With apparently few schools in the US spending any significant amount of time on handwriting and penmanship, should we press for a return to the handwriting classes of the past?

No. We should simply start teaching.

I'm still on the fence here. It's easy to say "yes" because it's something that we here are interested in, but how essential is it really, in the big picture?

Let me throw out a related question... do you think handwriting is a fundamental skill, along with literacy and basic mathematics, or is it an artistic, cultural, general "well-roundedness" skill more akin to music, art, dance, and the like?

In this context, I mean handwriting beyond the basic ability to leave a mostly-legible note when needed -- I think we'll all agree that that's an essential skill, but it doesn't have to be very developed in order to be functional in an age where writing of any length can be typed.

I think music education is more important to a person's life than is any mathematics past elementary school. Mainly, this demonstrates that any large group of people will never be able to agree on what is most important in education.

(I didn't mean to say we should all be school teachers, by the way - just that people who are good at writing should simply start showing anyone who's interested.)

It is true, as David I says, that it is impossible for a large number of people to agree about one specific issue. Yet, total agreement has never been necessary to promote and implement policies. As long as they are supported, and benefit the majority, one hopes that they are adopted.

Is handwriting a fundamental skill? I believe that one should distinguish three kinds of handwriting here.

• One, the ability to draw the letters well enough to fill out forms, or to write a legible note, and so forth. I believe that few will argue against considering this a fundamental ability.
• Two, the ability to handwrite fluently, and legibly, so that others understand what one has written. This is the basic ability practiced enough until it becomes second nature. I would argue that if you don’t plan to go to college, and do not plan to work in a business in which you need to share your notes--law and medicine, for instance--you probably don’t need this skill. While giving midterms, or in-class essays or finals, it’s painful to watch some students struggle with the mechanics of handwriting, a fact that hinders their thought process. On the other hand, if you don’t understand what students write, you cannot give them a good grade, no matter how brilliant the essay.
• Three, the ability to write beautifully, and with panache. Few people have the gift, and the patience to develop this kind of handwriting. And, of course, I would argue against its across-the-board teaching; yet, I would encourage any student who has the inclination.

Yes, laptops are ubiquitous nowadays, and that’s great. But handwriting has hardly died as a skill. Notice for instance the amount of research and investment devoted to Tablet PCs.

I think handwriting is a fundamental skill. A "mostly legible" note may well not be a legible note if an important word isn't legible, or if a given letter were to be mistaken for another one and the word was read as a different word.

Yes, I'd say penmanship should be taught in school, as well as typing/keyboarding. Both are relevant, important skills.

Best, Ann

It *is* taught formally in the UK as a fundamental part of the literacy element of the National Curriculum and starts at age 5.

Ray

I actually think it's both -- both a fundamental skill one should learn, as well as an artistic skill. People who can write in different languages using different characters (e.g., Japanese, Chinese, Urdu, Korean, and so forth) would probably agree that it’s both a fundamental skill that has to be learned and an artistic skill that has to be practiced and improved upon over time.

A friend of mine is a guidance school counselor and she remarked the other day that there are an increasing number of kids in "special education" classes because their handwriting is so illegible, they themselves cannot decipher what they wrote. Some suffer from a neurological disorder called dysgraphia -- which is similar to similar to dyslexia -- but sometimes they just have very poor handwriting. Ironically, these same kids are often also classified as "gifted," but due to visual/spatial difficulties, their handwriting is either illegible or they cannot write at all.

The ability to write legibly (and well) is a mode of communication just like speaking and typing. I was taught how to type in junior high, and I was taught to handwrite at home (my mother was a teacher) and in grade school. Maybe it was a Catholic school thing. I improved on those skills on my own. I doubt I could have made it through high school, college, law school, and Bar exams if my handwriting was illegible. And I grew up in the age of computers.

With regard to handwriting being an "essential skill" -- I think it's more essential in certain professions/fields. For instance, here's an interesting article about a handwriting course for physicians:
http://jscms.jrn.columbia.edu/cns/2006-04-...llegibledoctors

Yes, most things that we write these days can be reduced to typewritten form, but not always. And would we want them to be? A world full of keyboardists would be like a house with only white walls and beige carpeting.

While music education will be useful in a person having a well rounded life, without a fundamental appreciation of math well beyond elementary school, this person will have important and well paying (and growing and essential) career options foreclosed.

In North America, and possibly elsewhere, there is a looming shortage of engineers and scientists. WIthout educating students in math through high school, these career options become seriously foreclosed.

(an engineering educator)

Learning to write well is an important key to learning the underlying structure of letters and to recognize them so as to be able to read.

Learning music is an important social skill. If children were better trained in this, stoplights wouldn't be so disgustingly, vulgarly noisy. Also helps with communicating some math concepts, and with learning languages which use tones.

William

Do you have a musical education yourself, on which to base your comparison?

I did quite well in science and math in high school. It was entertaining stuff to learn, but none of what I got in those classes has been of any value to me since then.

I am left handed, have a mild case of cereberal palsy (AKA CP), and can't write very well. Because of the limited control of fine motor skills inherent to my minor disorder, I have never been able to write well. I would never be able to do well in such a course, even if I put in my very very best.

