Article: The Death of Handwriting

[Wino In Training]

Saw this today in the Toronto Star:

 

The Death of Handwriting

[tfwall]

Lots of good points. Though I disagree with the last one, that electronic communication will leave no trace. It is quite the opposite, every message sent online is archived, copied and mirrored dozens of times. It is almost impossible on conventional systems to ensure that no trace of it exists, someone can always resurrect the message with minimal work. It lacks the finality of a letter burned. It is quite likely that your grandchildren will be able to readily read any of your email that they wish, despite you having erased it 50 yrs prior. Only on the internet is communication eternal.

Edited December 11, 2009 by Chemyst

[rollerboy]

Lots of good points. Though I disagree with the last one, that electronic communication will leave no trace. It is quite the opposite, every message sent online is archived, copied and mirrored dozens of times. It is almost impossible on conventional systems to ensure that no trace of it exists, someone can always resurrect the message with minimal work. It lacks the finality of a letter burned. It is quite likely that your grandchildren will be able to readily read any of your email that they wish, despite you having erased it 50 yrs prior. Only on the internet is communication eternal.

 

That hasn't been the pattern I've seen so far with electronic media. Except for those files I've carefully transferred forward the files become inaccessible as the media becomes obsolete and I no longer have the correct device ... 3.5, 5.25, 8 inch floppies? Tapes, DATs, Bernoulli, Zip whatever. Perhaps we are at the stage where Google will magically keep everything in the cloud available forever, but I'd say such belief is premature. Either religiously backup and transfer to new media continually or, if it's *really* important, print it out!

[Johnny Appleseed]

This is a good article, and the first I have seen that actually references some researchers with insight into whether their really is a difference in how the brain processes different styles of writing. I will have to see if my wife has a copy of Normon Doidge's book on neuro-plasicity.

 

Incidentally, can anyone with access shoot me a copy (for personal research use only) of:

 

Barton JJS, Fox CJ, Sekunova A, Iaria G. Encoding in the visual word form area: an fMRI-adaptation study of words versus handwriting. J Cogn Neurosci 2009; epub Jul 2.

 

'Twould be most appreciated!

 

It is quite likely that your grandchildren will be able to readily read any of your email that they wish, despite you having erased it 50 yrs prior.

 

The question will be whether anyone will be able to find it. The proliferation and preservation of communication will be considered a blessing and curse to historians of the future. Ah data-mining on Twitter. . .

 

John

Edited December 11, 2009 by Johnny Appleseed

[tfwall]

Lots of good points. Though I disagree with the last one, that electronic communication will leave no trace. It is quite the opposite, every message sent online is archived, copied and mirrored dozens of times. It is almost impossible on conventional systems to ensure that no trace of it exists, someone can always resurrect the message with minimal work. It lacks the finality of a letter burned. It is quite likely that your grandchildren will be able to readily read any of your email that they wish, despite you having erased it 50 yrs prior. Only on the internet is communication eternal.

 

That hasn't been the pattern I've seen so far with electronic media. Except for those files I've carefully transferred forward the files become inaccessible as the media becomes obsolete and I no longer have the correct device ... 3.5, 5.25, 8 inch floppies? Tapes, DATs, Bernoulli, Zip whatever. Perhaps we are at the stage where Google will magically keep everything in the cloud available forever, but I'd say such belief is premature. Either religiously backup and transfer to new media continually or, if it's *really* important, print it out!

 

The hardware will become obsolete yes, but the internet as an information cloud does not. An individual server may go down, but this message will have been scanned, crawled and copied by hundreds of automated bots and services, archived by search engines and mirrored on back-up servers long before the server eventually fails. Even today you can employ a variety of techniques (e.g. The Wayback Machine) to search back 10 yrs or more.

 

A letter can be lost in a move, dissolved when the basement floods or consumed by a fire. There is only one copy and once it is gone, it is gone.

 

Imagine if we could access the full correspondence of some of the great artists and politicians of the past. History might be cast very differently.

 

 

 

[tfwall]

It is quite likely that your grandchildren will be able to readily read any of your email that they wish, despite you having erased it 50 yrs prior.

 

The question will be whether anyone will be able to find it. The proliferation and preservation of communication will be considered a blessing and curse to historians of the future. Ah data-mining on Twitter. . .

 

John

 

 

Yes, well that is the issue faced today in the US and UK where most (US) or all (UK) emails and digital communications are or can be archived by the government. Is doing so practical and useful? How many terabytes of data is searchable or even indexable per day vs. how much is generated. Perhaps quantum computing will offer help on that front.

