Writing in cursive

Handwriting without tears

In a fast paced world with texting, tablets, and voice activated smart phones how important is the actual practice of writing? Our next guest says it's more important that you might think. In fact, she has tips on how to encourage our kids to learn and continue writing in cursive.

Erin Dolin is a presenter for Handwriting Without Tears and an occupational therapist who wants us to take pen to paper.

Handwriting in the 21st Century?

Handwriting in the 21st Century? An Educational Summit

On January 23, 2012, 150 researchers and education thought leaders convened for Handwriting in the 21st Century? An Educational Summit to discuss the role of handwriting instruction in the 21st century classroom. Presenters shared cross-disciplinary handwriting research and attendees voiced their opinions about whether—and how—this skill should be taught. A white paper summarizing the research presented at the Summit, published by Saperstein Associates, Inc., is now available for download.

Handwriting in the Digital Age

A very interesting radio interview on the subject! Just click on the title above to go to the webpage, then click on 'Listen'.

The Twenty-Six Old Characters

A neat film from Sheaffer in 1947 about the development of writing.

Handwriting Is History

A fascinating article on the present -- and future -- demise of handwriting. But we'll still want to collect fountain pens!

Mourning the Death of Handwriting

From the upcoming issue of Time magazine.



"I can't remember how to write a capital Z in cursive. The rest of my letters are shaky and stiff, my words slanted in all directions. It's not for lack of trying. In grade school I was one of those insufferable girls who used pink pencils and dotted their i's with little circles. I experimented with different scripts, and for a brief period I even took the time to make two-story a's, with the fancy overhang used in most fonts (including this magazine's). But everything I wrote, I wrote in print. I am a member of Gen Y, the generation that shunned cursive. And now there is a group coming after me, a boom of tech-savvy children who don't remember life before the Internet and who text-message nearly as much as they talk. They have even less need for good penmanship. We are witnessing the death of handwriting."

Click the title to read the entire article.

...and then we have...

Air Writing: Next Big Thing in Cell Phones?

"Forget fumbling with tiny cell phone keys. A prototype of a new application allows cell phone users to write short notes in the air and send them automatically to an e-mail address.

This represents just one possible step toward allowing people to naturally merge the real world with the information power of the Internet. Travelers and other mobile users could air-write notes to themselves rather than have to text on the run.

"By holding the phone like a pen, you can write short messages or draw simple diagrams in the air," said Sandip Agrawal, an electrical and computer engineering student at Duke University in North Carolina."

Full article here.

...and something of a counterbalance to the post below...

iPhone Cursive Writing App Hits the App Store

"Deep Pocket Series has unveiled ABC Cursive Writing 1.0, a handwriting improvement app for the iPhone and iPod touch. The app was designed to help children learn the basics of cursive writing for the first time, as well as help adults improve their handwriting skills."

Read the full article here.

E-mail, texting push penmanship aside | CITIZEN-TIMES.com | Asheville Citizen-Times

"Have you heard that some people believe it would be a good thing if cursive writing — or script, if you will — went the way of the horse and buggy? All those years of learning and struggling for a beautiful “hand” will be for naught.

But think of it: When was the last time you wrote cursive except to sign a check or legal document or pen a note to your grandmother? And when is the last time you got an actual hand-written letter?

Most of us write on keyboards, or we Twitter or send phone messages now. It's all very legible, and the recipient can read it with no trouble. Word processing creates a level playing field for those of us whose writing isn't so great."

Read the full article here.

The Writing On The Wall

...and here we have an earlier Newsweek article from 2007, which takes a different tack to the post just below it...

Good penmanship is more than just a quaint skill. A new study shows that it's a key part of learning.

Raina Kelley
NEWSWEEK
From the magazine issue dated Nov 12, 2007

For most people, the written thank-you is your best bet for an expression of warm, heartfelt thanks. The last thing you want is for someone to be disappointed when her hand-knit scarf is acknowledged with a loud, animated e-card." So says the Emily Post Institute, founded in 1946 and still an authority on principles of politeness in today's digital age. And while, in the era of Gawker and YouTube, its earnest advice may seem old-fashioned and out of touch, it does raise the question: does handwriting have a practical use today, or is it just a relic of a bygone era when children listened to their elders? Certainly, notes written by hand have the retro appeal of, say, a gift of homemade apple butter, but apart from the odd scribble of gratitude or condolence, do we really need it?

Many educators say yes, for reasons having nothing to do with thank-you notes. Handwriting is important because research shows that when children are taught how to do it, they are also being taught how to learn and how to express themselves. 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 College Board recognized this in 2005 when it added a handwritten essay to the SAT—an effort to reverse the de-emphasis on handwriting and composition that may be adversely affecting children's learning all the way through high school and beyond.

How much instruction do kids need in cursive writing? In the 1960s and 1970s, the Zaner-Bloser Co., which has been publishing penmanship curriculum since 1904, recommended 45 minutes a day. By the 1980s, it was suggesting just 15 minutes. Today the average is more like 10 minutes, according to Handwriting Without Tears, whose penmanship curriculum is used by 5,000 school districts around the country. "We haven't added more hours to the school day or the school year, yet we've added more content, and something had to give," says Dennis Williams, national product manager for handwriting at Zaner-Bloser. In Zaner-Bloser's 2005 national survey, a majority of primary-school teachers said they spent an hour or less on handwriting a week. And Graham's study found that only 12 percent of teachers had actually taken a course in how to teach it. And, he says, educators are noticing a significant decline in the quality of students' handwriting and an increase in the frequency of problems such as letter reversals. We've forgotten one of the first rules of pedagogy: mind your p's and q's.

