Lost romance of pen and paper

From The Sunday Times
November 25, 2007
Lost romance of pen and paper
India Knight

I used to pride myself on my handwriting until last week when I attempted to write quite a wordy thing longhand। This had never been a problem in the past: like most people I spent my school and university career churning out reams of essays without so much as a sprained wrist. Last week my penmanship gave out halfway down the first sheet of A4 and the careful calligraphy that had pleased me so much as a student degenerated into a clumsy, barely legible scrawl. Also my hand started aching two paragraphs in.

I’m always grumpily pointing out to my older children that their handwriting suggests a chronic lack of education – they write like illiterates, with jerkiness and no fluency in the strokes of the pen, and it irritates me not just because it looks ugly and careless but because, to my mind, it makes them look stupid। I am of a generation (possibly the last one) that minds about such things: snobbishly, but usefully, I can often tell where people went to school through their handwriting and, to a degree, how clever or creative they are.

Well, I could. It seems that all young people nowadays write alike, as though they had two left hands, no brain and no sense of aesthetics. Nobody seems to mind much, but I do.
I don’t expect my children’s handwriting will improve much – why should it, when they can both touch-type and when the keyboard is an integral part of their homework? So it wasn’t entirely surprising to discover last week that the love letter is on its way out – not, presumably, because people don’t have love letter-worthy sentiments to express any more, but because they communicate their desires by e-mail or – the horror – by text, a medium that is also now commonly used for courtship and dumpage (nice)।

The Bradford & Bingley mortgage bank carried out a survey (hard to see what this has to do with bricks and mortar, but never mind) of 1,000 people, which found that just over a third of those aged between 16 and 34 had never written a letter to a loved one, let alone to a lover। Is this not tragically sad? When I was at school, a letter from home could make your day – your week, even – and we used to congregate by our pigeonholes in the morning with a sense of excitement.

The letters I received from my grandmother – more often than not with pressed flowers squished between the layers of cream paper – meant more to me than I can say। An e-mail, although perhaps more immediate, simply wouldn’t have the same effect.

Even today there is a real pleasure in receiving a proper, handwritten letter – it feels luxurious, as if someone has given you a little present and has gone to a flattering amount of effort in order to do so: getting out the paper, writing in ink, sealing it, finding a stamp, walking to the postbox, and all to ask you to tea or just to say hello।

Part of the pleasure, of course, is in knowing the person values you enough not to fob you off with a quick e-mail। This also applies – in triplicate – to invitations: if someone’s going to the bother of throwing a party, you’d think they might run to buying a load of blank postcards and writing on them. Instead, increasingly, you get evites.

While I can appreciate that these are quick, efficient and cheap, they don’t exactly cause your pulse to quicken in the way that paper or card does, especially if they’re corporate and you know that such and such a rich company can’t even be bothered to put in a call to the printers.
Handwriting is a dying art – in 20 years’ time nobody will know how to do it। I don’t just mean they’ll lack the stamina – and it’s easily lost, as I discovered last week – but that they won’t know how to form letters in a way that is both aesthetically pleasing and clear and an enhancement to the content of their letter. Aside from anything else, this will be a disaster for biographers, since most people don’t save their e-mail correspondence to CD for posterity (or maybe some do. What an unappealing thought).

I know only one person who still keeps a diary। Everything else – all those thoughts, emotions, insights, gossip, rants – has become disposable, lasting as long as your computer’s hard drive. Pity the poor latterday Boswell, trawling through the deceased’s correspondence and finding only old gas bills and bank statements.

Having said that or typed it – that’s another thing: my thoughts express themselves much more clearly when I type, which can’t be right and must be indicative of some general thickening of the brain; surely the flow from brain to hand-held pen oughtn’t to be a hardship – the lure of e-mail is undeniable। It’s fun, it’s quick, you can get rid of inbox bores in seconds or just delete them and put them out of your mind, whereas in the past the alternative would have involved many resentment-filled trips to the post office and a waste of good ink.

E-mail is kind to trees, I suppose, and it’s nice to be able to have quick back-and-forth conversations when you’re simply trying to find out something and don’t have the time or the inclination for a circuitous conversation। The fact that both my sons can touch-type will stand them in good stead and it enables them to communicate quickly with their friends without hogging the phone. It has its failures, though: a thank-you note sent by e-mail is better than nothing, but coming from a child I feel it lacks charm.