 

 

[emeraldboy]

Thank you for sharing the article!

 

Many of us backstage practice so-called dying arts, and I've often felt the same way about handwriting.

 

One friend (once she wins a lottery of course) will be opening a school for all the rare arts/skills... I'll let you all know when the penmanship courses begin.

[Mille]

This is a very bad article.

 

To begin with it is poorly written and unstructured, trying to make this point over and over again:

"With progress comes loss. Cursive's flow works the brain differently and builds distinct cognitive skills. Handwriting reinforces reading and spelling, develops motor memory as it becomes automatic, teaches students to focus and may help them remember what they learn.

 

Neuroscientists know that the brain changes throughout life depending on how we use it."

 

I firmly do not think that there is any proof on this. Besides the fact that anything, literarily anything, we do affect our brain. And that the brain in particular would benefit from handwriting is of course hopelessly impossible to prove. I can as well argue that the author has developed a brain-deficiency since she uses lined paper. Horrors!

 

And of course it was better in the Good Old Days:

"At the computer, the perfectionist's need to fiddle begins the second the words appear on the screen. Delete, insert and backspace functions are a writer's best friends. But they can also suck you under like quicksand.

...

This is how I wrote every essay in university, pecking out the corrected final version on a jerky manual typewriter. But after decades at a computer keyboard, those mental skills have gone as flabby as my middle-aged muscles.

"

The word processor is a tool requireing skill. If she does not want to learn to use it, but instead use a different skill, that is her choice.

 

She also find herself superior to others solely because she uses another writing technique:

"While I find freedom in writing by hand, my children, as digital natives, will probably achieve theirs at the keyboard."

Never in history people write so much as they do now. If there is anything that has liberated the written word it is the keyboard and internet, which her article is just but one of them. But we can also note that many, perhaps most of the published novels of the 20th century was written on a typewriter. A tool much similar to the keyboard than the pen.

 

I do love cursive and handwriting in general. But using false arguments is only counterproductive.

[Johnny Appleseed]

This is a very bad article.

 

To begin with it is poorly written and unstructured, trying to make this point over and over again:

"With progress comes loss. Cursive's flow works the brain differently and builds distinct cognitive skills. Handwriting reinforces reading and spelling, develops motor memory as it becomes automatic, teaches students to focus and may help them remember what they learn.

 

Neuroscientists know that the brain changes throughout life depending on how we use it."

 

I firmly do not think that there is any proof on this. Besides the fact that anything, literarily anything, we do affect our brain. And that the brain in particular would benefit from handwriting is of course hopelessly impossible to prove. I can as well argue that the author has developed a brain-deficiency since she uses lined paper. Horrors!

 

 

While this article does repeat many of the overgeneralizations and speculation that unfortunately tarnish these regular "death of handwriting/cursive" articles, this one does one important thing - it names names.

 

But Toronto psychiatrist and neuroplasticity expert Dr. Norman Doidge fears that if cursive fades away, so will cognitive skills that handwriting builds. If children don't learn those movements, their brains "will develop in a different way that no one has really thought through."

 

When a child types or prints, he produces a letter the same way each time. In cursive, however, each letter connects slightly differently to the next, which is more demanding on the part of the brain that converts symbol sequences into motor movements in the hand.

 

That is similar to the way a child translates symbol sequences into motor movements of the mouth and tongue in order to talk or movements of the eye in order to read. That's why Doidge says practising the complex demands of cursive also builds fluency in speaking and reading.

 

and

 

That flash of recognition has been the subject of studies by Dr. Jason Barton, a neurologist and Canada Research Chair at the University of British Columbia, whose research focuses on the role of the human brain in vision. Barton's findings, using brain imaging, suggest we recognize handwriting the same way we distinguish faces, triggering similar emotional responses.

 

 

Both of these researchers are well respected researchers in neuroscience. Barton in particular has done fMRI work on how the brain processes recognition of handwritten vs. mechanically printed text. Doidge's work on neuroplasticity is quite on the for-front of the field. Rather than merely throwing out a neurological concept without any pretense of a reference, this article at least allows us to actually look at their research and see what conclusions can be drawn from it.

 

I would add, in response to:

And that the brain in particular would benefit from handwriting is of course hopelessly impossible to prove.

Look again at "Comparison of Pen and Keyboard Transcription Modes in Children With and Without Learning Disabilities", Virginia Berninger et. al., Learning Disability Quarterly, Volume 32, Number 3, Summer 2009 , pp. 123-141(19) (Abstract).

