Cindy Soldan squints, then frowns, squints again, then finally gives up and heads out for a cigarette.
Halfway through marking a thick stack of exams, the Lakehead University professor has struck a fundamental impasse: yet another student’s hieroglyphic scrawlings.
First-year students in her Major British Writers class express themselves brilliantly in articulate and insightful typed essays, but all goes to pot during exams when the students are forced to communicate without a keyboard.
Soldan, a lecturer of 16 years who prides herself on her own graceful penmanship, reflects back to the day when handwriting was regarded as a sign of good character, and when it was taught with emphasis in school.
“She stood over us with a ruler,” Soldan recalls of her grade three teacher, who watched with a hawk’s eye as the class meticulously reproduced lines of cursive from their workbooks.
Such diligence may seem pointless in this age of word processors. The convenience of e-mail has sent the hand-written letter the way of the feather quill, and why fuss over the complexities of the cursive “S” when with a keystroke, one can lay one down with perfect uniformity?
Well, people still have to hand-write their exams, and in some cases illegible handwriting can lead to more than bad marks.
In 1999, a doctor’s sloppy prescription resulted in the overdose of a wrong drug and the death of a 42-year-old Texas man.
Soldan blames the trend of sloppiness on the school system: after grade three, marks for neat writing disappear from report cards. “This is where they’re falling through the cracks,” she said.
Karen Pontello couldn’t agree more. A sessional lecturer at Lakehead University and the impetus behind a new handwriting program in Thunder Bay classrooms, Pontello said university students are particularly disadvantaged, as they have been raised in a time when most Canadian provinces lack a standard handwriting curriculum.
“The kids that are in university right now are a product of being taught [handwriting] many different ways or not being taught at all,” she said. “The effect is [the students] are getting confused. They’re not developing the habits of effective writing,” Pontello said.
The qualifications of their teachers, many of whom are computer reliant and without penmanship instruction since elementary school, are also being questioned.
“[Students] are being taught by people who are themselves handicapped when it comes to writing,” says Dr. Philip Allingham, who teaches English skills to aspiring teachers at Lakehead. Add to this scant instruction the early emphasis on teaching keyboard skills, and students are stuck between a rock and a hard drive, as it were.
“Teaching computer skills before handwriting’s generally been mastered means that handwriting is awkward,” Allingham said. “The muscles that hold the pen don’t get that workout…they don’t gain in strength. So I think the physical act of handwriting can be quite fatiguing and painful.”
There is also evidence that the inability to write legibly leads to delayed cognitive development and poor content generation. “If someone has to think all the time about how to form a letter, they will not be able to get their idea down on paper,” she said.
In light of these findings, school boards are finally beginning to re-evaluate the importance of imparting penmanship skills. Under Pontello’s direction, both Thunder Bay school boards are now adopting “Handwriting Without Tears,” a curriculum that promotes neat handwriting.
After examining the program’s effectiveness for her master’s thesis in education, Pontello concluded it greatly increased the overall legibility of students’ writing.
But whether kids will employ these new skills or let them slip into sedentary stagnation is yet to be known.
Allingham thinks the lure of professional-looking documents printed on the computer might be too great to resist for grade-schoolers.
“Little kids know that stuff that’s printed is worth money and stuff that’s written is just purely personal…. That, I’d say, is the hegemony of the printed word over the written.”
Still, Soldan says, there will always be times when you’re going to head for a pen and paper instead of a computer. Like when the power goes out. Or when you need to jot down a grocery list. Or if you’re picked to be on Survivor.
“You’ll always be able to write in the dirt,” she said.
Soldan also turns to less measurable arguments for keeping the art alive: there’s just something so human about a handwritten letter, she says, crafted with the personal touch of the writer.
“If I send my mother a little emoticon for Mother’s Day on an e-mail instead of selecting a card and saying in my own handwriting ‘I love you,’ there’s a difference,” she said.
All things considered, we’re undoubtedly headed for a decline in handwriting elegance, Allingham said. But he isn’t worried that pen and paper will wind up as museum artifacts.
“The paperless office is about as practicable as the paperless washroom,” he says with a grin.
