Script and Scribble

by Kitty Burns Florey

  13 “I screwed the barmaid,” preserved in the ruins of Pompeii.

  14 The MTA turned to a combination of razor-wire, guard dogs, graffiti-proof paint, and regular scrubbing, and finally, by 1988, had pretty much wiped it out. Diehards still scratch with a sharp object on the cars’ walls and windows, but the results are, to say the least, lame.

  15 In other words, graffiti evolution began to parallel the history of handwriting through the ages: simple to complex to supremely difficult to write and read.

  16 An engrosser, using an elaborate, formal, slowly executed roundhand, inscribes information onto official documents, like legal resolutions.

  17 From Robert Louis Stevenson’s A Child’s Garden of Verses: “The world is so full of a number of things/I’m sure we should all be as happy as kings,” to which James Thurber appended sarcastically, “And you know how happy kings are.”

  18 January 23, same as National Handwriting Day: maybe a good day to make a pie and then write out the recipe in neat, legible script and pass it on to a friend?

  19 The Japan Penmanship Association’s newsletter, Yoshodo, has been published since 1946.

  20 Which sounds like some occult practice or the eighth Harry Potter, but is a book about the work of the celebrated Louis Madarasz (1859–1910), often called the most highly skilled ornamental penman who ever lived.

  21 In addition, there are the equally pen-crazed magazines Pen World International and Stylus.

  Students are usually taught to print in first grade, which is when my own generation learned it. In those long-gone days, the move from printing to cursive writing in third grade was a ritual of growing up, an entry into the adult world.

  But today, for many students, handwriting instruction doesn’t go beyond that—and some people believe it shouldn’t. Just as, back in the eighteenth century, cacography (poor penmanship) was considered a mark of the leisured class, there are plenty of people today who accept their own atrocious writing without a qualm, who don’t intend to write badly but see no practical use for a legibility they were never taught. An editor I know comments, “I’d rather see people learn grammar and usage and spelling than neat handwriting. You can write a beautiful script and still look like an idiot if you mix up imply and infer.” True enough! As a copy editor, I wish They had to flea their village and He was a child protégé on the violin hadn’t just come across my desk.

  Other proud cacographers believe bad writing is a way of declaring their individuality and creativity, their refusal to truckle under and write like a nun or a schoolteacher. Tamara Plakins Thornton, in Handwriting in America, comes out strongly as a pro-printing, pro-keyboarding, anti-cursive, pro-technology anti-Luddite. For her, penmanship study can be an exercise in conformity. All her life, Thornton has had a “secret conviction that good penmanship does not matter, that if anything it denotes a person who is fearful or incapable of being in any way unusual.” To me, in our computerized world, it’s beautiful handwriting that seems unusual, a mark of individuality. A low-tech friend of mine with a thriving garden design business in Manhattan sends out handwritten bills on her elegant stationery. Her customers love it.

  Among the advocates of reviving penmanship exercises, some may really be looking for a return of the discipline that was forced on children in their own day. This is the dark underbelly of nostalgia, something that we who were raised in a simpler, more picturesque time (sock hops and taffy pulls, sledding down Maple Street Hill, tying on a gingham apron and helping Mom bake bread) need to be on guard against. I would love to see children writing cursive script, just because it seems wrong when something beautiful, useful, and historically important vanishes. But underneath the Norman Rockwell stuff, many of us were severely over-disciplined children, and so the idea can also be rather discomfiting. We don’t need to inflict our suffering on a new generation of innocent babes. My own daughter never finickily ironed the wrinkles out of a handkerchief in her life, much less sprinkled one with water and let it sit until it was “ready,” and yet as an adult she seems to be a pretty solid citizen.

