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Paula Schaeffer's Columns
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Paula Schaeffer
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Bring Penmanship Back Into the Schools!
Although I can’t confirm when it happened exactly, Minnesota (along with 40 other states) stopped requiring schools to teach cursive writing when they adopted the Common Core State Standards for English in recent years.
Many supporters of this move say the skill of handwriting is archaic and unnecessary in the digital age. Other supporters say that learning to type is more important when it comes down to choosing what to teach in an age when so much classroom time needs to be devoted to enabling the student to pass mandatory testing.
I disagree with this for two reasons: one is that I think legible handwriting is still essential in the work place and, for another reason, I believe science shows that learning (and using) this skill has “intellectual” benefits.
First of all, this is my argument for legible handwriting in the workplace. I work in an office where every employee has a computer on their desk. The majority of these employees use that computer to produce most of their work output. So, do I think people need to know how to type well? Yes. However, the nature of our business still necessitates that many forms and logs use handwritten entries. These entries need to be read by another person in order to gather data, whether it’s to create an advertisement or to create an invoice for that advertisement. Dozens of times a day, messages are taken or notes written to convey information to another person without the use of a computer.
Now, I hate to pick on my younger co-workers, but in general, the younger they are, the worse their writing – or printing – is. It takes longer to figure out what their handwritten messages or entries say because the writing is so messy. These are young, talented, intelligent people ... they can’t help it that the school they went to didn’t think there was time to teach a higher level of proficiency in handwriting. Even a good friend of mine with four children in their 20s pointed out how bad young people’s writing has become. She also pointed out – and I’ve since noticed it more and more – that the younger people seem to all “print” rather than use the cursive style.
Actually, I wouldn’t care if they didn’t teach the cursive version of writing anymore. Just teach them how to PRINT legibly! Every school still has to teach THAT much, don’t they? Why not teach kids how to do it properly?
I can’t tell you how often having to decipher messy or illegible writing has slowed down my progress in completing a job. Worse yet, it’s not uncommon that I have not been able to complete the task at hand and had to go looking for answers because I could not read a co-worker’s writing. Or I guessed wrong as to what the writing said and later had to do extra work to correct “my” error.
Regarding my argument that learning and practicing the skill of handwriting has “intellectual” benefits, read on.
Studies show people better retain information if they write it rather than type it. Yes, it takes more time, but that information is better absorbed. You can take this even further. On the ABC News website, Associate Professor Anne Mangen at the University of Stavanger’s Reading Centre was quoted as saying: “... handwriting seems, based on empirical evidence from neuroscience, to play a larger role in the visual recognition and learning of letters.
"This is something one should be aware of in an educational context," she stresses.
In other words, those who learn to write by hand learn better. Mangen points to an experiment involving two groups of adults in which participants were taught a new, foreign alphabet. One group learned the characters by hand, the other learned only to recognize them on a screen and with a keyboard. Weeks after the experiment, the group that learned the letters by hand consistently scored better on recognition tests than those who learned with a keyboard. Brain scans of the hands-on group also showed greater activity in the part of the brain that controls language comprehension, motor-related processes and speech-associated gestures.
Do I have perfect handwriting at my “advanced” age of 56? No. Years of gripping an Exacto knife (to complete my duties as a graphic artist in the pre-digital age) followed by years of gripping a computer mouse (to complete my duties as a writer, designer and bookkeeper in the digital age) has taken it toll on the nerves in my right hand, wrist and forearm. It’s not as effortless to handwrite a note as it used to be and so I hurry through it to ease the stress. And, when I hurry, the legibility of my writing decreases.
So, although my younger co-workers may have some gripes about my writing as well at this stage in my life, I still think the art and science of handwriting should be valued highly and taught religiously.
Paula Schaeffer
The Hanska Herald Editor
hh@prairiepublishingmn.com
More of Paula's blogs can be found in the Archives.
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