Doing something in school has never given me much drive to do it. I really never learned much in school. I think that school-based education is not as good as everyone says it is. Without trying to sound concieted, I was an unuaully bright kid. My parents taught me how to read, and I read the entire Hardy Boys series before first grade (which in my district is where reading is first taught).

My parents taught me basic arithmetic, and I was pretty well versed in math in mulitplying and deviding decimals and fractions when kids in my second grade class were struggling with adding and subtracting large whole numbers. My parents stopped teaching me around that time, but I didn't stop learning. I taught myself.

By fourth grade I was struggling my way, on my own, through pre-algebra. My dad would help me with things I didn't understand, but the majority i did on my own. I rarely did homework even then, which brought my grade down. But I rarely got less than an A on tests and quizes. I was so far ahead of my class the whole thing bored me. I sometimes slept through classes.

I remember so very clearly a conversation I had with my fourth grade teacher after the first math test of the year. She told me I had to put effort into my test and not put down any old answer. She told me this because I had finished in 10 minutes what took the rest of the class most of the period. I had already taken out the book I was going to read while waiting for the period to end. I told her to grade it, and with the first wrong answer, to come grab me and I would go over the whole test again. I got a 100% on that one. Why? Because by that time doing fraction multiplication was a mental math operation, so it took me no time at all. She stopped bugging me at that point.

Despite the fact that I have gone through the public school system, and with dismal grades mostly due to my ignoring homework as a waste of time, I would say I am self taught and effectively home schooled. I learned little in school and never developed many friendships. Especially after I realized the people who were trying to befriend me only wanted my help with school work. I doubt there are many people who graduated high school with a 1.5 (minimim requirement- actually I had a 1.48 but a friend in the school administration rounded it up so I could graduate) GPA and a 1580 on their SAT, but I am one of them.

My point is, I wouldn't benefit from a handwriting course taken as required by the public school system. I would have ignored it. I couldn't write well then, and being a computer nerd I would have seen no point to trying.

When I was younger my CP affected me more because of the fact that It caused my heel to stay up and made my balance awful. The first doctor told us that as I got older I would lose the ability to walk. A second doctor told us he could do some surgery to prevent that, although I would still be limited in my mobility and have a permanent limp. I do limp, I'll give him that. But I ran in the new york marathon 3 years ago. I didn't win, but I did finish. The doctors statements drove me to do it. "Limited mobility, oh great doctor? HA!"

This is all a long winded lead up to something relevant, I promise.

So here I am, I have a disorder limiting my fine motor control, I am left handed, I can't write very well, and I am an avid lover of writing with fountain pens. I WILL IMPROVE MY HANDWRITING! They tell me I will never write well. THE HELL I WON'T!

I am interested in this because I want to do it. I am working on it and will succeed because I am determined to do so. I intend to throw my weight behind this project of mine because I internally feel the desire. Nobody externally could have convinced me to do this. It was a decision I made inside.

I took a history course in high school. I remember an extra credit exam question oh so clearly. It was an essay type. "Who won World War II? Why? How? What makes you arrive at this conclusion?" As a short answer question, obviously the answer is "The Allies". But as an essay question, it is open to debate. Winning is not an open or shut case. Then there is the philisophical concept: Can anyone win in an enterprise that involves millions of people dieing? I wrote two pages as my answer, eventually concluding that the winner of the war was infact Switzerland, since they were almost non-involved.

I also remember ever so clearly, the valedictorian of the class coming up to me after the class and asking me how dumb can a question get. It was clearly a short answer, there was no explaination possible. It clearly states in the book that the allies won she said, so that is obviously the answer. (I was the only person in the class to actually get the extra credit v.v) She studied diligently what was written in the book. She memorized the dates, remembered all the terms. She studied the essay question given out before the test and wrote it down based on what was in the book. And she understood none of it. She learned nothing of value. She graduated valedictorian yet couldn't understand that concept.

A handwriting course? It would end up like foriegn language in so many american schools. They can translate, pass the exam, and limp along in pidgeon speak of the language they take. They don't know the language, can't speak it, and have no value added to their processed brains. Handwriting is not a science, nor a discipline. It is an art, and only people with the inclination and determination to learn that art will ever benefit from being taught it. So no, teaching it in school would be worthless.

I think it should be taught. I'd love to learn it, since I'm currently in school. My handwriting is good enough as it is, but I'd still like classes to improve it if I could have them.

I have to agree with that..... in Art class we were taught calligraphy..... but I learned it because I wanted to.....

I think a basic standard of writting is nessicary..... (OK... spelling is something I compleatly messed up on...) but beyond writting so someone else can read it..... then we're back into Art.....

I learned the hard way that by holding the pen incorrectly, one is more prone to getting hand cramps and shoulder aches after long essay tests. Also, the right posture taught during penmanship class should reduce the number of students falling asleep in class.

-Hana

Studies have shown that teaching handwriting to young children creates connections within the brain that are vital to higher learning. Similar studies have been done with musical studies for children and the same holds true. At our Grammar School we teach both "keyboarding" skills and "handwriting" skills. But the emphasis is on handwriting. Why? Because when you are writing by hand you do not have spell-check and punctuation tools at your disposal. The student must understand composition and proper sentence structure as well as proper spelling in order to communicate effectively.

