Fluid, fast handwriting skills help students learn a variety of subjects, according to researchers. Newsweek reports:
. . . from kindergarten through fourth grade, kids think and write at the same time. (Only later is mental composition divorced from the physical process of handwriting.) If they have to struggle to remember how to make their letters, their ability to express themselves will suffer. The motions have to be automatic, both for expressive writing and for another skill that students will need later in life, note-taking. “Measures of speed among elementary-school students are good predictors of the quality and quantity of their writing in middle school,” says Stephen Peverly, a professor of psychology and education at Columbia University’s Teachers College. “I don’t care about legibility.”
Educators “are trying to wedge (penmanship) back into the curriculum,” Newsweek says.
Fluid handwriting joins fluid mastery of phonics and fluid mastery of number facts as a key to learning.
“I don’t care about legibility.”
Pity my elementary school thought otherwise,back in the paleolithic age (1950`s). Speed did not matter until shorthand class ten or eleven years after flunking penmanship in 1st grade.
I am thankful that I was early enough to miss a lot (unfortunately, not all) of the “let`s experiment, they`re only kids after all” junk, while late enough to also miss (mostly) corporal punishment for lessons. Still amazed that returning to phonics, learning how math works, and other things is now experimental.
I have personally developed a course on Handwriting Improvement after observing my own handwriting over a period of many years. My theory is that if one person can write well then why can’t the others? I teach people the rules developed by me known as the 7 Golden Rules of beautiful handwriting. Let people send me a scanned copy of their present handwriting and I can help them improve their handwriting in just one session. Then it is only practise that is required on a daily basis. The surprising part is that I get better and quicker results with adults and older students. What about fees? Well, it is voluntary. If you get results you pay or else take it for free. So, why wait, take that pen of yours and start writing the right way along with me.
Regards and happy writing,
Alex Mathew
goodwriting@hotmail.com
Here’s a scenario and an associated train of thought. I’m in a fast food restaurent and observe a worker rather listlessly mopping the floor. She shows no enthusiasm, no diligence or conscientiousness. And she’s not doing a very good job on the floor. As a math teacher I know what the trouble is – the lack of long division in the schools now days.
Did I say long division? I meant handwriting.
Am I dreaming? I’m not sure. As I understand it the idea of mental discipline was debunked early in the twentieth century. Research was done, and the conclusion was very clear. Learning x does not help you learn y. Neither long division nor careful handwriting will transfer to learning history or doing a good job in mopping a floor. And as I understand it, the idea of mental discipline was ripe for debunking. Scholars in the 1800’s insisted that learning Greek, Latin, and math, and whatever other classics there were at the time, led to all sorts of good things. The mind was like a muscle, they said. It needed exercise. But now we know better.
But I’m not sure. My hypothesis is this. Careful teaching and disciplined learning leads to productive mental habits. Productive mental habits do transfer to many situations, including college study and mopping floors.
I don’t see what the problem is. Yes, handwriting is important, but schools are covering it adequately. The only real problem are kids with dysgraphia, an often undiagnosed learning disability that produces precisely the problems mentioned.
My grandpa had beautiful Spencerian script. I, like many oldtime wireless operators, print.
I never had good handwriting in school. Then, in the process of getting an engineering degree (which requires most things to be printed), I completely lost the ability to write longhand.
Even my printing is pretty poor, since I go days at a time without writing anything by hand (my typing, on the other hand, is pretty good on most days).
It has been thirty years and I’ve never noticed any problems. If I have to write something by hand, I just print. If I concentrate, I can make it legible. Half the time, it’s a form where they want you to print anyway. If I’m going to take notes or something like that - where speed is helpful - I type (and I can type much faster than anyone can write).
Longhand is overrated and I predict its demise in the next fifty years.
This reminds me so much of the bad old days of elementary school. My handwriting is far from perfect, but adequate. Most teachers were abhorrent of my handwriting; they especially HATED they way I held the pencil/pen. In second grade, it got quite amusing: one teacher had me visit an eye doctor, for surely the reason I was holding my pen wrong was my eyesight! Another put a block on my pencil to get me to write “correctly”; a block I took off the pencil whenever she turned her back.
Only my beloved fourth grade teacher did absolutely nothing about my handwriting or pencil-holding. (I suspect that said something about the generational difference; the teachers who were most apt to berate me for penmanship were older, while my fourth grade teacher was totally new to teaching and quite young.)
I had a fifth grade teacher attempt to flunk me based solely on penmanship; it was for my own good, she said, because I wouldn’t get past sixth grade with my handwriting. (Boy, she’d be terrified to know that I have a B.A. in History now!)