I also blame e-mail for the general decline in spelling: what need is there to learn it if your e-mail program auto-corrects and your phone does predictive text? And if you are trying to communicate anything complex or emotionally difficult, such as sending condolences, e-mail still feels like an overly casual means of conveying your thoughts।

Not that people try to communicate much any more, either। A slew of them express themselves through the maudlin “poems” or prewritten sentiments of Hallmark cards and their ilk, or abbreviate their thoughts until they are so concise they can be texted, thus: SOZ ABT UR DED DAD (I’m all for being informal but there are surely limits).

This is a plea for a return to pen and paper. Admittedly I am almost fetishistic in my love of stationery but there is nevertheless a real pleasure to be had in writing someone a proper letter and in taking care over it. And it’s likely to end up, well-thumbed and cherished, in some cache of effects for your grandchildren to find – as opposed to expiring when your computer does, lost for ever, disposable and ultimately meaningless.

Is this the end of cursive writing?

Second-grade teacher Diane Arciero waves her hand – draped in a homemade, white bunny puppet – from side to side in time to "If You're Happy and You Know It" playing on her classroom's CD player. As the song reaches its familiar refrain, the 24 students in her class at Boston's Hugh R. O'Donnell Elementary School join in singing with her and the bunny: "Where do you start your letter? At the top!" they shout, pointing index fingers in the air in unison.

It's hardly the handwriting instruction most American adults grew up with, but cursive traditionalists are happy to see any type of instruction. Their revered written art is an endangered species given the rise of computers, the growing proportion of class time spent preparing for standardized tests, and the increasing perception that cursive writing is a difficult and pointless exercise. Yet new evidence suggests there are benefits to mastering this skill – including higher SAT scores – that don't appear until long after traditional instruction ends in fifth grade. It's a controversial claim.

Cursive's proponents point to less-practical benefits as well. The romantic allure, for one. "When you look in Martha Stewart Weddings magazine, you don't see printed invitations," says Janie Cravens, who taught for 25 years in Alabama and Georgia. "Despite what many people seem to think these days, there's still demand for calligraphers and people who can write in cursive beautifully." She is vice president of the International Association of Master Penmen, Engrossers, and Teachers of Handwriting based in Webster, N.Y.

"You still need to be able to write a signature and a personal thank-you note as well as read cursive," says Cathy Van Haute, a pediatric occupational consultant. And "you can't tell me everyone has easy access to a computer."

Robert Martin, principal of O'Donnell Elementary, agrees. "It's a dangerous path to go down if the only way you can communicate or record information is electronically or with printed letters. Cursive teaches things like how letters connect and a different type of hand-eye coordination that's important."

Cursive enthusiasts also point to recent College Board data on the new writing section of the SATs, introduced in 2006. The data indicate that the 15 percent of students who wrote their essay in cursive did slightly better than those who used some other type of handwriting. Cursive proponents say this is because those writing in cursive could write faster, allowing them to write longer essays.

Steve Graham is skeptical of such a conclusion. The special education professor at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tenn., says "It's like saying there's been a rise in peanut butter sales in New York and a rise in mental illness, therefore peanut butter causes mental illness," he says.

Professor Graham says the issue isn't what kind of handwriting is taught, but that children learn to be fluent in some type of transcription. He points to studies where two groups of people were given the same essay to grade. One group got an essay written in poor, but legible handwriting; the other, an essay in more attractive handwriting (not necessarily cursive). The essay with the more attractive handwriting received a better grade.

But the most efficient way for anyone, including children, to record their thoughts, Graham says, is at a keyboard. He recommends more elementary schools buy computers with keyboards designed for children's hands. Typing should be a key way that children communicate.

"Your hands aren't fast enough to keep up with your mind," Graham says, "especially for a first grader who can write between nine and 18 letters a minute. Typing uses a different, slightly easier motor skill. If they spend less time thinking about their handwriting and more time writing,... they will have longer compositions and better grammar and planning."

Others share his sentiment that teaching cursive should not be sacrosanct.

"Schools are re­­flective of our society in general," says Barbara Willer, president of the National Association for the Education of Young Children, an advocacy group in Washington, D.C. "We spend less time doing things like writing notes to each other since there are other tools available to us to communicate, and curriculums need to reflect that."