Written communication requires accuracy and clarity of thought key tools to being successful in life..I am stepping off my soapbox now...

What a great initial question! The exchanges in this thread are wonderful!

I've actually noticed that the more dependent I became on computers/keyboards to "write," the more difficult it was for me to articulate my thoughts when I took pen to paper. I started to journal on the computer when I was in high school, and I believe that I missed out on half of the therapeutic benefit of journaling. I'm back to journaling in longhand, and I notice that my synapses work better when I do. Not only do I get to practice my penmanship this way, but I also benefit from the tactile joy of writing.

In our area it never left.


K

I don't know about penmanship and the school system and society and the benefit to the community and humanity etc., but I myself find satisfaction and benefit from fluency in both the keyboard and pen. So I'm thinking, why deprive the kids?

Doug

I wonder if our opinions count. I can tell you first-hand that very little of what is taught in school is of any use in the outside world. Every second of my school day is spent preparing the students for the reading test coming up in January. If our supervisor sees one shred of anything being taught that is not directly related to that test, she immediately walks into the classrooms and halts the lessons.
In my school we are lucky if a half dozen kids out of classes of more than thirty hand in their homework. If they do decide to do it and hand it in, it's such a mish mosh it can't be read. We must be VERY careful how we handle this because if we say something to upset the kids, we could be brought up on charges (real or otherwise) that could ruin our careers and families.
It amuses me how many people have a bone to pick with teachers but imagine working in a profession where your bosses (a thousand and a half of them) were born (this year at least) in 1994.

The poll didn't have a choice that fits my opinion: teach handwriting, but TEACH it — make it a course, not a farce. If a teacher can't/won't teach soundly, and/or won't (or can't) write legibly him/herself at a reasonable speed, then I'd rather see no handwriting taught by that teacher at all, instead of the inevitably bad writing which will inevitably result from his/her Monty-Python-esque attempts to teach that which s/he does not actually know and cannot actually do.

IMO penmanship is very important. Of what use is writing if nobody can read it, or can only read it with some difficulty?

Using a computer for some communications is one thing, being dependent on it to write is quite another. People are not always going to have a computer handy when they need to write something.

And what happens if a pharmacist misreads a prescription? The consequences could be fatal.

I would very much like penmanship (or at least handwriting) to stay in the curriculum.Having the privilege of teaching disabled children, amongst other things, how to write I have had some experiences in that field I would like to share :

Writing by hand and joining the letters to words is important to your thinking, reading and ability to solve problems. In my case, I had pupils with all sorts of disabilities and was looking for a script, that met their requirements, which were:

Few simple rules for paper position, movement, and letterforms.

Joined letters - so they would learn to tell words

Few penlifts- very demanding, when you have no fine motor skills and distortion of orientation abilities
The starting point of letters had to be fixed - so we didn't need obscure guidelines to see, where to put the pencil down - (sometimes in the middle - sometimes from the baseline and sometimes from the top - did not work - every letter, except a few, had to start from the same line).

No fine motor skills involved. Most of my pupils have none or very little control of this. This meant using the arm only - the "Palmer way".

And finally: How to sit and position and move the paper.

Given all this, most of my pupils are able to write a fair Zaner- Bloserlike script they are rather proud of - and they like to "write like grown ups" as one af them said. (a little to my surprise: Italics did not work so well - but cursive did - maybe because the starting point of almost all the letters was at the baseline). It takes a lot of practice - but I think, it is worth it, and goes to show, that handwriting does matter - allso in other subjects.
kind regards
Henrik

Thanks to Henrik for his interesting comments. He and his students deserve credit for all their hard work. He writes:

> ... Having the privilege of teaching disabled children, amongst other things, how to write

What disabilities do your students have?

Re:

>Writing by hand and joining the letters to words is important to your thinking, reading and >ability to solve problems.

I disagree. Due to my own disabilities, I reached the age of 24 with very little writing by hand, very poor writing by hand, and no joining of letters. Before I had the ability to do "writing by hand and joining the letters to words," I had a college education and 90% of my graduate-school education. It would vastly surprise my instructors and classmates in graduate school, college, high school, and earlier education to hear from Henrik that, without "joining the letters" and so forth, I must have lacked some important part of thinking, reading, and problem-solving.

Re:

> Joined letters - so they would learn to tell words

If your students (or any other people) cannot "tell words" (I think this must mean either "say words" or "distinguish words") without the letters joined, how do they learn to read books/magazines/newspapers/etc. (which do not join the letters).
Myself, I find it much harder (and have always found it much harder) to distinguish words when all the letters join.

