds dramatic, but how would you feel if, in kindergarten, you painstakingly wrote your name on the chalkboard and marveled at its neatness, only to have your teacher walk by and erase it because you used all uppercase letters? Wouldn't it sting just a little if you received a big red F on a cursive test in second grade because you couldn't master the curly Qs and Zs? However, those situations were rare, because penmanship lessons themselves were rare—I spent much more time in the computer lab conquering the keyboard with typing games. But before technology made paper and pens supposedly obsolete, handwriting exercises were considered of the utmost importance. Now younger generations type and text to communicate, and even those of us who grew up writing everything struggle to decipher our increasingly messy scrawls. There's no question that handwriting isn't what it used to be, but just how much has it declined, and, perhaps more importantly, just how much should we care? Making Room for Improvements
Though people tend to blame computers for handwriting's decline, the fall began much earlier with the advent of typewriters in the work place. In fact, an essay called "The Decline of Handwriting," published in a 1965 issue of The Elementary School Journal, lamented handwriting's "all-time low" in the United States. But handwriting underwent changes even before then when it transformed from ornate, calligraphic penscript to the less flowery form of cursive we're more familiar with today. If you remember learning penmanship in school, you were most likely taught Palmer cursive, a style created in the mid-1890s that allowed for quicker and more efficient writing (read: it has less curls and swirls) than its predecessors. Teachers passed down this new cursive to students in thirty-minute to hour-long lessons. But when typewriters were invented and seemed to be the wave of the future, penmanship time was significantly reduced to allow more time for focusing on typing skills. And in the 1990s, when computers gained popularity both in the office and at home, teaching handwriting became even less of a priority.
Why Teachers Can't Prioritize Penmanship
Today, handwriting lessons are a small part of the syllabus. A 2008 survey of primary-grade teachers in the United States showed that while nine out of ten teachers cover penmanship in their lesson plans, they spend, on average, less than fifteen minutes on it per day. Only 12 percent of them felt sufficiently trained to even teach the subject. But its lack of priority isn't the teachers' faults, nor is technology solely to blame; we can also point the finger at standardized tests. A government report in the 1980s called A Nation at Risk sparked the emphasis on standardized testing, and it only intensified under the Bush administration. These days, many schools' only hope of getting funded and fulfilling the needs of students and faculty is students' performing well on such tests. You can't blame schools for pushing reading and math over writing. After all, once you're done with school, how often do you handwrite anything? A 2010 IPA TouchPoints survey out of the UK found that adults spend a mere 1 percent of their communication time writing letters. Four percent use texts instead. Since kids now grow up with computers and will continue to use them personally and professionally as they grow older, focusing on skills besides handwriting makes sense. But with that choice comes consequences—namely, entire generations of people who write in chicken scratch. What Handwriting Is Today—and What We Stand to Lose
How bad has it gotten? Some students' handwriting is so illegible, they're allowed to take the written-essay portion of standardized tests (which the National Assessment of Educational Progress will start phasing out in 2011) on computers. Kids who never learn to write well don't get better at it with age, and depending on their careers as adults, that's potentially dangerous. For instance, a 2006 study by the Institute of Medicine revealed that an average of one person a day is given an incorrect prescription in U.S. hospitals. Even scarier, about 7,000 people die every year from such mistakes. Plus, research shows that kids benefit from learning good penmanship at a young age. One study out of Vanderbilt University had first graders with demonstrated writing difficulties take fifteen-minute handwriting lessons three days a week for nine weeks. By the end of the study, they wrote twice as quickly, constructed sentences more competently, and—here's the most surprising result—expressed themselves more complexly when asked to freewrite. The same held true when researchers tested the kids six months later.
But the positive impact wasn't entirely due to an emphasis on neat handwriting, according to lead researcher Steve Graham. Graham told the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette in 2006, "It is not cursive that is critical, but being able to fluently and legibly write." Considering the things that can go wrong when handwriting's bad—pharmacists misreading doctors' orders, mail going undelivered in the post office, job seekers being turned down for indecipherable applications, etc.—there's clearly something to be said for neatness. Evolving with the Times
There's also something to be said for handwriting's nostalgic factor, its personal touch. "I used to change my handwriting the way I changed my hair color," writes Kitty Burns Florey in her book Script & Scribble. "At some level, the way you wrote was a part of you, and was judged. That identification with my own script never left me." I feel the same way, despite my bad experiences with penmanship lessons. A handwritten note moves you in the way an email never can, and it would be sad to lose one for the sake of the other. But even though none of us are writing as much or as well as we used to, such changes are just the reality of progress; I don't think it means handwriting's lost forever. Its purpose has changed, and it will continue to change as time goes on. As Rosemary Sassoon writes in her book Handwriting of the Twentieth Century, "If we accept that handwriting is going to be more for personal than public use and scrutiny, then surely we should be thinking about what kind of handwriting is needed." We can afford to let go of flowery cursive a bit, but not without first teaching today's youth how to write well and for longer than just a few minutes a day. After all, they'll be writing our prescriptions someday WARM REGARDS, Akhtar khatri
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