My parents too were worried until one day my father had to take some papers to HQ for a general to sign. He signed the papers, and my father noticed the general was holding his pen exactly as I did, and that his handwriting was about the same level of terrible as mine. From that day forward he never fussed about it.
I wonder why we’re teaching any kind of handwriting at all. We should be teaching keyboarding skills, since most kids will be working primarily on computers and smart boards, by the time they reach fourth grade.
By the time today’s 5-year-olds get to high school, the pencil and notebook may be obsolete.
Anyone who has taught on the border knows that schools in Mexico do not teach cursive. When Mexican students come to school in the U.S. they not only must take notes in a foreign language, but may have trouble interpreting instructions written in cursive.
This is to the person from Bell Work Online Staff. I think you are making an erroneous assumption that all schools will have this technology. In my school district we have portables which are notorious for getting broken into, despite having security systems installed. I also know that in my school district many of the students do not have access to computers and/or smart boards until middle or high school.
(Only later is mental composition divorced from the physical process of handwriting.)
Wrong, actually. Writing IS thinking, all the way through one’s life.
The typical native born 12 year old makes very few grammatical errors when speaking.
Have that child write it down on paper and you’ll find all kinds of errors.
Why?
Because speech is closer to the speed of thought.
Forced to slow down the process by the act of writing, a student will forget what the first part of the sentence is about by the time he reaches the end.
A major part of learning how to write well is learning how to overcome the speed difference by training the mind to be like a tape recorder. Compose the idea, record it, play it back, transcribe it.
So, yes, the idea that faster writing might produce better writing isn’t silly at all.
Bell Work Online -
I work “primarily on computers” and I still need good handwriting, as things like notebooks and sticky notes, as well as white boards, are alive and well even in the most high-tech businesses.
Keyboarding is a skill which should be taught along with, not instead of, quick and legible handwriting, especially since things like muscle memory are best established early.
Interestingly enough, Brian, research shows that it does if you tell kids it can. I don’t know if that’s more of believing what people who care about you believe or “turning on the lightbulb” for kids - when they see that they’re capable of a skill in one area, they are confident they can apply it to another. Many times if you explain something … so I wonder if I explained this idea to my students, about handwriting and thought, if it might help them think about their own thinking. I teach 9th graders; we’ll see. Definite food for thought, though.
Thanks for the article link - in reading it, this struck me:
A new study to be released this month by Vanderbilt University professor Steve Graham finds that a majority of primary-school teachers believe that students with fluent handwriting produced written assignments that were superior in quantity and quality and resulted in higher grades—aside from being easier to read.
The new study reports on teacher beliefs - it says nothing about a correlation between handwriting and any other skill - just anecdotal responses. Where the quantitative research?
I find the article very misleading - many the published paper will provide the evidence.
Sorry about the typos - I really should remember to edit my work before I hit “submit!”
Oh, there’s no question that teachers grade based on handwriting quality. In fact, the wonder is when teachers grade on anything all all related to academic ability.
I work at Microsoft. The floor I work on is split between the people who make Microsoft Word and the people who make OneNote, a software program for taking notes. Every person on the floor is a computer programmer of some kind. The average office contains 3 different computers. The entire purpose of that floor of the building is to find increasingly sophisticated ways to write everything - from memos to letters to 1,000-page technical manuals - on a computer.
The supply room for the floor contains stacks of sticky notes, notebooks, and ink pens, all of which have to be replaced regularly.
There is no substitute for paper, and as such, no substitute for knowing how to write on paper.
I just love when people like Cal make such wide-sweeping generalizations about a group of people.
Learning x does not help you learn y. Neither long division nor careful handwriting will transfer to learning history or doing a good job in mopping a floor.
Umm, quite often, in learning history, you need to take notes. Fast but readable handwriting is useful for that. In my history classes I would write all the time.
Handwriting may not be a help in mopping a floor. But in a job that involves any writing, it’s a useful skill to have. I’ve used handwriting when working as a checkout operator and as a nurse’s aide
There are core skills such as maths and reading and writing that are used in a wide variety of different areas of life.
I think that in this day and age, handwriting is a lost cause! Any more people use the computers for everything. Need to write a note to the neighbor; just drop an email or type a note to put in their box. I think that handwriting is very important, especially in the developmental stages of learning phonemes and such; however, any more computers are taking the place of the need for pen and paper. I think that teacher’s do an adequate job of teaching students something that’s being lost in our culture today.
I was watching a movie from the 1990s this weekend with my wife. The 1990s are so close and yet so far.