> Few penlifts- very demanding, when you have no fine motor skills and distortion of orientation > abilities

Some folks, as Henrik says, find it easiest to have few pen-lifts. Other folks with and without disabilities (and I must include myself in the "with" class) find the demands of any pen-lift much less than the demands of the most difficult joins required by having few pen-lifts: for such joins as "pa" and "sc" and "gh" and "qu" I must report that I myself (and at least some other disabled and non-disabled people who've come to me for help) find that correctly making those joins on paper (which requires difficult sequences of curving motions) demands much, much more effort and time than making those joins in air (as straight lines — the shortest, simplest path between two points).
If I ever met some student who really did find "pa/sc/gh/qu" always easier and quicker when joined on paper than when joined in air, of course I would teach him/her that way. However, I have not yet found such a person.

> The starting point of letters had to be fixed - so we didn't need obscure guidelines to see,
> where to put the pencil down - (sometimes in the middle - sometimes from the baseline and
> sometimes from the top - did not work - every letter, except a few, had to start from the same > line).

In Italic, every letter starts at the same place (the top of the letter) except for two letters: "d" and in some Italic styles "e." Not knowing Henrik's students, I would like Henrik to tell me why his students found this (or would have found it) more difficult than starting at the bottom and moving upwards at the beginning of most letters. I find a bottom-to-top movement difficult at first, then more difficult and less controllable as writing-speed and writing-skill increase.

>No fine motor skills involved. Most of my pupils have none or very little control of this. This >meant using the arm only - the "Palmer way".

Note that one can write just about any style — not just Palmer or its relatives — with arm-only movement. I have seen excellent Italic written by someone who had no writing-arm below the elbow: obviously she used a "Palmer-style" arm-movement method to do it.

> And finally: How to sit and position and move the paper.

What different sitting-positions, paper-positions, and/or paper-movement techniques did you try? Whichever you used, I congratulate your pupils on their achievement. In my experience, many people can produce a "fair Zaner-Bloser-like" script if they don't go beyond some very slow speed: possibly your students, with all their disabilities, would never write fast in any case, so they would never risk such a script collapsing at speed.

For me (and for other students of mine), one of the immensely biggest difficulties of Zaner-Bloser/Palmer/similar styles involves the fact that bottom-starting makes many letters need to change their appearance whenever they occur after the letters "b/o/v/w" instead of after the other letters: for instance, the "r" in "port" differs vastly (in starting-point and in shape) from the "same" letter "r" in the word "part" — the "s" in "post" differs vastly (in starting-point and in shape) from the "same" letter "s" in the word "past." As long as you have bottom-starting, you have the fact that bottom-starting does not work after the letters "b/o/v/w," so I wonder how Hendrik and his students deal with this inconsistency. It posed vast problems to me, and to others — here in the USA, at any rate, when students try to write a cursive "r" and they have learned that this starts from the bottom, this makes "or" look like "ar" because the student goes to the bottom (as s/he learned) after "o" in order to start the "r"! (I have seen this among schoolchildren, teens, and even some adults whom the teachers had rigidly trained to "start every letter from the bottom" — I have even seen it in the handwritings of some handwriting-teachers!)

Whatever style one writes, of course, one must learn to READ a fully joined cursive for the sake of those people who do write it ... fortunately, for most of the people I've taught, learning to read such a cursive takes far less time than learning to write it. But (as I said above) if anyone demonstrably gains his/her soundest life-long handwriting from writing a fully joined cursive, s/he should write that way and leave it to the rest of us to read it ...

With regard to the bottom-starting for every letter, when I had penmanship (I think it was the Ziller system, similar but not exactly Zaner-Bloser), we were carefully taught how to connect the letters at mid-height after lowercase b, o, v, and w, and how to get the letters that follow to look correct. I wish I could find my box of old elementary school papers and see if I still have my practice books..

Dear Kate,
Thank you for your comment and interest in my way of teaching. Now I feel a bit handicapped - because I would like to explain - but I don't think my english is good enough - but I will try anyway.
I was just trying to express the weiw, that penmanship should stay in the curriculum, because it is important for reading and thinking - besides practical communication. Then I referred to some observations I made, when trying to teach.
As said: english is not my native language, and I migth have used terms and expressions, that could be misunderstood - by "joined" I did not mean joined by legatures, but put together forming words. I migth have made other mistakes (distinguished was one of theml)? I apologize for that
However, I sense at bit of sarcasm and need to correct me on every point? I feel that I in general agree with you - I just went this way, with these pupils .But I do appeiciate your comments very much, and wil take them in consideration, when I plan instruction in the future.
kind regards
Henrik

Thanks for clarifying, Henrik, and for saying that you like my ideas anyway — by the way, I think you mean "alienum" where you have "alenium."

;-)

Thank you Kate, I wasn't wearing my glasses that day. I'm learning something all the time!
kind regards
Henrik

Found this link on another forum. Great story about fountain pens in school.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20061210/ap_on_...ntain_pen_lives

I'm sure most (of not all ) elementary schools in Australia still have exhaustive hand writing classes

I remember not enjoying those classes, because my handwriting was not very good with a pencil or ballpoint pen

My opinion of this topic is - Yes, to the extent that students have legible writing, but don't make it so that we all have the same handwriting It's good to see lots of different types of writing to different personalities

I trained in a school system where we all were supposed to match the big handwriting cards around the room. However, by the time we had reached junior high, we had already started adopting our own styles. By the time we were graduated from high school, our styles were quite different indeed--mine as different as any!