 

From the abstract:

Although LD-TD and non-LD groups did not differ in total time for producing letters by pen or keyboard, both groups took longer to compose sentences and essays by keyboard than by pen. Students in both groups tended to show the same pattern of results for amount written as a larger sample of typically developing fourth graders who composed longer essays by pen. Results for that sample, which also included typically developing second and sixth graders, showed that effects of transcription mode vary with level of language and within level of language by grade level for letters and sentences. However, consistently from second to fourth to sixth grade, children wrote longer essays with faster word production rate by pen than by keyboard. In addition, fourth and sixth graders wrote more complete sentences when writing by pen than by keyboard, and this relative advantage for sentence composing in text was not affected by spelling ability.

Emphasis mine. While not directly related to neurology, it certainly points that direction.

 

What remains to be seen is if there is any actual difference between handwritten print and cursive. Doidge seems to present a professional opinion as a neuroscientist that there is, but I do not know whether that is based on hard research or is merely a hypothesis built on interpolation from other results.

 

John

John

[SueEllen]

Saw this today in the Toronto Star:

 

The Death of Handwriting

 

My fifth grade teacher showed me how to remember the spelling of any difficult word. She said that I should write the word in cursive, large enough to trace the letters with my index finger. It must be cursive, she said: the unbroken writing of the word is essential. She said if I then trace the script a few times with my index finger, I would never forget the spelling of the word. It worked; even on multi-syllable, rarely-used words. I cannot access this part of my brain by printing.

[Sirona]

This article makes me want to

[Mille]

Saw this today in the Toronto Star:

 

The Death of Handwriting

 

My fifth grade teacher showed me how to remember the spelling of any difficult word. She said that I should write the word in cursive, large enough to trace the letters with my index finger. It must be cursive, she said: the unbroken writing of the word is essential. She said if I then trace the script a few times with my index finger, I would never forget the spelling of the word. It worked; even on multi-syllable, rarely-used words. I cannot access this part of my brain by printing.

 

Most people recognize the correct spelling of a word by pattern recognition. First you try a spelling and look at it, and if it in some way looks "wrong", you make another attempt until the word look right. This works regardless of writing/typing tool. A typical example is "synthesizer" which no sane man can remember the correct spelling of.

 

But if your method works for you it is good, and we are all different. And also has an advantage when using a fountain pen.

[KateGladstone]

That fifth-grade teacher (and possibly the opinionated Dr. Norman Doidge) should talk to some students of mine who find cursive deleterious to their spelling.

 

I share some other people's concerns on the sheer badness of the article, its reliance on vaguely and emotionally phrased assertions as a substitute for proof, and so on. Enough such concerns exist (and, I think, appall enough of us here) that I'd considered writing a letter to the editor -- but would like to make it a JOINT letter. Those agreeing with me would draft such a letter, jointly, right here on FPN-Penmanship (as a new thread titled "Joint Letter") and then -- when we finish it in a day or two -- append all our names for me (or whomever else you might pick from among us) to send the finished letter to the editor.

 

What do you think? Which of us here can unite in this?

[Enai]

I actually liked this article and thought it was interesting. The article says measuring the cognitive impact of cursive is not easy, but I find nothing wrong in proposing reasonable hypotheses based on one's current knowledge as a scientist. I hope that the time will soon come that they can better measure the cognitive impact of cursive writing and test these hypotheses.

[TXKat]

_{I thoutht this was rather interesting, In the past week's commute, I've twice heard advertisements on hand writing from BIC. Here are a couple of articles. Yes, it's an advertisement that will benefit their business, but I like the fact they are encouraging writing. Here in TX, they have taken cursive writing out of the school's curriculum and it's no longer taught. (Story later on the teen that couldn't sign her name when getting her driver's license for the first time!)}

 

_{http://bicfightforyourwrite.com/assets/pdf/FFYW_ConsumerRelease_Final.pdf}

 

_{http://www.bicfightforyourwrite.com/}

 

_{http://www.chiefmarketer.com/mobile-marketing/bic-asks-writing-samples-new-mobile-campaign-10062014}

 

_{I have absolutely NO affiliation with BIC, I just love that SOMEONE is promoting writing by hand again!!}

 

_{NOTE: If anyone can figure out why the fonts on my posts are so tiny...I...and my eyes would appreciate it!!! This is supposedly 24 pt.}

Edited August 19, 2014 by TXKat

[erpe]

Let's be positive about the approach but I find it somewhat embarrassing that in a supposedly modern nation like the US, such a campaign is required.

[TXKat]

Ditto!

 

Is the United States the only country trying to do away with cursive writing per say? (Why does that not surprise me...)

Edited August 20, 2014 by TXKat