The Handwriting Is on the Wall

This is off The Washington Post:

The computer keyboard helped kill shorthand, and now it's threatening to finish off longhand.

When handwritten essays were introduced on the SAT exams for the class of 2006, just 15 percent of the almost 1.5 million students wrote their answers in cursive. The rest? They printed. Block letters.

And those college hopefuls are just the first edge of a wave of U.S. students who no longer get much handwriting instruction in the primary grades, frequently 10 minutes a day or less. As a result, more and more students struggle to read and write cursive.

It is amazing what the computer keyboard can kill. Cursive writing is an interesting form of writing. It is certainly very stylistic, reflecting an individual's personality and even emotional being at the particular moment of writing the cursive letters. It can certainly be a bitch to read. My own penmanship style is actually a combination of cursive and block letters. And now we have the demise of cursive writing here. Continuing with the Post article:

At Keene Mill Elementary l in Springfield, Debbie Mattocks teaches cursive once a week to her gifted-and-talented group of third-graders -- mainly so they can read it. All their poems and stories are all typed. Children in Fairfax County schools are taught keyboarding beginning in kindergarten.

"I can't think of any other place you need cursive as an adult other than to sign your name," she said. "Cursive -- that is so low on the priority list, we really could care less. We are much more concerned that these kids pass their SOLs [standardized tests], and that doesn't require a bit of cursive."

Older students who never mastered handwriting say it doesn't affect their grades. "A lot of kids have just awful handwriting. . . . Teachers don't take off points for poor handwriting," said Matt Paragamian, a 10th-grader at St. Albans School in Northwest Washington. Many of his classmates take notes in class on their own laptops and do homework on computers.

Until the 1970s, penmanship was a separate daily lesson through sixth grade, said Dennis Williams, national product manager for Zaner-Bloser Handwriting, the most widely used penmanship curriculum. At its peak in the 1940s and '50s, most teachers insisted on as much as two hours a week, but a 2003 Vanderbilt University survey of primary-grade teachers found that most now spend 10 minutes a day or less on the subject. To adapt to this new reality, the Zaner-Bloser method has been changed to a 15-minute daily plan.

If I have to do any type of brainstorming, outlining, or even writing a rough draft of an essay, I have to write it out in longhand. It may be a little slower, but it also gives me time to compose my own thoughts on the issues. I even take notes in longhand for classes--it is far easier for me than typing on a computer keyboard. While I am a fairly decent typist, I'm also a little more exacting in my typing skills. Not only would I be typing out my thoughts, but I would also be editing the very words I've typed for spelling and grammatical errors. For my blog, I type everything out. And for your information, I learned how to touch-type in high school.

In some ways, longhand writing even helps in thinking. According to the Post:

The loss of handwriting also may be a cognitive opportunity missed. The neurological process that directs thought, through fingers, into written symbols is a highly sophisticated one. Several academic studies have found that good handwriting skills at a young age can help children express their thoughts better -- a lifelong benefit. Children who don't learn correct technique find it harder to write by hand, so they avoid it. Schools that do teach handwriting often stop after third grade -- right after kids learn cursive. By the time computers are more widely used in classrooms for writing, perhaps in fourth or fifth grade, many children already have decided they don't like to write.

In one of the studies, Vanderbilt University professor Steve Graham, who studies the acquisition of writing, experimented with a group of first-graders in Prince George's County who could write only 10 to 12 letters per minute. The kids were given 15 minutes of handwriting instruction three times a week. After nine weeks, they had doubled their writing speed and their expressed thoughts were more complex. He also found corresponding increases in their sentence construction skills.

But Graham worries that students who remain printers, rather than writing in cursive, need more time to take notes or write essays for the SAT. Teachers may say they don't deduct for bad handwriting in class, but research tells another story, he said.

When adults are given the same composition written in good handwriting and poor handwriting, "they still give lower grades for ideation and quality of writing if the text is less legible," he said.

Indeed, the SAT essays written in cursive had slightly higher average scores than those written in print, according to the College Board.

The best thing to do here is to keep instructing a combination of longhand writing and typing skills to the children until after the sixth grade. Allow those kids who wish to write in longhand to continue writing in longhand. Allow the kids who wish to use the keyboard to use the keyboard. If there is research showing that kids will improve their thinking skills through longhand writing, and then continue the longhand writing until sixth grade. It is better to have a child who can think and express complex thoughts, rather than regurgitate something through the printer and possibly the Internet.

But our educational system is not a system to produce thinkers here, but rather to regurgitate standardized answers to standardized test scores.