Handwriting today
On the whole, handwriting today is in bad shape—partly because good handwriting is no longer taught as an admirable skill, and in part because people more than ever rely on keyboards to produce written communications. I have a post on italic handwriting and how to learn it, and Jack of Amsterdam points out this article by Emily Yoffe in Slate:
If you have school-age children, you may have noticed their handwriting is terrible. They may communicate incessantly via written word—they can text with their heads in a paper bag—but put a pen in their hands and they can barely write a sentence in decent cursive. It’s not going to be easy to decipher one either, if they think cursive might as well be cuneiform.
My daughter is in the eighth grade, and I realized several years ago that her rudimentary block-letter printing was actually never going to improve because handwriting had been chopped from the school curriculum. Children today learn basic printing in first and second grade, then get cursory instruction in cursive in the third grade—my daughter was given a cursive workbook and told to figure it out herself. She dutifully filled in every page, but she never understood how these looping letters were supposed to become her handwriting, so they never did.
I was appalled that she seemed stuck with this crude penmanship. After all, I had spent hours in Miss Mackenzie’s fifth-grade class perfecting my Palmer-derived hand. Surely part of being literate was having decent handwriting! But I was hardly one to talk. As with the human body, over the decades people’s cursive tends toward collapse. The loops become lumps and eventually degenerate into illegibility. My script piled up on the page, letters smashed against one another at different angles like a series of derailments.
Miss Mackenzie is long gone, but I decided to see if both my daughter and I could improve our handwriting. I was hopeful for her but dubious about myself. At her age, she’s in the neuron-growing business: Certainly she could master this basic skill. But at my age, I assumed handwriting was one of those things that was so fixed it couldn’t be fixed.
We went to the Maryland farmhouse home of Nan Jay Barchowsky, 79, who for almost 30 years has been a handwriting consultant with a line of instructional materials she developed. A calligrapher and artist, she started teaching handwriting at a local school, basing her letters on italic script—the elegant, quick form developed in early-16th-century Italy.
Barchowsky sat my daughter and me at a slanted writing desk and dictated a paragraph for us to write. She then looked at our work and tried to be diplomatic. She noted that my loops were too big and tended to get tangled in the lines of writing above and below, the sizes of my letters were inconsistent, they slanted in every direction, and certain ones—like R—were illegible while others got omitted altogether. She asked, "Do you ever go back and find you are unable to read your notes?" Yes, all the time!
Barchowsky said my daughter’s handwriting would look more sophisticated, and be both faster and more legible, if her letter size was more regular and she learned to create joins within her words. My daughter acknowledged her frustration. "My handwriting makes me look so young," she complained. "Also it’s so big that on tests and reports I can’t fit in what I want to say."
This Washington Post article describes the national abandonment of penmanship in recent decades. Until the 1970s it was taught as a separate subject through sixth grade. Children in mid-20thcentury America spent two hours a week on it. Today the teaching of it generally ceases after third grade, and a 2003 survey found that during the years it’s taught, it’s for 10 minutes or less a day…
I maintain that poor typing skills are far more detrimental today than bad handwriting.
scott
18 September 2009 at 11:31 am
As a lefty, I hated, hated, hated learning the rightward tyranny of cursive. I’m a writer by trade, but if it hadn’t been for the rise of word processors, I would never have continued writing. Is it really a big deal if cursive is a lost art? I had to find my own hybrid handwriting style in order to write by hand at any speed. The only big deal was the apoplexy of my teachers and my mother…
Seamus
18 September 2009 at 1:23 pm
If you enjoy good handwriting (writing it or reading it), it does seem a shame to abandon the teaching of good penmanship—by which I mean italic cursive. Left-handed writers can write comfortably by using a regular (square-tip) italic pen and orienting the paper on its side, top to the right, and then writing vertically down the page (but with the writing oriented so that top is right, down is left). The hand doesn’t get into the ink and can be held at a comfortable angle. It takes about a week to master the new writing position, but then it’s all good.
LeisureGuy
18 September 2009 at 1:54 pm
I had hours of penmanship in early grades in a small town public school and hated it so much that once I took my small rounded-tips school scissors and cut off almost half of my ruled tablet paper in first grade and what a relief that I had fewer circles, slanted lines, etc., to make!
Unfortunately, it was easy for my teacher to see what I’d done when she gathered all the papers…and mine was so short in comparison to my school chums’.
She handed back to me my paper and required I do the exercise on the reverse of the sheet, too. I was crushed. I could see spatially that I was having to do more lines of penmanship than if I had not been so “clever” as to cut some of my sheet off!
Taylor
20 September 2009 at 1:30 am
For me, it’s less the orientation of the paper and more that, no matter how you slice it, a lefty ends up pushing the pen to make all those loops, and pens don’t seem to like that! I know there are left-handed nibs, etc., but I think I will leave the art of handwriting to those who do not end up with ink all over the side of their pinkies!
Seamus
22 September 2009 at 4:33 pm
Righties also push the pen. Making an “o” pretty much requires it—the difference between handwriting and calligraphic writing, in which every stroke is pulled.
I watched lefties write at speed with fountain pens down the page with nary a problem. They were using “right-handed” nibs—the same stub point as the righties were using. No problems at all, using that technique.
If you’ve actually tried it, I would be interested to hear what went wrong.
LeisureGuy
22 September 2009 at 4:52 pm
Tell you what–if I can get my hands on a fountain pen, I will try definitely it with that to see if it’s different and let you know what happens.
I’ve tried every configuration I can come up with with other kinds of pens, and it’s simply a matter of the slowness and awkwardness of writing with a hand crooked over that gets me–my elbow is jammed up against my side; my hand aches after a few minutes; the side of my hand gets inky. Even though, if I do say so myself, I’m no slouch in terms of dexterity–I play gypsy jazz guitar (right-handed, oddly enough) and practice sleight of hand. It’s difficult to explain how bothersome it is to those who aren’t left-handed! I’m impressed with those who can do it, though!
It would be fun (I’m assuming you’re right-handed) to trade experiments–try making a whole line (or a few) of o’s from right to left without lifting pen from paper, and you may well run into many of the physical difficulties that are so tough to explain.
cheers!
Seamus
22 September 2009 at 8:11 pm
I have tried writing left-handed, and I understand the difficulties that you encounter when you keep the paper in the traditional orientation. But in the method I’ve described, there’s no cramping because your hand is relaxed and in a normal position. You don’t really have to wait for a fountain pen—grab a ballpoint or rollerball or pencil and try it. You’ll see that your hand rests comfortably on the unwritten part of the page and your grip is normal as you write vertically down the paper, with top to the right and bottom to the left.
LeisureGuy
23 September 2009 at 7:06 am