  However, there are better arguments for learning to write neatly than “Those were the good old days.” There’s an increasing body of evidence that says good handwriting can influence academic performance on many levels. Dennis Williams, the national product manager for the Zaner-Bloser school handwriting program—one of the most popular in use today—points out that handwriting is not an isolated skill. For young students, the primary goal is to learn to read fluently—as Williams puts it, “to crack the code of the alphabet”—and, as they write their letters, they’re matching symbols to sounds. They not only see the letters and hear the way they sound, they actually create them, on paper, with care. In addition, they are able to get a clear idea of which letters are commonly associated with each other—a necessity for good spelling.

  I also talked to Louise Spear-Swerling, a learning disabilities specialist who teaches at Southern Connecticut State University in New Haven. She is firmly committed to the idea that handwriting instruction is especially beneficial not merely to learning-disabled kids but to all children at the early stage when they’re trying to master letter sounds. “Writing focuses their attention,” she says. “Just looking at a letter isn’t going to do it.” Spear-Swerling has respect for the usefulness of computers and word-processing programs for children with writing problems, but, along with every educator I spoke to, she strongly believes that advances in technology do not eliminate the need for teaching handwriting.

  When young children learn handwriting at the same time that they’re learning to express their thoughts on paper, the two kinds of writing—one a mechanical skill, one a creative intellectual process—become naturally and inextricably connected in the child’s mind. In a 2006 article in Developmental Neuropsychology, Steven T. Peverly of Columbia University Teachers College elaborates on this idea: “For both children and adults, research suggests that greater transcription speed increases automaticity of word production” so that a writer’s working memory can be freed up “for the metacognitive processes needed to create good reader-friendly prose.”

  In other words, students need to write not only clearly but also quickly—the less we have to struggle with making a capital G, the more we can think about what we’re trying to say and how to say it.

  While it’s true that learning a legible handwriting is not easy for young children—gratification isn’t immediate but slow and cumulative—there may be an intrinsic and lasting value in having children deal with this kind of frustration. The classic “marshmallow test” done in the 1960s by the Stanford psychologist Walter Mischel (now at Columbia) illustrates this: a plate of marshmallows was put in front of a group of four-year-olds. The children were told they could take a marshmallow—or, if they waited fifteen minutes, they could have two marshmallows. Some of them—the hedonistic set—grabbed one immediately and wolfed it down. Others chose to wait, even though delaying gratification was so painful that some had to close their eyes so they couldn’t see the marshmallows. Fourteen years later, the kids were evaluated. Sure enough, the ones who’d been able to wait had more friends, better social skills, and higher grades and SAT scores than the grabbers, who were often in academic trouble. Mischel’s study doesn’t comment, but chances are the waiters had better handwriting as well.

  In school, a student’s slovenly script, regardless of its content, almost always carries a penalty: the cacography-plagued Duke of Wellington wouldn’t have made it out of sixth grade:

  (image credits 5.1)

  For one thing, if the writing is indecipherable chicken-scratching, what’s written, brilliant or not, is beside the point—no one can read it. For another, bad handwriting implies that the writer doesn’t care about the reader. By the time a teacher has strained to make out whether it’s book or look or boob or Bob or kook or boat or lob or load.… Well, that teacher has become alienated. D-minus.

  But young children want to learn to write; they
see it as a natural, desirable, inevitable process. They begin drawing as soon as their small-motor skills permit them to hold a pencil or a paintbrush, and they instinctively scribble letter-like forms: they see their elders writing and want to imitate them.

  The author’s obsession with the letter W at age three

  As Charles L. Lehman puts it in Handwriting Models for Schools: “From about the age of three, slanting verticals and elliptical scribbles appear with more consistency.” If they’re read to by adults, kids are quick to grasp the connection between spoken words and words on a page, and to understand how letters “work”—left to right, in straight lines, with strategic spaces. By the time they’re five or six years old, they’re ready to write, both physically and psychologically.

