The Death of Handwriting

Many adults can recall their emotionally scarring handwriting classes in elementary school.  Teachers passed down the new cursive to students in thirty-minute to hour-long lessons; little children sat in classroom, practicing writing the letters again and again, but still received an F on cursive test in second because they couldn’t master the curly Qs and Zs.  However, such situations become rare for younger generation, because penmanship lessons themselves has become rare.  When typewriters were invented and became the wave of the future, penmanship time was significantly reduced, and finally in the 1990s, when computers gained popularity both in the office and at home, teaching handwriting became even less of a priority.  Today, handwriting lessons are a small part of the syllabus.  A 2008 study on elementary school teachers in United Sates showed that while nine out of ten teachers cover penmanship in their lesson plans, they spend less than fifteen minutes on it per day on average.  Many kids now spend much time in the computer lab conquering keyboarding with typing games.  The death of handwriting is an inevitable future, and for many nostalgic people, they have to accept the vanishing of many human cultures.

Although many advocates attempt to restore the art of handwriting, schools have their justifiable reasons for the decline of penmanship lessons – the growing necessity of a quicker, neater, more accessible way to communicate thoughts, such as keyboard typing.  “We need to make sure they’ll be ready for what’s going to happen in 2020 or 2030,” said Katie Van Sluys, a professor at DePaul University, “I am not sure students have a sense of any reason why they should vest their time and effort in writing a message out manually when it can be sent electronically in seconds.”  Besides some sentimental concerns, typing outscores handwriting in many ways.  “If everything we do still had to be done by hand, there would not be enough hours in the day,” says Ruth Hodson, registration manager for Peterborough City Council.  Indeed, by typing words down and print papers out, we can save much time to focus on other things and we no longer need to figure out those scribbly written words.  There are some more reasons that we turn to keyboarding other than its clearness and convenience.  For many left-handers, it could be a torture to learn handwriting because often they were forced to write with their right, while their “bad” hand was tied down.  With the universal use of computers and keyboards, the gap between left-handers and right-handers may become smaller and smaller, and maybe someday, left-handers will not be marked as “minority”.

Maybe the schools’ decision to pay less attention to handwriting is not only a compromise to students’ life which is full of text messaging, e-mail, and word processing, but also a compromise to the standardized test.  For teenagers, in 2011, the writing test of the National Assessment of Educational Progress will require 8th and 11th graders to compose on computers, with 4th graders following in 2019.  For international students with English being their second language, the whole process of TOEFL (Test of English as a Foreign Language) test relies on computers.  For college students, according to Vanderbilt University professor Steve Graham, who cites multiple studies showing that sloppy writing routinely leads to lower grades, even in papers with the same wording as those written in a neater hand.  I suspect eventually College Board will accommodate to the high-technology society and come up with SAT tests that allow students to type their answers and essays, since it will be more convenience for both test takers and graders.  According to Professor Graham, the fear over the decline of handwriting is distraction from the goal of improving students’ overall writing skills.  The important thing is to make students proficient enough to focus on their ideas and the composition of their writing rather than how they form the letters.

Paula Sassi, a certified master graphologist, describes the disappearing of handwriting in a different way, “just like when we went from quill pen to fountain pen to ball point, now we’re going from handwriting to keyboarding.”  People will still exchange their thoughts and ideas, just through different media, and that’s the trend of human history.  Maybe in the future a student will write an essay titled “The Death of Typing” – “I remember the days when I sat in front of a computer; letters popped up in the screen as my fingers danced on the keyboard.  But they are all gone now…”  However, it is a little frightening to think about that the society described in Fahrenheit 451 will come true even without a tyrannous government, and it is a little disappointing to think about that what we will leave to our future generations is plenty of date but very little of our personalities.