Kate Gladstone is a "handwriting repair expert" in New York. She is not surprised to see cursive going the way of the dinosaur, with only 15 percent of adults using cursive after high school. She's not disappointed. She disagrees with the idea that students should first learn to print and then to write in cursive.

"You don't teach someone English by first teaching them Chinese," Ms. Glad­stone says. "We need to decide what the best way to handwrite is and just teach that."

That does not sit well with cursive traditionalists. "Hand­writing is an emotionally charged issue," Gladstone adds. "I get letters from people calling me anti-American because I don't like what they think of as 'proper' cursive."

Gladstone promotes italic cursive, which she says is the fastest, most natural, and most easily readable form of handwriting. It's also the easiest and quickest to teach children, she says. She also claims it's the fastest-growing way to teach handwriting: 7 percent of students are learning this method, compared with 1 percent ten years ago. For homeschoolers, that number is 1 in 3, she says.

She recommends traditional cursive be an elective that children could take after elementary school if they wanted to.

That idea has no appeal for O'Donnell Elementary's Dr. Martin. Back when he was a middle-school principal, he realized many students couldn't read cursive, let alone write it. "I said, 'If I ever get to be an elementary school principal, I'm doing something about this,' " he says. That's why he recently introduced Handwriting Without Tears and the "magic bunny" to his school, which he found to be an effective and fun method.

"We're used to thinking about nuns rapping the knuckles of kids who couldn't write the perfectly shaped letter.... I remember when I was a kid, we had the Palmer Method...." He recalls the rote cursive instruction and copying upper- and lower-case letters pinned to a board at the front of the classroom.

The Palmer and Zaner-Bloser penmanship methods ruled the day for decades. Students spent 45 minutes every day on handwriting. Penmanship was a separate grade on report cards. Today, handwriting instruction might get 10 or 15 minutes a few times a week. Keyboarding skills are taught much earlier, now.

But in this era of standardized testing, Gladstone says, teachers need to train their charges to express themselves quickly with a pen or pencil. And that means italic cursive, to her.

"Students need to be able to write about 100 letters a minute on these tests," she says, "but I know a lot of high schoolers can only do 30 per minute."

It may be too late to halt cursive's decline. Fewer and fewer teachers today know how to write cursive themselves.

"I've actually seen teachers give cursive instruction by saying, 'Just follow the book,' " Gladstone says. "And when a child asks the teacher to demonstrate it herself, she'll say, 'I'll try, but I'm really not so good at this.' How can we expect kids to learn cursive if the teachers have trouble with it?" A recent study Graham conducted on handwriting instruction found that only 12 percent of teachers had taken a course in how to teach handwriting.

Instead of focusing on what type of handwriting is best, Graham suggests that schools concentrate on improving students' handwriting, period, whatever it is.

"Two out of three kids in this country do not write well enough for their classroom work," he says. "Handwriting is a small part of the overall writing picture."

Good Handwriting may enhance learning skills - study

November 07, 2007


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New York: A study conducted by Vanderbilt University professor Steve Graham has revealed that good handwriting is one of the key parts of learning.

The study to be released this month has revealed that when children are taught to write, they are also being taught how to learn and how to express themselves.

The study also 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, besides from being easier to read.

In 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, the College Board of US has included a handwritten essay to the SAT, the standardised test for US colleges admissions.

University: handwriting vital for future teachers

2007-11-19 09:29:21

BEIJING, Nov. 19 -- Good handwriting is becoming a must for would-be teachers at East China Normal University.

The university, which enrolled its first group of free education majors this year, kicked off a campus handwriting contest among the 1,000-plus freshmen being trained as teachers on a four-year course.

University officials said they were adding handwriting to the required curriculum, after students' poor handwriting aroused public concern.

"Handwriting reflects one's personal artistic and cultural quality but it's more important for teachers, who are expected to exemplify the best for the younger generation," said Jiang Bingbing, associate professor with ECNU's school of humanity and social sciences.

From this month, education majors must submit writing -- including calligraphy, pen work, chalk work and blackboard design -- for a competition on campus.

Contestants must copy a paragraph during the final competition round before winners are selected by professors at the end of December.

Prize-winning works will be on display around the campus which is expected to "motivate the elite and shame those lagging behind to improve their handwriting," organizers said.