I dated a professional graphologist many years ago, and I do believe one's handwriting can be an indicator of personality.

Regarding graphology — I've seen the graphologists get things seriously wrong at least as often as I've seen them get things more-or-less right.

I think that someone who holds his/her pen wrongly is not something good. Why? Because there is a way to write with a pen as well as to hold it. You don't hold a pen like you hold a hammer. And also some specific position of the pen allows you to write faster and without making too much efforts. Someone who knows how to hold a pen correctly and write fast and enough clearly and with a good spelling is someone who had received an education and is litterate and disciplined. Discipline and coherence are very important today.

Hmm, I was schooled during the 50's and 60's, when penmanship had been forgotten. I loved watching my father write. He was born in 1891. Now that I have discovered and am studying the Palmer Method myself, I know that this is the method he was taught.

I spoke with him and other members of my family, who were raised in the U.S., Germany, Estonia, Russia, about their schooling 70 years ago and learned that nobody had ADD, or "dysgraphia", or dys-anything else. Everyone successfully learned the three R's and everyone had good penmanship. This was basic.

As far as whether good penmanship is important today, yes it is. As a former employer of as many as 55 people, I can assure you that employers judge potential hires in many ways including neatness of dress, and penmanship. Employers try to get a " feel" for the people they will be letting into their business. Sloppy handwriting implies (but does not guarantee) sloppy thinking, poor work habits, and lack of attention to detail. In other words, not caring.

While lack of good penmanship never stopped me from hiring a person who was known to be a good engineer, it was something that I and my associates noted as something that might be reflected in his or her work -- and it usually was. Imagine that.

So that's my argument for the importance of good penmanship, or at least clear and legible handwriting. Right or wrong, people DO judge you by it, and that makes it important in school.

/phil

Re:

> I spoke with him and other members of my family, who were raised in the U.S.,
>Germany, Estonia, Russia, about their schooling 70 years ago and learned that
>nobody had ADD, or "dysgraphia", or dys-anything else. Everyone successfully
>learned the three R's and everyone had good penmanship. This was basic.

For the record:

My paternal grandmother (born in Warsaw, Poland in 1900 — expensively educated by a wealthy family — spoke/read/wrote in five languages) showed every symptom of dysgraphia, dyslexia, and ADD.

My paternal grandfather (born in Rovno, Lithuania in 1890-something — homeschooled — spoke/read/wrote in four languages) showed every symptom of dysgraphia and dyslexia.

My maternal grandmother (born in Volhynia, Poland in 1906 — brought to the USA in 1917 and enrolled in a demanding high-standards public school which taught Palmer Method for at least an hour a day — spoke/read two languages, and spoke/read/wrote a third) showed every symptom of dyslexia and ADD, and several symptoms of dysgraphia.

Captain Nemo: with such people in my family, how can I adopt your view that we didn't have dyslexia/dysgraphia/ADD seventy years ago?

They didn't used to call it ADD, they just used to call those kids stupid and abuse them until they dropped out of school. That's only changed very very recently.

Hi Kate,

Good Heavens. I had no intention of offending. I was relaying what I was told by family members of whom I had asked these things. I was curious of their experiences in the early 1900's because my experience in large public schools in the 50's and 60's was that everyone kept up and everyone learned to read and write without notable difficulty. My schools (in Southern California) were large public schools and included deaf kids and blind kids, was racially mixed, and I never ran into anyone who "couldn't do it". (Blind kids used Braille, which I found fascinating) Unfortunately for me, by the time I reached school age in the 1950's, good penmanship had been dropped from the curriculum and I am now, finally, attempting to learn to write as my father and everyone else in my family older than I does (or did).

The overall point that I was trying to make was not about schools and all the diagnosable illnesses that have cropped up over the past 30 years but that, despite the lack of penmanship instruction in today's schools, or in the schools I attended nearly 50 years ago, and despite the universal use of computers for writing, people today still do notice one's penmanship and one is judged by it. Fair or unfair, like it or not, this is how it is. Penmanship is important. (Mine is very legible, people like it, but measured against the standards of 70 years ago, my handwriting stinks.)

I'm sorry if my life experiences differ from yours and offended you. I was relaying "old school" school thinking, I suppose.

Best regards,
/phil

Captain Nemo — rest assured, you did not in the least offend me: I meant only to share some info/observations that (so it seems to me) must affect your conclusion.

I definitely do agree that, fairly or not, people still judge you by your handwriting — in fact, even folks with abominable handwriting will often disdain another abominable writer! (particularly if his/her particular type of scribal abominableness differs much from their own: I've seen teachers who produced one form of illegibility label as "stupid" or "disordered" those students who tended towards some other form of scribble than that which the teacher generated and therefore favored.)
On the other hand — and even more unfairly — I've known mediocre-to-abominable handwriters to disdain those with particularly *neat* handwriting (even handwriting that the mediocre/abominable scribe confessed s/he found very attractive). Some people consider illegibility (in their own writing or in another's) actually a mark of distinction — perhaps they think it signifies that this writer has much more important things on his/her mind than the "abc"s — and I have actually seen/heard people state that only the less than fully literate/educated make efforts to write neatly: a view that, for all his good sense otherwise, George Orwell seemingly shared:

"Winston found and handed over two creased and filthy notes, which Parsons entered in a small notebook, in the neat handwriting of the illiterate ... " (NINETEEN EIGHTY-FOUR, chapter 5)

Hi Kate,

Whew. I'm glad to hear that. I'm still very new here on FPN and I was not pleased that I had stepped on somebody's toes already, or thought so anyway.

