Handwriting Speed

[smk]

I am in the process of developing an italic hand suitable for everyday use. My regular handwriting is cursive. While I like my handwriting, it couldn't hurt to have another one - and its fun practicing italic anyway.

 

While practicing it struck me that I would need to know when my speed is sufficiently developed for use as a daily hand - not wanting to rely on purely subjective 'feel' I decided to at least figure out what my writing speed was.

 

So - I made up a sentence with exactly 60 letters (seemed like a good idea at the time but I don't think it makes any difference) and wrote it twice while timing it. I did this a total of 12 times with 3 different pens writing some at full speed (with acceptable legibility) and others at regular speed (at which I would write a letter).

 

A quick search on the internet showed that the average handwriting speed is 33 words per minute (a word being 5 letters on average). I figured a time per letter would be a better metric as one can always calculate 'average' words per minute from it.

 

My findings were rather disappointing. I found that at full tilt I could only manage a best time of .33 seconds per letter (spl) with an average 'fast' speed of 0.36 spa. For my regular hand the best time was .39 spa while the average was .42 spa. The corresponding WPM for fast and regular speeds come to 33.7 & 28.9 respectively - and I thought I wrote pretty fast!

 

Has anyone else timed their speed? Does average speed data exist for different hands?

 

 

EDIT: fix errors :-(

Edited August 29, 2010 by smk

[nxn96]

Never measured it that way. Beyond a certain point, I think that's what shorthand was intended to do. A lost art, but it probably gets to your basic question.

[KateGladstone]

I prefer to score handwriting in LLPM (Legible Letters Per Minute), which is computable from your measure of SPL (Seconds Per Letter) if all the letters are legible:

and which is more objective than the usual WPM (Words Per Minute).

 

 

Why LLPM is more useful than the other measures:

 

/1/ LLPM takes account of legibility, which the other measurements do not. (An illegible handwriting could be very fast.)

 

/1/ Words -- the key of the WPM measurement -- have different lengths: "See Dick run" and "Observe Richard's acceleration" both contain three words.

 

My own LLPM varies from 135 to 155, depending on the size and purpose of my writing at the moment.

[KateGladstone]

My "rule-of-thumb" average (something that I came up with, that so far proves generally accurate) for how fast one should write in order to use handwriting efficiently for everyday purposes and be able to "keep up":

 

Take the number of years of education you have had, starting with kindergarten and going up through the senior year of high school. Multiply by 10 and (if you are not yet in high school) add the number of months of school which have elapsed during whatever school year you are in. The result is a good LLPM for you to aim for.

 

For example: if you have finished high school, you've had 13 full years of education (counting kindergarten) --

so 130 LLPM would be a good rate to aim for.

 

If you are starting fifth grade (you have had five years of education, counting kindergarten) --

50 LLPM would be a good rate for coming into the fifth grade

 

If you are five months into the fourth grade (you've had four years and five months of education, counting kindergarten),

45 LLPM would be a good rate for you -- but you'll want to get it up to 50 LLPM by the end of the school year, to be ready for the start of fifth grade.

(Actually, if you live in a country with a long summer vacation for students -- like the USA or Canada -- you may want to get it up to a shade above 50 LLPM before summer starts,

because students' handwriting speed in these countries tends to drop a bit when they are not writing much by hand for months on end.)

[smk]

Thanks Kate - LLPM makes sense.

 

The data I collected puts me from 145-169 average with lowest being 131 and highest being 181. I believe my real world speed would be somewhat less but thats o.k. The idea was to get a baseline anyway.

 

For you rule-of-thumb average, do you stop at the keep-up rate calculated for high school level education? (I should be somewhere near 200 if I count all my education :-)

 

Here's a snapshot of the data I collected in case anyone's interested:

[nxn96]

My "rule-of-thumb" average (something that I came up with, that so far proves generally accurate) for how fast one should write in order to use handwriting efficiently for everyday purposes and be able to "keep up":

 

Take the number of years of education you have had, starting with kindergarten and going up through the senior year of high school. Multiply by 10 and (if you are not yet in high school) add the number of months of school which have elapsed during whatever school year you are in. The result is a good LLPM for you to aim for.

 

For example: if you have finished high school, you've had 13 full years of education (counting kindergarten) --

so 130 LLPM would be a good rate to aim for.

 

If you are starting fifth grade (you have had five years of education, counting kindergarten) --

50 LLPM would be a good rate for coming into the fifth grade

 

If you are five months into the fourth grade (you've had four years and five months of education, counting kindergarten),

45 LLPM would be a good rate for you -- but you'll want to get it up to 50 LLPM by the end of the school year, to be ready for the start of fifth grade.

(Actually, if you live in a country with a long summer vacation for students -- like the USA or Canada -- you may want to get it up to a shade above 50 LLPM before summer starts,

because students' handwriting speed in these countries tends to drop a bit when they are not writing much by hand for months on end.)

 

Are you saying that the average high school graduate will have a LLPM rate approximating 130, but that's only a mean or median; i.e., there's some sort of range + or - that encompasses the broader population?

 

Why doesn't continuing education (college or university) add to the LLPM rate in your model? Is it a speed or legibility issue the more years of education under your belt?

 

Given the increased presence of computers in the classroom in earlier grades (I think my own children were expected to put their reports and papers on Word beginning in the fourth or fifth grade), would you expect the LLPM rate per year of school to decrease over time, as the need for legible notetaking fast enough to "keep up" might be less important. For example, when I was in graduate school, many professors would post their lecture notes or PowerPoint presentations on line for the students, so most students would simply make a few notes on the margins of the handouts.

