Pretend your pen is a baby
bird. The pen's nib is the beak, the finger area is its
neck, the shaft is the bird's body. Your aim is to write
without squashing that poor thing.
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looking at difficulties in
handwriting
>/1/ staircase of handwriting
function
optimal:
- self-administers (administers to others if required)
handwriting maintenance/improvement procedures -
self-monitors status of own handwriting (can monitor
others' handwriting status if required)
- handwrites unambiguously at practical speed(s) for
needed duration(s) of task
- the writer, and others who see and read his or her
writing, find it at least cceptable in appearance:
whether or not it conforms exactly with every details
of a given school-style of handwriting.
>
approaching
optimal:
- continues developing handwriting speed to needed
level(s)
- handwrites unambiguously for increasing durations:
word, phrase, sentence, paragraph, page, long task
handwrites unambiguously anything s/he can
say, hear, understand, or think
- handwrites unmistakably all letters, numerals,
symbols, punctuation, abbreviations, etc. that s/he
reads/knows/uses. (NOTE: This will vary depending on
the needs of the person also because of our changing
culture. For example: just a few decades ago, very
few of us ever needed to write the @ symbol!)
not-yet-totally-functional handwriting
(includes most of USA normal
population!)>
- handwrites legibly or at adequate speed or
with ease - but does not manage to do all three
together
Handwrites unambiguously all or most letters
in one or more related-motion groups (such as u/a/c/d/g/q
or n/r/m/h/b/p), but not all the letters
and/or not all letter-combinations. This writer will
show repeated and noticeable difficulties involving
particular sequences of motion and/or particular
letters/joins, especially in conventional cursive
writing
g>>someone who can write ...
but definitely a "problem handwriter"
- handwrites unmistakably one or more letters, but
not all of them
- may have (or have had) a lot of difficulty with
conventional manuscript-then-cursive instruction:
(He or she will probably tell you: "I hate cursive
!")
- may "fight" conventional cursive , and/or attempt
a "self-invented" way of writing (typically this
will be some form of "printing," a mix of upper-
& lower-case, and/or atypical ways of forming
the letters (out-of-order strokes or directions)
g>someone
in the following situation
may appear unable to write by hand -
however, appropriate methods and
models for handwriting may make it possible for this
individual to develop some handwriting competence and
ascend higher on the "staircase":
- can hold some object, with some part of the body,
&/or can move some object and/or body-part to
make some type of mark (such as a dot or scribble)
on some kind of surface.
- may require a special tool, writing surface, or
other adaptation to do so
someone
in the following situation cannot write by hand:
ig>
- cannot voluntarily move any body part or hold any
object in any manner whatsoever
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/2/ trouble spots in
handwriting include:
g>
conventional-print-writing
trouble spot:
- requiring/presenting circle/vertical separate
shapes for beginners' written letters - the shapes
that most people, even adults, find the
most difficult to make (at least,without drafting
tools). Even for people without disabilities, these
shapes do not really relate to ordinary everyday
patterns of movement.
conventional-cursive
trouble spots:
- use of 2 opposed styles for writing, so that
students must change their entire
already-established writing style just to join
letters: this means that later learnings oppose
earlier ones (instead of building on them)
- requiring fancy versions of
CAPITALS/b/f/r/s/z in joined writing ... this
not only makes the letters very difficult to learn
and distinguish, but makes them extremely dissimilar
to the letter-shapes used almost all reading matter.
In any case, these allegedly necessary fanciments
(especially for the CAPITALS) do not even appear in
the handwriting of many adults who write legibly at
speed. This makes them difficult to justify on
grounds of speed or "adultness." Difficulty in
mastering these shapes also stems from their rarity:
only 2% of ordinary prose text consists of capital
letters, so a student usually does not encounter the
elaborate conventional cursive forms often enough to
remember them clearly, or to justify the extended
practice that these elaborate shapes require for
correct mastery, performance, and retention.
- asking for total joining/looping of all letters in
script words
(To experience this problem, try to write all
these words, in good conventional cursive, without
a single pen-lift inside any of the words. Can
you? Probably not!)
handwriting Constitutionally citizenship
Thanksgiving grandmother scientific grandmother
tyrannosaurus arithmetic thermometer astronomy
eleemnosynary thyroidectomies uncopyrightable
multiculturality antidisestablishmentarianism
Some letter-combinations make it very
hard to join legibly at speed. In many cases, a
join/loop may even present more difficulties (and
allow less speed and legibility) than just
momentarily lifting the pen during the movement
between letters. (Examples include joining into
tall letters & a/c/d/g/q). Also, our attention
spans and our hands often need a break from
repetitive motions after 3 - 5 letters.
- presenting/teaching extreme "script" slant. Using
a heavy slant (over 15 degrees to the right) removes
the cursive letters even further from ordinary
(type) letter-forms (a vertical stroke in type
translates to a strongly-slanted stroke in
conventional cursive handwriting) ... also, it
optically squashes letter-bodies, making them less
easy to distinguish.
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ig>
g>but does the research support this?