I have run into both of the hypocrisies / idiocies you cited. Amazing isn't it? It tells you quite a lot about the person who would take these positions, too.

Learning disabilities are a fascinating thing. Some people carry it too far, and some people take up their disability and carry it like a banner before them, hoping that it will buy them some sort of extra privilege, but this is to be expected from human nature.

My first experience with a person with a learning disability came when I was well into adulthood. I had an associate named Rick who was extremely intelligent and an excellent writer, but a very, very poor speller—astonishingly bad. This puzzled me greatly because, up to that time, I could not imagine separating the two. I am one of these people to whom words are sounds, and meanings, and visual shapes. You can hand me a page of dense single-spaced typewritten text and without reading it, just by glancing at the page, the three misspelled words jump out at me as though they were highlighted – two seconds and I've spotted them. Working with my friend Rick taught me that some people just don't have the “spelling gene” and that poor spelling has nothing to do with anything else.

Since then, I have run into others, including a roomate for a year who suffered from ADD all his life. We spoke about it a lot. I wanted to know all about it firsthand and, for the first time, I gained a real understanding of it. He is also extremely intelligent and was very good at describing in detail the way his mind worked so that I could imagine it myself – what happens when he tries to read a book and what happens when he sits down to watch a movie – how his mind jumps the track and how thoughts jump into his mind that obliterate whatever he was thinking about before so thoroughly that he cannot even remember what he was thinking about before the unbidden thought popped in.

But my lessons in learning disabilities are about to get serious. I have three grown kids and four grandkids. One of them, a six year old girl, has been diagnosed with all manner of learning disabilities as well as a very strange speech problem. (She speaks fine but from time to time, several words will come out completely garbled and then she's fine again.) Personally, I see a bit of ODD (Oppositional Defiance Disorder) in her as well, and that's not good at all. Starting in June, I will be taking her under my wing and working with her closely. I can see that she's going to be a major long-term project and I'll be an expert by the time she grows up. Fortunately, I'm pretty well suited for the job. I may sound like a hard-*ss, but I'm not really. I'm known for being gently persistent and infinitely patient, and will probably need plenty of both with this girl. I'll let you know if dysgraphia is one of her problems. ;-)

Thanks for jumping in and clarifying, Kate. I did not want to leave the impresson that I'm just a grumpy old curmudgeon.

Best regards,
/phil

PS. Regarding the Orwell quote, I can see how some people might get that idea. If EVERYONE is schooled in fine penmanship, then there is no relation between penmanship and intelligence or knowledge. And it is possible that there was some truth to the statement. A dumber kid would spend more time diligently practicing and refining his penmanship, while a smart kid, interested in many things, would spend less time on the drudgery of the Palmer Method. Just a thought.

Re:

> Hi Kate,

> I have run into both of the hypocrisies / idiocies you cited. Amazing isn't it?

Yes, and those strange ideas go back a lot further than George Orwell.

Consider this from Shakespeare:
"I once did hold it, as our statists do,
A baseness to write fair, and labour'd much
How to forget that learning. But, sir, now
It stood me yeoman's service."
(HAMLET, Act Five, Scene Two)

... or this from Quintilian:
"The accomplishment of writing well and expeditiously, which is commonly disregarded by people of quality, is by no means an indifferent matter."
[Quintilian's Institutes of Oratory, Book I, Section 28]

Re:

> ...some people just don't have the “spelling gene” and that poor spelling has
> nothing to do with anything else.

My paternal grandmother definitely did *not* have the "spelling gene." She could not spell even in her native Polish, a language of exceedingly simple spelling (no spelling-exceptions at all, one unvarying sound per letter or per letter-combination — as she herself told me: she could recognize that English spelling lacks these advantages and that Polish spelling has them ... but she said she couldn't handle Polish spelling, let alone English spelling. People who know Polish — which I don't know more than a few words of — tell me that she made far fewer spelling-errors in her Polish writing than in her writing of English, but I can't think of any language that she spelled correctly even though she read voraciously in several.)

Good luck, Captain, to you and your children & grandchildren as you embark on your own serious "lessons in learning disabilities." If I can help here in any way, let me know. At the very least, I would like to refer you to a colleague of mine (a medical-man-plus-handwriting-enthusiast/literacy-specialist, Dr. Bob Rose: rovarose@aol.com) who has done some excellent research on the acquisition of handwriting skills and how this aids reading/learning. Please talk with Bob, particularly about your six-year-old (what Bob does works best with the younger set) — and please tell Bob that I referred you to him.