With the wider use of computers, young people get used to typing out articles.

"Some even find themselves unable to write characters correctly without computers," said Feng Chengcheng, an ECNU student and one of the initiators of the contest.

For instance, wrong characters in graduates' resumes and exam papers, and poorly written documents are likely to annoy teachers and employers, Feng said.

"But handwriting is more than a personal affair for teachers who need to write for students. It's not only a traditional art, but a professional quality for us," she said.

(Source: Shanghai Daily)

Handwriting predicts cardiac health?

Wed, 21 Nov 2007 20:59:05


A British scientist claims that the number of resting dots and breaks in handwriting can determine an individual's heart condition.

Cristina Strang analyzed the handwriting of over 100 people in their early 60s, with the focus on breaks in the writing, malformed 'O's, resting dots and where the pen rests momentarily in the middle of a pen stroke.

According to her presentation in an international conference in Melbourne, individuals with heart diseases had a significant higher number of resting dots especially in the upper middle zone of the letters 'a', 'e' and 'o'.

Many scientists believe there is not enough evidence to correlate heart disease with handwriting style, or to suggest that handwriting style can be used to accurately diagnose poor health.

Previous researches had studied the impact of several neurological conditions such as Parkinson's, Huntington's and Alzheimer's diseases on a person's handwriting

PKH/HGH

Doctors fail handwriting test

Even when asked, doctors cannot write neatly It is true - the handwriting of doctors really is appalling.

In a scientific study of handwriting samples taken from three different groups of health workers in Wales, the doctors' scrawl proved to be the least legible.

The research, published in the British Medical Journal, was prompted by concern that poor handwriting may lead to prescription errors and problems with referral letters.

"Essentially, the problem goes back to medical school and racing down notes from lectures," says Ronan Lyons, who carried out the research with colleagues from the Department of Public Health in Swansea.

Character recognition

The 92 health workers who took part in the study were asked to complete a form that contained boxes for the respondent's name, the 26 letters of the alphabet and the digits 0-9.

They were not told the true reason for supplying the handwriting samples, but they were asked to write as neatly as possible. The forms were scanned by a character-recognition computer software package that highlights words it cannot determine properly.

The forms filled out by doctors contained significantly more highlighting than those completed by other healthcare workers.

Good with numbers

The authors say: "The study suggests that doctors, even when asked to be as neat as possible, produce handwriting that is worse than that of other professions."

Interestingly, the problem only seems to affect words and not numbers.
"People are much clearer about writing numbers," says Mr Lyons, "particularly because they do it in relation to doses, and doctors regard that as very important."

There were no apparent differences between the ages and the sexes.

Future improvements

The authors believe doctors' handwriting will improve with the changes in teaching techniques introduced into the lectures at medical schools.

"People have started giving out notes and photocopies," says Mr Lyons. "The formal lectures are less common than they once were because they are probably seen as not the best way of teaching people."

He also believes voice-recognition software will become very popular with doctors: "What they now write, they will increasingly dictate."

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/179606.stm

Bad handwriting ends court case

A Northamptonshire man accused of illegal hare-coursing has had his case thrown out of court because lawyers could not read a policeman's written report.

In what is thought to be the first case of its kind, magistrates have agreed it was a breach of human rights not to be able to read the case against the defendant.

It was claimed that Terry Button, a local traveller, had been spotted hare coursing on land in Bedfordshire with another man.

He appeared at court in Bedford on Tuesday, charged with trespassing on land in search of game.

His lawyer, Derek Johashen, told court that the handwritten statement from the officer in the case had been illegible, so he had been unable to prepare his defence.

He said that was a breach of human rights laws.

Magistrates agreed, and the police say it is the first time they have dealt with a case like this.
They say the problem could have been dealt with at an earlier hearing.




Source : http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/1292634.stm

Death followed wrong insulin dose

Death followed wrong insulin dose

A grandmother died after poor handwriting on her hospital records led to her being given a massive overdose of insulin, a fatal accident inquiry has found.
8 Dec 2005

http://news.bbc.co.uk/player/nol/newsid_4510000/newsid_4511800/4511876.stm?bw=nb&mp=wm&nol_storyid=4511876&news=1#

Professor to publish handwriting study | InsideVandy

Professor to publish handwriting study InsideVandy