When parents in the movie got a letter (via the US Mail) from their college student son, we both remarked how odd that seems today. I’ll bet 99% of college student - parent exchanges were emails or text messages this year. Who would want to wait three days for their message to get through? And PAY for postage?
We laughed again when someone pulled out a clunky old SLR film camera to take a snapshot. Then a character pulled out a big, bulky cell phone and we REALLY cracked up.
I know you’re proud of your penmanship, but it’s a lost cause. Printing is fine for all daily use and I don’t think it will be long before longhand will be illegible to the younger generation.
Bell Work Online Staff: “I wonder why we’re teaching any kind of handwriting at all.”
Try setting up and solving an interesting integral in a limited space on a test or on the tools available on the vast majority of computers, then get back to me about how useless legible handwriting is.
FWIW, I use computers almost exclusively for extended writing. For note-taking, outlining, math, brainstorming — anything other than formal prose, really — I find writing by hand to be indispensable.
Cal: “Yes, handwriting is important, but schools are covering it adequately. The only real problem are kids with dysgraphia, an often undiagnosed learning disability that produces precisely the problems mentioned.”
While I can’t speak to “schools”, I can say that the schools I’ve seen locally do a terrible job of teaching writing. And it is, I think, precisely the attitude reflected in “Bell Work Online Staff”’s comment that leads teachers to be unwilling to spend the necessary time on the subject.
In particular, my experience is that boys have a much bigger problem with legibility and speed than do girls. (I think my experience is also the conventional wisdom, though I’d be happy to see any evidence either way.) When added to an increasing emphasis on writing over math, this can result in severely disparate impact on the education of young boys.
Kids need to be fluent in a form of written communication in order to take notes, organize thoughts, and communicate ideas. Whicever form is most optimally functional for the child is the one that should be used. If a child shows motor dysfunction or has dysfluent handwriting, decisions must be made on an individual basis - the question is what the general school policy should be.
I teach in an elementary school and I see no signs that paper is becoming obsolete - even though there is extensive typing instruction. Also, multisensory teaching methods, used for reading instruction, often involve the physical act of writing, whether it be skywriting, tracing on a dry erase board, or doing “dictation” with pencil and paper. Striking a single key on a keyboard does not help to cement the form of a letter or its sound in memory. All keys on most keyboards feel interchangeable. Therefore, for the beginning reader, physically writing out the letters does have a measureable benefit (assuming letters are practiced correctly - writing a “d” backwards while saying the “b” sound only cements confusion).
On the other hand, when attempting to spell accurately, fluent typing is highly advantageous. Children who struggle with motor memory do not produce handwritten letters automatically. This causes them to have to focus attention and working memory space to letter formation, decreasing the amount of attention, working memory, and energy available for word retrieval, syntax, idea formation, and organization. Often legibility suffers too, unless the child is solely copying and not producing the language simultaneously. At that point, fluent typing is a huge time saver, since it takes one precise keystroke to produce a letter. Some typists can do that with two or three fingers (I know kids who can hunt and peck better than many adult folks can type). The key word is, again, fluent. Dysfluent typing takes away attention and working memory from language production - though often takes away less than dysfluent handwriting does.
So based on all of this, I would suggest that students practice handwriting during reading class as they are learning sounds, syllables, spelling rules and so on. They should also be playing with learn-to-type programs on the computer - there are many designed for children, some of which even review beginning reading skills. When they have to write, they should use whatever method facilitates better production. And they should only be graded on the neatness of polished, finished products.
I think that handwriting is important as long as they can read their own. Since we are moving into a technology based world we will be using computers here soon for most things. I know now that in all my college classes I use the computer to type notes. I am hardly ever writing, except for on tests.
I’m pretty convinced that handwriting is important. But I am having trouble figuring out what are good materials for helping support what my son is doing in school. Unfortunately, he didn’t really learn to write in cursive in second grade. I think it was because he was in a small, alternative school and the rest of the small class was girls who all seemed to already know how to write cursive. The teacher never really took the time to teach him. So now we’re in third grade in a public school and it seems that all the kids were supposed to learn how to write cursive in second grade and now I am supposed to teach my son. His teacher is fantastic. But I am struggling to figure out how to help him. Of course we are copying and practicing, but the materials I’ve found aren’t so great. Anyone have suggestions? P.S. I don’t think I can teach him the ‘italic’ style because part of learning cursive is learning how to *read* cursive.
Jade - Handwriting Without Tears is the program that our occupational therapists prefer. There is a print and a cursive version.