The Death of Handwriting

There's an interesting feature in Time Magazine this week on the death of cursive handwriting. Today's kids are spending little if any time being taught to write in cursive. The question is, does it matter?

People born after 1980 tend to have a distinctive style of handwriting: a little bit sloppy, a little bit childish and almost never in cursive. The knee-jerk explanation is that computers are responsible for our increasingly illegible scrawl, but Steve Graham, a special-education and literacy professor at Vanderbilt University, says that's not the case. The simple fact is that kids haven't learned to write neatly because no one has forced them to. "Writing is just not part of the national agenda anymore," he says.

Today schoolchildren typically learn print in kindergarten, cursive in third grade. But they don't master either one. Over the decades, daily handwriting lessons have decreased from an average of 30 minutes to 15.

Zaner-Bloser, the nation's largest supplier of handwriting manuals, offers coursework through the eighth grade but admits that these days, schools rarely purchase materials beyond the third grade.

Is that such a bad thing? Except for physicians — whose illegible handwriting on charts and prescription pads causes thousands of deaths a year — penmanship has almost no bearing on job performance. And aside from the occasional grocery list or Post-it note, most adults write very little by hand. The Emily Post Institute recommends sending a handwritten thank-you but says it doesn't matter whether the note is in cursive or print, as long as it looks tidy. But with the declining emphasis in schools, neatness is becoming a rarity.

Source: Time
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1912419-2,00.html

Comments

[Kate Gladstone]

It had to happen sooner or later: a handwriting course provided via iPhone application.
See http://bit.ly/BetterLetters for details of handwriting's cyber-comeback.

[Essay Writing Service]

Hi,
It is necessary to force kids to write one page daily. This will not only improve their writing, but also a sense of writing will be developed among them.