Re:

> ... Regarding the Orwell quote ... If EVERYONE is schooled in fine penmanship,
> then there is no relation between penmanship and intelligence or knowledge. And > ... A dumber kid would spend more time diligently practicing and refining his
> penmanship, while a smart kid, interested in many things, would spend less time
> on the drudgery of the Palmer Method. Just a thought.

This seems plausible enough: so if we want the smart kids, too, to aim for fine penmanship, we may *conceivably* need to present them with something less drudgery-rife than Palmer ... Back to Orwell: although he associates neat penmanship with illiterates, his NINETEEN EIGHTY-FOUR nevertheless shows real appreciation of quality writing-tools — note this from Chapter One ...

" ... the thing that he was now about to do ... had ... been suggested by the book that he had just taken out of the drawer. It was a peculiarly beautiful book. Its smooth creamy paper, a little yellowed by age, was of a kind that had not been manufactured for at least forty years past. He could guess, however, that the book was much older than that. He had seen it lying in the window of a frowsy little junk-shop ... Winston fitted a nib into the penholder and sucked it to get the grease off. The pen was an archaic instrument, seldom used even for signatures, and he had procured one furtively and with some difficulty simply because of a feeling that the beautiful creamy paper deserved to be written on with a real nib instead of being scratched with an ink-pencil.
"Actually, he was not used to writing by hand. Apart from very short notes it was usual to dictate everything into the speak-write which was of course impossible for his present purpose. He dipped the pen into the ink and then faltered ... To mark the paper was the decisive act. In small clumsy letters he wrote April 4th, 1984."

Hmmm ... he loves old pens and old paper ... bought some from a second-hand shop ... and, despite less-than-marvelous handwriting he has good reason to write by hand ... hey, this guy would fit "write" in around here!

In France, we were taught spelling by writing the words several times. When one made a mispelling fault after dictation, the teacher gave him a light beating on the fingers with a metallic ruler. That was 23 years ago. Now due to sms and the internet, lot of French students not only write with an atrocious spelling but have an extremely limited vocabulary. During the time I passed the A level or Baccalaureat, only 1 spelling mistake per page was tolerated that was 8 years ago. In 2002, they changed the Baccalaureat rules and 8 spelling mistakes per page was the new standard, a shame really. By lowering the difficulty of level of the baccalaureat, more people had it but it didn't make them more clever or more educated people. When you have a letter of application for a job and which is filled of spelling mistakes you ask yourself if the person is really having a high degree of education or not. I started to learn American English at age of 9 by myself and learned German at the age of 11 at school also I started to speak and write Russian at the age of 4 and I was rarely making spelling mistakes even in foreign languages. Despite I speak mainly Russian at home, I have no probs for French and English spelling and Grammar.

Re spelling, handwriting, changing practices, and limited vocabulary — many people who fear punishment for spelling-errors/handwriting-errors limit their (written) vocabulary so that they will never risk using a word that they do not know how to spell, and will never risk using a word that they do not know how to write legibly — e.g., someone who wants to call a difficulty "enormous" but who instead calls it "big" because s/he knows that s/he does not know how to spell "enormous" correctly/how to write "enormous" readably.

You are right Kate but one can improve his/her spelling and broaden his/her vocabulary by reading or watching movies. Or perhaps writing letters to relatives instead of using the internet all the time. The best way to spell a word is to say it loud then write it several times and then restart again to write that word several times again till it is written with no spelling mistakes. Most professions require to have a good spelling and to have some vocabulary. One can acquire words by reading a lot.

Re:

> ... You are right Kate but one can improve his/her spelling and broaden his/her
> vocabulary by reading or watching movies. Or perhaps writing letters to relatives > instead of using the internet all the time.

Many children's/teens' use of the Internet consists 50% (or more) of reading, watching movies, and writing letters to friends and relatives. Or do you not consider reading "reading" if the surface uses pixels insteads of ink?

Re:

> The best way to spell a word is to say it loud then write it several times and then
> restart again to write that word several times again till it is written with no spelling > mistakes.

This works well for many people. For at least some people (in my observation and experience) it actually makes the spelling get worse and worse ... not that anything else has results for them, eithe, but at least (for those individuals) procedures other than "the best way" do not actually make things worse. Given a choice between non-results and making things worse, I won't choose what makes things worse for a given individual. Many who "acquire words by reading a lot" have enormous vocabularies which they speak/read correctly — perhaps even handwrite elegantly — but cannot spell. (Have you ever seen elegant, model-perfect handwriting with nearly every word misspelled? I have ... and it presents an odd impression indeed.)

Re:

> I dated a professional graphologist many years ago, and I do believe one's
> handwriting can be an indicator of personality.