  The trick for a teacher is to nurture that instinct, not squelch it. Learning to write well is challenging, but it doesn’t have to be a daunting task. Most contemporary handwriting programs stress the idea that kids will not dread or dislike it if the teacher stays positive, reinforces what they do well—and doesn’t let the lesson go on too long. In the 1950s, the average time spent practicing Palmer Method approached two hours a week. Now the average is more like fifteen minutes a day, maybe three times a week, and that seems to be enough. Most handwriting programs, including Zaner-Bloser, have gradually become shorter, snappier, adapted to brief attention spans and diminished class time.

  What’s vitally important, however, is following up this early instruction. When I was in school, handwriting practice continued through the fifth grade—and no one was allowed to get away with illegible script, right up to graduation day. Now, if handwriting is taught at all, it ends just as the demands of school are requiring children to write more often, and more rapidly. Kathy Libby, a former teacher and the author of a series of handwriting workbooks, says that if students haven’t mastered cursive by the end of third grade, it’s over. Cursive is only “randomly reinforced” after that. Teachers may reprimand students for bad handwriting, or plead with them to write more neatly, or take off points for sloppiness, but that’s it. “Not many fourth-grade teachers currently teach cursive, leaving non-fluent third graders at risk,” Libby says. “These students are at a disadvantage.” Without reinforcement, a student’s script can gradually deteriorate into the illegibility that afflicts so many adults.

  And like it or not, even in our machine-driven world, people still judge you by your handwriting. In businesses that continue to require handwritten applications, it’s a truism that job candidates with a pleasing script tend to be hired over those who scribble. I recently experienced this first hand: judging handwritten applications for writing positions, I found myself drawn to those with legible handwriting and prejudiced against the scrawlers; in every case, the better hand-writers turned out to be better writers as well.

  A surprising number of help-wanted ads require applicants to have not only proficiency in MS Word, and Excel, but also “neat handwriting.” Or maybe this isn’t really so surprising: according to the Writing Instrument Manufacturers Association, cacography-caused business losses—phone calls made to wrong numbers, incorrect items shipped, sloppy tax returns, undeliverable letters and packages, secretaries unable to read their bosses’ handwriting—hover around $200 million annually.

  But, as many struggling handwriters have probably asked themselves: Do we really need to learn cursive writing? How is it superior to printing?

  I may have been brainwashed at an impressionable age by Sister Victorine and the Palmer Method, but I always assumed that cursive writing was rapid writing—that it’s not called “cursive” (which means, roughly, “running”) for nothing. I began to doubt this when my daughter, Katherine, told me that the reason her handwriting has evolved from the cursive drilled into her in third grade to a highly individual printed style with a few cursive touches is that:

  (image credits 5.3)

  The standard argument against printing by fans of traditional cursive is that the writer has to keep lifting the pen from the paper, and this wastes time. This is simply not true: lifting the pen once in a while and moving it through the air a quarter of an inch takes no more time than dragging it a quarter of an inch across the paper. And it saves ink. And it gives the hand a nanosecond of rest. In an admittedly unscientific test, I was surprised at how much less stressed my writing hand felt when it had the little breaks you get with the print/cursive combo.

  I asked Steve Graham, a professor of special education at Vanderbilt University who has written extensively on how handwriting develops, if printing is more legible, but cursive is quicker. It depends, he says. Cursive may indeed be faster for people who have been using it all their lives. It’s their natural script, learned long ago, and it tends to be an efficient one for them. In a study focused on ways to improve writing skills, Graham and his colleagues, looking at students in grades one through six, found that cursive and printing had the same degree of readability—but that the speediest writers were those who mixed the two, using a combination of printing and cursive that joins only certain selected letters, usually the easiest ones to link up.

  In 2006, a mere 15 percent of the students taking the SATs wrote their essays in cursive; everyone else printed. The cursive essays had, on average, only slightly higher scores than printed ones, according to the College Board—not enough to be statistically valid.1 Neat and legible printing, or half-printing—whether good to look at or merely serviceable—is definitely preferable to dutiful, earnest, sloppy cursive. And frequently, in laboring to make fancy cursive readable, the student wastes valuable time and may not finish.