>
If you take an interest in writing more simply
(and/or in teaching your children to do the same), you
may ask:
"What research support this? Does this just represnt
one person's - or more than one person's - experience?
Or have we any hard proof that the things Kate
suggests really make a difference?"
Current research does show that the differences do
make a difference: at least, if your goals in
handwriting include legibility and speed.
Here follows a summary of 1998 university research on
what makes for effective handwriting-skills:
University of
Maryland, appears in the 1998 issue of HANDWRITING REVIEW, an
annual (now semi-annual) handwriting-research
journal published by the Handwriting Interest Group (HIG)
at the University of Reading (UK).
>
Article title:
Virginia Berninger and Steve Graham -
"Language by Hand: A Synthesis of a Decade of
Research on Handwriting," in HANDWRITING REVIEW (pp. 11-25).
Reading (UK): Handwriting Interest
Group/University of Reading, 1998.
(Dr. Berninger conducts learning-disabilities
research at the University of Washington, and Dr.
Graham teaches/researches in the Education
Department of the University of Maryland. Funding for
the handwriting research done by Berninger and
Graham at both these universities came through
grants from the USA's National Institutes of Health
[NIH], as part of NIH research on assessment and
intervention for writing disabilities.)
Berninger's and Graham's research
involved 900 children, 100 each in grades 1 through 9
- 50 boys and 50 girls in each grade, in two USA
states (Maryland and Washington).
Below, you'll find the HANDWRITING REVIEW
abstract of the article, then my own summary of some
specific Berninger/Graham findings which
should interest anyone who cares about better,
simpler, basic handwriting and how to teach it:
ABSTRACT from Handwriting Review:
"An overview is provided of a decade of research in
handwriting, with an emphasis on the rôle of
handwriting in composing for authentic communications
purposes. This research, which is a joint
collaboration of two research groups, is theory-driven
and has examined the neurodevelopmental underpinnings
of handwriting, handwriting development, gender
differences, assessment practices, instructional
approaches, and transfer from handwriting to other
writing and reading skills. Key findings from this
research program include (a) handwriting
automaticity (producing accurate letters under
time-limited conditions) is important to writing
development throughout the elementary school years,
and (b) handwriting is language by hand and
involves more than just fine motor skills."
SOME SPECIFIC FINDINGS OF NOTE summarized by Kate Gladstone:>
/1/ many students do not follow the typical classroom
expectation of using only one of the types of
handwriting they learnedig
(manuscript - i.e., what most US people would call
"printing" & most British people would call
"script"-
throughout a piece of writing. Instead, they "mix"
elements of both these systems. About 40% of the
children observed by Berninger and Graham habitually
"mixed" handwriting-systems in this manner.
/2/ about SPEED - Berninger and Graham
observed that those students who used such a "mixed"
writing wrote faster than the students who
complied with the classroom expectation of using
either one or the other type of handwriting for a
given piece of work.
In other words, not only did the students with
"mixed" writing write faster than "print-writers" (we
might have expected that) but they *also*
wrote faster than those writing "properly" in
all-cursive style (something we might NOT have
expected ... since people often think of "good
handwriting" as being synonymous with "doing it
properly in cursive - because that speeds the
handwriting"... yet writing in "proper" relentlessly
joined cursive actually produces slower results, by
test, than "mixing" one's writing.)
(Note that those familiar only with conventional
USA-style manuscript and cursive systems generally
apply this description of "mixed handwriting" to
Italic, the type of handwriting that I recommend.)
3/ about LEGIBILITY - Berninger and Graham
observed that those students using such a "mixed"
style of writing wrote as legibly as, or more
legibly than, students who complied with the
classroom expectation of writing either consistently
in conventional manuscript or consistently in
conventional cursive.
In other words, any "proper" (100%-connected, etc.)
cursive program not only falls short in speed, but
does not excel in legibility either (and probably
falls short in legibility as much as in speed). So why
insist on a conventional cursive style at any stage?
/4/ which is faster, manuscript or cursive? - Berninger
and Graham observed that work done exclusively in
cursive writing was not significantly faster
than work done exclusively in manuscript writing. (To
measure handwriting speed, the researchers counted how
many accurate letters each writer produced per
minute.)
If a relentlessly joined and ornamented cursive style
- which some people feel must matter so very much -
does not even exceed the speed of "printing", what
reason exists to teach it?
/5/ which permits better legibility, cursive
writing or manuscript writing? - Berninger and
Graham also observed that work done exclusively in
manuscript writing did not make for easier
reading than work done exclusively in cursive
writing./big>
(The researchers evaluated legibility with the Test
of Legible Handwriting authored by Larsen and Hammill
in 1989.)
To me, findings /1/ - /5/ imply that classroom
"either/or" expectations for disparate styles -
"manuscript is manuscript, and cursive is cursive, and
never the twain shall meet" -
have counter-productive results, and that instead of
imposing a pair of disparate styles in quick
succession we should definitely teach a consistent
form of handwriting that combines the best elements of
these styles.
g>
After all, even when 40% of kids write in a "mixed"
way without any instruction or encouragement
in doing so, their "mixed" writing has superior
results in speed and has at least equal results in
legibility.