[KateGladstone]

Re:

 

For you rule-of-thumb average, do you stop at the keep-up rate calculated for high school level education? (I should be somewhere near 200 if I count all my education :-)

 

 

Yes -- I stop there, for the reason that your comment implies. Of course, a lot of people can go faster than they did (or should have done) in high school, but they don't usually have to.

 

 

[KateGladstone]

Re:

 

Are you saying that the average high school graduate will have a LLPM rate approximating 130, but that's only a mean or median; i.e., there's some sort of range + or - that encompasses the broader population?

 

 

Why doesn't continuing education (college or university) add to the LLPM rate in your model? Is it a speed or legibility issue the more years of education under your belt?

 

Good question -- the reasons that I don't (yet) extend my figures into college/university are these:

 

/1/ I am not (yet) sure that college/university instructors talk that much faster than high-school instructors,

 

and

 

/2/ there are sheerly physical considerations here, along with the speed/legibility issues of coping with college-level note-taking: if I extended my figures into college/graduate/postgraduate years of education, the amount of education that some people here have survived would mean that the "rule of thumb" (if it covered those years) would require them to routinely write 200 LLPM, and I am not sure that people do that (or that they can do it).

 

So I would like others here to experiment with my rule, to determine (based on your experiences) how to best adapt it to college/graduate/postgraduate education:

 

Keep it as it is? (which means not expecting LLPM to rise after high school)

 

Simply extend the figures for additional years of education? (so that entering freshmen at college, for instance, would be considered to need 140 LLPM, seniors would need 180 LLPM , etc. -- it is actually starting to seem to me that they *may* need this ... )

 

Decide that the 4 years of college should count as just "one year" for LLPM rule-of-thumb purposes, then graduate school and postgraduate school each also count as "one year"? (It could be that whether this is true, or the preceding is true, depends on the difficulty of the academic program at the college/university ... )

 

Or do something else? Seeing how fast any proficient/fluent/legible/speedy handwriters here write in LLPM, and how much education they've had, will make it possible for FPNers to find the best way to extend the "LLPM and education" rule, or whatever name we want to give such a rule ...

 

Re:

 

Given the increased presence of computers in the classroom in earlier grades (I think my own children were expected to put their reports and papers on Word beginning in the fourth or fifth grade), would you expect the LLPM rate per year of school to decrease over time ... ?

 

I might have said that, except for the continued (and increasing) use of timed handwritten essays as part of standardized examinations and other testing. For example, a 16-year-old student who has "coasted" through school with a very low LLPM will (in the USA) face at this age the SAT exam: a [now] three-hour-long test which [since 2003] ends with a timed handwritten essay (minimum 1 1/2 pages in length) on an assigned subject provided at the start of the essay-writing section of the test.

 

For this essay, students have 25 minutes to do all their planning and writing of this essay -- more and more students report that the main difficulty in doing a good job on the essay is not planning what to write, but is writing what they've planned -- and doing it fast enough, when legible, to finish in the time allotted.

In other words, it's typical for a student to plan the essay quickly, to write his/her essay clearly BUT at such a slow LLPM rate that s/he requires 15 or 20 minutes simply to pen the first few sentences legibly. (And there's also the matter that the graders get only 90 seconds to grade each essay: whatever cannot be deciphered in that time cannot be awarded any points, so the test is in a way a test of clear handwriting under exam-room speed and stress -- even though this is never officially admitted -- because having to puzzle out the meaning of any unclearly written words will use a signiicant chunk of the grader's scant allotted time.)

 

 

[Guest Pjay]

A study in Queensland of school children (10-14 years of age) in 1994 found the following:

Analysis indicated that mean writing speed ranged from 34.9 to 110.76

letters per minute for boys and 38.77 to 84.68 letters per minute for girls.

Compared with earlier findings (Ziviani, 1984), these children wrote almost

twice as quickly. This could be explained, in part, by the increased attention

to handwriting within the school curricula which followed the introduction

of modern cursive script.

Ziviani, Jenny. Perceptual & Motor Skills, Feb96, Vol. 82 Issue 1, p282

[KateGladstone]

A study in Queensland of school children (10-14 years of age) in 1994 found the following:

Analysis indicated that mean writing speed ranged from 34.9 to 110.76

letters per minute for boys and 38.77 to 84.68 letters per minute for girls.

Compared with earlier findings (Ziviani, 1984), these children wrote almost

twice as quickly. This could be explained, in part, by the increased attention

to handwriting within the school curricula which followed the introduction

of modern cursive script.

Ziviani, Jenny. Perceptual & Motor Skills, Feb96, Vol. 82 Issue 1, p282

 

What Queensland officially calls "modern cursive script" is an Italic --

you can see it at the links here. What Queensland used in the early 1980s

(when the earlier research was done) was a cursive similar to Palmer or

Zaner-Bloser.

[Guest Pjay]

Thanks for the 'disclaimer' Kate. I know the Queensland system fairly intimately, with most of my school years spent in Queensland schools in the 60s, and two decades at the chalkface as a teacher. I had to adopt the newer style of handwriting myself so that I could model it on the blackboard (no white boards in those days :embarrassed_smile: )

Our training in the teaching of handwriting was rudimentary to say the least, and a sister-in-law who is a recent education graduate tells me it is still given only cursory treatment...