  It would be hard to find an educator who disagrees with the idea that by the time students get to college those who know how to take fast, readable notes in lectures get higher scores on tests than those who don’t. Every study guide, college prep handbook, and academic counselor says the same thing: whether it’s printing or cursive or a hybrid, good, rapid handwriting is essential.

  But it’s also in short supply, and so the first resort of many students is not a notebook but a laptop—a tradeoff that does not always please their professors. Georgetown law prof David Cole banned laptops from his classroom in 2007. As he wrote in a Wall Street Journal essay, “Note-taking on a laptop encourages verbatim transcription. The note-taker tends to go into stenographic mode and no longer processes information in a way that is conducive to the give and take of classroom discussion.” In addition, now that so many campuses—including classrooms—are wi-fi equipped, “With the aid of Microsoft and Google, we have effectively put at every seat a library of magazines, a television, and the opportunity for real-time side conversations.” Multitasking? “I don’t buy it,” Cole says. “Attention diverted is attention diverted.” In a subsequent survey, he found that about 80 percent of his students reported being more engaged in class discussion when they are laptop-free. But their handwriting may present them with its own problem: unreadable notes. Poorly trained handwriters lose legibility as they gain speed.

  The fact is that speed is something that should be emphasized from the beginning. Steve Graham told me that second-graders who can write only nine or ten letters per minute (a typical speed for a child having trouble with handwriting) will produce less, will lose their train of thought, will write less coherently and with less planning. Many of the teachers I talked to say those kids will also hate to write—meaning that not only will they hate having to produce handwriting, they’ll hate to write at all. School compositions, essays, tests, SATs—everything becomes a chore. And it hardly needs to be said that the more writing people do, the better writers they become—and vice versa.

  So what would seem to make very good sense is to teach children a pleasantly legible handwriting that would also be fast. Yes, we live in a speeded-up world—but since we still need to write things down, we need to learn to write them quickly.

  HANDWRITING PROGRAMS

  Since the scripts of Spencer and Palmer were erased from American culture, mo
dern handwriting instruction programs that advertise themselves as “simplified” have been formulated. Charles Paxton Zaner and Elmer Ward Bloser were close contemporaries of Palmer, but their handwriting schools, which also taught engraving, English composition, and other subjects, were not as widespread. Today, the Zaner-Bloser system is the industry leader, along with D’Nealian (devised by Donald Neil Thurber), which are aggressively marketed both to schools and to home schoolers.2

  But most twentieth-century cursives turn out to be some variation on Pizza Palmer—same basic recipe, slightly different toppings:

  Zaner-Bloser (image credits 5.4)

  D’Nealian (image credits 5.5)

  Then there’s “Handwriting Without Tears” (HWT), which jettisons most of the curlicues and eliminates the rightward slant on the theory that children are more comfortable with upright letters because they look more like the print they’re already familiar with from books:

  Handwriting Without Tears (image credits 5.6)

  But does it really make sense for children to turn out writing that resembles what they see in books? And except for its uprightness, how similar is it, really? Also, as Charlemagne’s penmanship committee discovered in the ninth century, it seems to be true for nearly all writers that a slight rightward slant ends up being easier, quicker, and kinder to the hand muscles than writing straight up—most people, no matter what method they learn, eventually ease into a slant. In the early 1900s, there was a short-lived fad for teaching vertical script, based on the theory that slanted cursive can cause curvature of the spine and vision problems in children—a theory that was quickly disproved. As Lehman reports in Handwriting Models for Schools, an upright hand is actually much more difficult for children to master.3

  Can we call today’s scripts simplified? Well, A. N. Palmer would certainly think so, and Platt Rogers Spencer would probably recommend remedial training for everyone involved. But all these styles retain their share of loops, the unnecessarily convoluted G and S, the backward F, the time-wasting turnarounds on most of the ascenders and descenders (b, f, g, q, y, etc.), the sailboat I, and the double-looped J. D’Nealian and HWT even preserve the unrepentant “Q like a 2.”