All this matters, educators say, because evidence is growing that handwriting fluency is a fundamental building block of learning. Emily Knapton, director of program development at Handwriting Without Tears, believes that "when kids struggle with handwriting, it filters into all their academics. Spelling becomes a problem; math becomes a problem because they reverse their numbers. All of these subjects would be much easier for these kids to learn if handwriting was an automatic process." That concern, in part, prompted the addition of a written essay to the SAT, which is graded for content, though not legibility. "If you put something like a writing test on the SAT, children's skill level will begin to be addressed," says Ed Hardin, a senior content specialist at the College Board. The trickle-down effect to middle schools should eventually reach third grade, where the trouble so often begins.

No one is predicting, or even recommending, a return to the days when children obsessively practiced the curlicues on their Palmer Method capitals. Beauty seems to be less important than fluidity and speed. Graham's work, and others', has shown that 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."

Predictions of handwriting's demise didn't begin with the computer; they date back to the introduction of the Remington typewriter in 1873. But for at least a generation, penmanship has seemed a quaint and, well … schoolmarmish subject to be emphasizing. Now, backed by new research, educators are trying to wedge it back into the curriculum. After all, no one has suggested that the invention of the calculator means we don't have to teach kids how to add, and spelling is still a prized skill in the era of spell check. If we stop teaching penmanship, it will not only hasten the dreaded day when brides acknowledge wedding gifts by e-mail; the bigger danger is, they'll be composed even more poorly than they already are.

The Curse of Cursive

Well, I liked the penultimate sentence.

Penmanship, like hieroglyphics and the IBM Selectric, has lost its purpose. Let's erase it for good.

Jessica Bennett
NEWSWEEK
From the magazine issue dated Feb 23, 2009

In all my years of school, there was only one time I cried in class. It was the first week of first grade—Mrs. Scougie's room—and we were learning cursive. Q. I hated the letter. But it wasn't that I couldn't get the strokes right. It was the way I held my pencil: with four fingers around the base, not three—an apparent crime against writing protocol. And though I still write that way, thank you very much, I haven't used script since elementary school. I type, I Twitter, I Facebook and IM. I e-mail co-workers who sit feet from my desk, and text rather than call. The only time I pen a handwritten letter is when I write to my grandmother. So when I hear people say that penmanship is dead, my response: it's about time.

It's precisely people like me who prompted Kitty Burns Florey, a longtime copy editor, to write "Script and Scribble," in which she argues that there's simply too much to be lost by allowing the written word to fade into irrelevance. Penmanship, Florey believes, is about more than pretty loops and strokes. It's a way to understand our past, reflect ourselves in the present and maybe even improve our cognition in the future. "I know that in the digital age, forming perfectly sculpted letters on paper can seem pointless," says Florey, 65. "But I think there are a lot of people who just can't stand to see handwriting die. And it's not just old people!"

No, but they may be out-of-touch people. The folks who want to make us script conscripts have formulated all sorts of rationalizations. Chief among them: education. Some studies have shown a link between good handwriting and improved academic performance. A recent one found that the majority of primary-school teachers believe that students with fluent handwriting produce better work, though it seems just as likely that the teachers might "believe" that because legible handwriting makes their jobs easier. And you could just as easily argue that cursive can be a disincentive to learning for Q-phobic kids like me (though even I believe kids should still learn block lettering). That was the case for Anne Trubek's 9-year-old son, who struggled so much with penmanship that he now hates writing altogether. "His school's policy is that you must learn cursive because you need to learn how to write and read it," says Trubek, who is a professor of English at Oberlin College. "I understand that you need to know how to write, but I think cursive could really just go." Teachers seem to think so, too. Penmanship was once taught for close to an hour each day; it now warrants less than 15 minutes, according to a 2007 study. Keyboarding has replaced cursive as the priority in most schools, and most kids don't use it when they have the chance: in 2006, just 15 percent of SAT takers used cursive on the written test.

Then there's the history argument: if we can't read script, we'll lose a link to our past. How will we study the Declaration of Independence, or make sense of letters from the Civil War? Will we no longer be able to translate the diaries of our ancestors? They're valid concerns, except that no ordinary person is hitting up the original text of the Declaration anyway. And if reading "The Diary of Anne Frank" in translation is good enough for most every student in America, what's so wrong with a pocket-size transcription of the Founding Fathers' words? Sure, handwriting can be a form of individual expression; if there were no cursive, John Hancock would be just another name on a legal document. Yet if Princess Diana—who was accepted into secondary school on the strength of her penmanship—were alive today, she'd probably be typing in a lovely custom font.

If you think about it, penmanship has been edging toward oblivion for years. Between the printing press, the typewriter and now, of course, the computer, it's a "historical blip," as Trubek puts it, among writing technologies. By the 1890s, even Henry James was dictating his novels to a secretary. The fact is, the push to save cursive isn't so much historical or educational as it is emotional. Which means there's a reason people such as Florey are worrying about handwriting's disappearance right now. As historian Tamara Plakins Thornton, the author of "Handwriting in America," explains it, penmanship represents a simpler, prettier way of life—slower and more personal, much like the handwritten note. In times of particular anxiety—war, recession, change—we tend to cling to these simplicities of the past as a way to maintain order over the present. So if loops and swirls make you feel better, be my guest. In fact, go buy a fountain pen. The economy needs all the help it can get.