Last year, in a meeting with teachers from feeder schools, someone asked whether or not elementary school teachers should continue to teach cursive writing to their students.
At the time, I told them that I am just happy with something legible, whether written, printed, block-letter, or a mix. All good copies are typed anyway, was my rationale. The Grade 8 teachers breathed a sigh of relief, wiping a lot of future battles from their schedule. A colleague from my own department, who continues to request cursive writing from her students, breathed a sigh of despair. “Where will we be when the lights go out?” was her question.
Since that day, however, I’ve come to question my earlier position. Is it really okay if students don’t use cursive writing anymore?
When we look into the future, it’s highly possible that handwriting will be replaced by some form of keying. It’s part of my job to prepare students for that future, where they will need to be able to publish written works electronically and online.
But the reality is that today, right now, students aren’t working entirely electronically. They don’t have access to computers in every class for note-taking (at least not at my school, and I suspect this is the norm rather than the exception). Tests and in-class assignments are completed using a pen and paper.
My wife alerted me to the article “Writing a Wrong” by Helaine Becker in the January 2008 issue of Today’s Parent. Although the article is a bit shy of references, there are some ideas in there that make sense, among them being:
- Students who cannot write legibly and quickly perform poorly on tests.
- Poor penmanship is unconsciously penalized by teachers, even when they are trying to mark only the content. This means that students who cannot write legibly receive lower grades.
- Students who cannot write legibly may not be able to read their own notes or homework assignments.
- Students who cannot write fluently – with automacity, according to Becker – have to focus on forming their letters rather than on sorting out and communicating their ideas. They can’t really process what they are writing.
These are some alarming consequences of poor penmanship in a world where receiving a high school diploma depends on hand writing a pen-and-paper literacy test. So until the format of that test changes, I think I’m going to include some handwriting practice in my Gr. 9 and literacy help classes.
I waver back and forth on this subject myself. Just how important is handwriting, really?
I think it comes down to the environment you operate in. Your colleague’s comment (where will we be when the lights go out) is interesting, but I think it misses the point. “Writing” is not about putting a pen to paper; it’s about communicating through a medium that can transcend space and time. Whether it’s knots in a rope, cuneform, quill-and-ink, or bits stored on a computer, writing is using a hardware medium to record your message.
In that sense, asking where we will be when the lights go out is somewhat like asking where we’ll be when the paper is gone. Communication evolves, and just as very few people today can write with fountain pens (and we are, I would argue, none the worse for wear because of it), it’s conceivable that in the next century very few people will be able to write cursively with a pen. The lights may go out, but in that case, just as in the case where we no longer have paper, the problems we will be facing will be so large that handwriting will be well down the list of concerns.
The flip side of this is the situation you mention, where students are still graded based on the handwritten content they provide. Until all testing is done in the new (electronic, typed) medium, handwriting will still be an important success skill in school.
On its own, though, I think handwriting is just a means to an end, and if newer, more efficient means come along, then let’s progress towards them.
Thanks for this comment, SC. (May I call you SC?)
I like your perspective on writing – that it’s about communicating through a medium. The specific tool that we use is probably less important than whether or not we can use the grammar of the medium to convey our ideas. Writing in this sense incorporates much more than words, but also images and sound.
And reading, then, requires an understanding of the grammars of different mediums.
Not sure where I’m going with all of this, except to say that you’ve got me thinking. Thanks.
Sure, SC is fine.
Having just typed an emoticon has got me thinking about emoticons now, and the fact that they really aren’t prevalent in handwritten text; just electronic communications. I have no real point to make — just an observation.
Your point about grammar is key, I think. The medium we choose to communicate through may change, but so far all those mediums have at least been based around specifically-shaped characters on a screen in specific patterns. That’s how we can read what’s been written.
Grammar is what lets us understand what’s been written, though. I think that’s a point that a lot of students miss. Grammar isn’t just rules for the sake of rules; those rules allow us to convey complex thoughts with clarity and consistency.