I know several professional graphologists. I've seen them analyze my handwriting, and the handwriting of people I know — and they routinely got at least as much wrong as they got right: when confronted with the evidence of that, they simply didn't admit it.
One of my friends (a police profiler/investigator equally unconvinced about graphology) did an experiment some years ago with some of *his* professional-graphologist friends. He showed them a sample of the "Unabomber's" handwriting (not telling them who had written it) and asked them to analyze it. Most of them identified this sample as coming from someone uneducated and unintellectual — the "Unabomber," though, had a Ph.D in higher mathematics from a very demanding university. Most of the graphologists also stated that the writer had a thoroughly altruistic and gentle personality, friendly and outgoing and incapable of violence or deviousness. When told whom they had analyzed in this way, ALL the graphologists (especially the majority who had made these mistakes) claimed that my friend had "cheated" by not telling them that this sample came from the Unabomber, or at least telling them that "This comes from a terrorist who makes bombs." Apparently, they would have said quite different things about the man if they had seen his name/alias/"job description" along with "merely" seeing his handwriting ... if someone gives you a piece of paper and says "The Unabomber wrote this," you don't even need to look at the handwriting in order to make a credible-sounding "analysis" ...

I can't compare a book with what is written on a screen. Sometimes what you see on a screen is full of mistakes and written as if the person was totally illiterate or uneducated that is not the case of a book.
As you said there are people who have a very nice handwriting but an atrocious spelling and grammar even tough they could/can speak with ease and elegance. I knew several like those people in my earlier classes. But in today's life, you have to put yourself at the place of an employer, would an employer hire someone with an atrocious spelling and grammar? No. People do pay attention to spelling and grammar. For some people spelling and grammar are details but not for me.
Apprentship of grammar and spelling is included in penmanship I think. It was included in mine thanks a hardass female teacher, tough she was not the kindest person but the result is that everyone who got her/his penmanship with her was excellent at spelling and grammar and learnt to write quick and legible.
Such teachers are rare these days and I was enough fortunate to get the benefit to have a such teacher.

Georges writes:

> I can't compare a book with what a written on a screen. Sometimes what you see >on a screen is full of mistakes

By that argument, one should never play music (but should only read the music of others) because sometimes, when one plays music, it is full of mistakes.


>and written as if the person was totally illiterate

Anything "written as if the person was totally illiterate" would consist of either /a/ entirely blank pages, or /b/ pictures without any words, without even any letters or numbers. Claiming that the "totally illiterate" write web-pages (or any other written works) defies logic.

>or uneducated that is not the case of a book.

I have never seen a book without typographical or orthographical errors. If Georges finds no value in reading anything but absolutely perfectly spelled and punctuated material, then I fear he has very, very little to read — for even his own writing contains numerous errors not entirely explainable by his use of a language other than his native tongue.


> But in today's life, you have to put yourself at the place of an employer, would an > employer hire someone with an atrocious spelling and grammar? No.

Agreed — though I suspect that we will all live to see the developing "Internet spelling system" (e.g., "r u w8ing" for "are you waiting)" become an accepted spelling-standard side-by-side with what we now use (just as American spelling long ago became an accepted standard side-by-side with British spelling: "color/colour — realize/realise — plow/plough" and so forth for thousands of words).

Hi kate

I disagree with you for these reasons:
-first: I have never said that anyone shouldn't play music but there is good music and there is a bad music. After it is the choice of everyone what kind of music they want to play and there is a way of learning of how to play music as well.

-second: I can understand that a book contains a pair of mistakes but when an article or a book contains more than two spelling mistakes per page, it makes things suspicious but I am not here to bash authors or writers. I am not perfect myself but when there are too many spelling mistakes in an article or a book, it leads you to ask yourself questions about who wrote the book.

-third: I have no fear to read something, I read books in Russian, German and English. I would like you to point my numerous errors as you say. But despite I am a non native English Speaker, I have passed my TOEIC with 850 and I have a Cambridge Diploma in Economics with a very good mention. I started to learn English by my own at the age of 9. You also forgot that besides French and English, I do also speak and write Russian as well as German. In those other languages, I am fluent. I would understand that one has troubles in spelling with one language. But to be honest with you, I have had enough severe and strict English teachers that insisted more than a lot on spelling and grammar so I don't think I am making important spelling and/or grammar mistakes.

I just expressed my disagreements.

very best regards

georges

Re:

> ... good music and ... bad music ...

Spellings or grammatical features from non-standard varieties of a language don't make the writing (or the language) bad — they just make it non-standard. Needing to use the standard variety of a language where only this has acceptance (e.g., in most workplaces) does not make the non-standard varieties somehow inherently "bad" — any more than one would consider French inherently "bad" because we don't normally speak it in the USA. Situations/circumstances where the non-standard varieties appear and increasingly have acceptance (e.g., the Internet) therefore do not constitute somehow-"bad" uses of reading/writing (it seems to me that you regard such circumstances as somehow "bad" uses of literacy, and that you further equate these so-called "bad" uses of literacy with not having literacy.)
Re:

> ... I am not perfect myself but when there are too many spelling mistakes in an
> article or a book, it leads you to ask yourself questions about who wrote the book.

So you value standard spellings simply because, when you see them, you feel good (instead of bad) about the author who uses them? To me, that sounds rather like circular reasoning.

I won't point out your errors in this letter, Georges, but I thank you for (and may act on) your invitation to do so in future correspondence.

Hi again Kate

I accept constructive criticism because it is a way to improve myself. Advice always helps. Some can't accept constructive criticism and that is quite sad. Also when you speak many languages and not only one, you are more prone to make mistakes than a native speaker who is fluent (even tough I would like to say masterful) in his native language.

regards

georges