Some additional Berninger/Graham findings:nt>
/6/ Berninger and Graham observed that the average
speed and legibility of children's handwriting rose
steadily, grade after grade, from first through ninth
grade (complete tables are given in their article) with
one striking exception - while children were in
third grade, their speed and legibility reverted to
first-grade levels (only afterwards, in fourth grade,
did the speed and legibility slowly begin to rise
again.)
The authors attribute this loss of handwriting
competence to the fact that third-grade students in
the USA are normally required to change their
handwritings - this is typically the year when
students are expected to alter their handwriting-style
from what they were previously taught (manuscript) and
now write in a very different style (cursive).
(To me, finding /6/ implies that classroom
expectations for a change of styles are
counter-productive, and that instead we should be
teaching a single style to prevent this regression.)
general observations relating to teaching/learning
of any style
/7/ Berninger and Graham observed that girls in the
study typically wrote more fluently than boys, and
that this fluency seemed to translate into girls
getting better grades for written work than boys -
there also appears some evidence, according to
Berninger and Graham, that most girls use
left-hemisphere processing for handwriting (mentally
coding letters verbally) but most boys use
right-hemisphere processing (coding letters spatially)
and that the spatial coding slows retrieval (makes it
more difficult to remember, on demand, how a letter is
to look
/8/ Berninger and Graham observed also that, when
handwriting instruction involves what the researchers
called "verbal mediation"
(verbalizing specific directions for how to form the
letter in connection with tracing/copying/writing),
handwriting-learning and -performance actually deteriorate
(i.e., students who receive "verbal mediation" as
part of their handwriting instruction do *less* well
than students who receive the same trace/copy/write
instruction but with the verbal-mediation component
*left out*) -
>Berninger and Graham suspect that adding the
task of verbal comprehension/memorization/description
to the task of mastering/using handwriting, in their
words, "uses up limited working memory resources in
the beginning writer."
(I'd like to note at this point that many "standard"
handwriting-instruction programs in the USA
(and perhaps in other countries too?)
specifically *require* teachers and/or students to
use this counter-productive "verbal mediation"-style
step-by-step oral description of letters and/or
strokes.)
Yet ANOTHER interesting finding of the
Berninger/Graham team was this:
/9/
When the researchers compared the effectiveness of
various strategies in handwriting-instruction other
than hearing/memorizing verbal descriptions
<(copying a model-letter,
demonstrating the motor acts involved in forming a
letter & asking students to copy these acts,
providing numbered arrows as visual cues for
letter-formation -
requiring students to write letters from memory after
increasing
time-intervals -
using both numbered arrows *and* writing of letters
from memory after
increasing intervals) -
it was the combination of numbered arrows and
writing from memory after increasing intervals
that produced significantly greater improvement in
handwriting, and greater "automaticity" of handwriting
behavior
(students did not have to consciously think about how
to form each letter every time)
compared with any of the other approaches or with a
"no intervention" approach ("control" group)
- the combination of numbered arrows and writing
from memory after increasing intervals also
produced significantly greater transfer of
handwriting-skills into the students' written
composition outside of handwriting-instruction
copying-tasks.
(What was interesting to me here was that "copy the
model", which is probably THE most common and typical
strategy of classroom teachers, appeared *not* to
actually be the best strategy for teaching/learning of
letter-forms.
Numbered arrows (one component of the study's most
successful strategy) are of course common, but I know
*very* few if any teachers/curricula who use or even
*mention* the other half of the most successful
strategy (memory after increasing intervals) in
learning letter-forms. Try both halves of that
most successful strategy (numbered arrows and writing
letters from memory after increasing intervals of
time) and tell me what you think!)
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short resource list (some
available materials)
Fairbank, Alfred, A Handwriting Manual and
A Book of Scripts.
(out of print: stocks still available from John
Neal, Bookseller, Inc., 1-800-369-9598 or
e-mail JNealBooks@aol.com)
Getty, Barbara and
Dubay, Inga, Write Now: A Complete
Self-Teaching Program For Better Handwriting
Portland [OR]: Portland State University Media
Resources, 1991 (1-800-547-8887, extension 4891. Other
materials are also available from this source)
Jarman, Christopher, Development
of Handwriting Skills. Second edition. Melbourne
(Australia): Basil Blackwell, 1999 - or e-mail
Christopher at quilljar@btinternet.com
- or visit
his handwriting site to learn more
Lehman,
Charles L., Handwriting Models for
Schools. (out of print, but stocks still
available from John
Neal, Bookseller, Inc. 1-800-369-9598 or
e-mail JNealBooks@aol.com ).
You may also wish to inquire from Charles L. Lehman
himself at scribe@hevanet.com ...
and you may enjoy visiting his web-site at http://www.hevanet.com/scribe
.
For a much fuller resource list
(now
60 kilobytes!), e-mail me -
make sure that your message's
SUBJECT-line contains the words "handwriting
resource list"
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