Essay
What’s the Use of Handwriting?
An anachronism?
Poor Justin Donlan. He wrote an article about ink pens and showed a photo of his penmanship and all I could do was exclaim at his handwriting which consisted entirely of print. My God, I thought, the work involved lifting the pen on and off the page as each new capital letter is formed!
It’s the teacher in me. Working with special needs students, I have had to remediate a lot of handwriting, which means I laser in on others’ penmanship and begin immediately to remedy it.
Rarely do learning difficulties manifest as discrete. Rather, they come as a constellation of associative challenges; fine motor difficulties and poor handwriting are often in the mix.
When legible and fluent handwriting is not an automatic skill, much cognitive effort is taken up with forming letters. Add difficulties with spelling and punctuation and just the sheer mechanics or transcription of writing becomes a cognitive task, leaving little capacity available for actual content which is the entire point of writing.
Print can certainly be legible and fluent (as Justin proves) but cursive writing is a more legato act, more conducive to fluency. Without the constant lifting and placing of the pencil, words can flow and spelling is promoted by muscle memory.
