By Arvin Jantz
The answer to the title question is a definite YES. It is as important today as it was in the day when our grandparents learned to write. It seems that good handwriting is a lost art today, but still everybody enjoys good handwriting. Good writing, not too long ago, was a necessary art. Business colleges required it. It has been said that you know a doctor by his writing. But who can read a doctor’s prescriptions unless you are trained to read them? If that saying is true, possibly more should have been doctors instead of teachers. Just why must Johnny be taught to write well?
When a child becomes a better penman, he may very likely become a better student. We hear so often that Johnny can’t read. That’s a real handicap to his progress in school. We also hear that Johnny can’t write. That can become a real handicap also. One high school teacher informed us that he flunked most of his class of thirty in a “written” test. Why? First, they couldn’t put into writing what they knew. Secondly, he could not read what they had written. Teachers with experience will agree that in general, the poor penmen are your poor spellers; that is, in written spelling; they are the ones with untidy papers; their paragraphs are usually very short without content. Why? Good writing, to such a pupil, is a very difficult and complex chore in itself. The physical chore, or rather the lack of ability to write well, can become a severe block to a child’s learning just as well as some other physical or mental handicap. The physical chore of writing distracts the child’s mind from the subject matter. It has been proven, again and again, that as a child’s writing improved, his grades improved along with it. In a written examination, a student’s writing deteriorated as he progressed, until towards the end it became a meaningless scrawl. He explained the reason for it. The student became so disgusted with the chore of writing that he didn’t care how or what he wrote. Had he been able to write well, the concentration would have been more on WHAT rather than on HOW he wrote. Later this student brought up his D’s to C’s and B’s because, as he said , “Now that I have improved my writing, I like to write, and I can spend more time on thinking what to write.” The foregoing related experience brings us to a question.
Where does the fault lie that Johnny can’t write? It might be his own fault. More likely the fault lies somewhere else. The teacher in school is a constant example to the children. He can be a poor as well as a good example. If the teacher is untidy about his clothes or his person, will the children learn to be tidy? What impression is made on the pupils when the teacher is careless with his writing on the board or otherwise? What example does the teacher set if he is not consistent in letter form and in spacing? What will the children learn from a “lesson in penmanship” a few minutes a week when a poor example is before them on the board at all times? If a teacher is a poor writer, how can he be enthusiastic about good writing, and how can he inspire the children to become writers? It seems that children in the lower grades often write as well or even better than seventh and eighth graders. Why? Possibly the teachers have allowed the older children to form sloven habits in writing, and once such habits have been formed, it seems almost impossible to unlearn them. What can be done?
There are several things that teachers might do. Teachers can become better examples by being concerned about their writing and by practicing. Zaner Bloser has a course in in writing for teachers. This course is free if you use their books. It might be well to take an inventory of your own and your school’s writing. It may seem rather late, but why not teach penmanship to our prospective teachers while they are still in high school and college?
Whatever you do, DON’T LET GOOD PENMANSHIP BECOME A LOST ART!
This is an article originally published in the Lutheran Educator May 1962, Volume II Number 4. The article’s author, Arvin Jantz, was the teacher and principal at St. Matthew’s in Benton Harbor, Michigan, at the time the article was published. We wanted to republish this article to demonstrate that some educational issues are timeless.
Handwriting Without Tears / Keyboarding Without Tears is doing a free webinar on “Pencils to Keyboards – Teaching Your Students to Write Today” (August 25, 8:00pm Eastern, 7pm Central).
http://email.hwtears.com/?jJyi.0SeWoCGEtXn.jqxHKhc1en1e6qwj&source=web
For those who think that handwriting practice and learning cursive in the classroom is not necessary in today’s world, I encourage you to read the article, “Why Writing by Hand Could Make You Smarter” by William R. Klemm published in Memory Medic. It’s posted online on the Psychology Today website. There is research that shows how important it is in our students’ education…not just for k-2 kids first learning their letters, but throughout the elementary grade levels. I urge my fellow educators to do some active research and let it guide their decisions for classroom decisions rather than personal preferences and anecdotes.
I believe that today we must delineate between good penmanship and good writing. This article seems to confound the two. I firmly believe that we must definitely do everything possible to ensure that GOOD WRITING does not become a lost art. As for GOOD PENMANSHIP, it is already a lost art and has been lost, in my opinion, for a long time. I thank God that He has provided the electronic means for me to keep “writing” even though in old age my lifelong miserable penmanship has deteriorated to something that is often unreadable. In my latter years in the classroom, I gave thanks repeatedly(but not often enough, I’m sure)for the fact that students could submit written materials via the word processor. What a relief to read GOOD WRITING without the anguish of wading through the morass of POOR PENMANSHIP!
I got a kick out of hearing about a letter that was sent to astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson by a grade school student protesting his role in the demotion of Pluto from planet status. The student asked for a reply but said that Tyson should not write in cursive because then the student would not be able to read it. Cursive was not taught at his school.
I was taught in mechanical drawing class to work at printing letters clearly and as fast as one would write in cursive. On the other hand, I’ve always enjoyed cursive. It is an art form and like poetry implies care. We should keep it in our schools. We still write and need to do it with clarity and good form.
Is this indeed a “timeless” piece? Is there current research to support the claims made by this author in 1962? For that matter, beyond the author’s personal anecdotes, what did the research say in 1962?
Disclaimer: In the mid-1960s when I was a primary grade student, I consistently got unsatisfactory grades in penmanship. And I’m not sure I ever learned to be a tidy person. (Ask my students today to describe me; I suspect “tidy” would be their absolute last choice of adjectives.) And yet I am quite enthusiastic about writing and teach writing-intensive courses and lead workshops on devotional writing. Somehow my lack of penmanship skill never has held me back.
If you look online, you can find samples of handwritten pages by George Orwell, J.K. Rowling, Vladimir Nabokov, Franz Kafka, Mark Twain — and you’d not describe their scribblings as “tidy.” Great writers sometimes have awful penmanship. And I’m okay with that.
I’m also okay with allowing students to write test essays using electronic devices they have with them in the classroom and upload those documents to the course website. That wasn’t an option in 1962.
David Sellnow
MLC
I agree with your thoughts, Professor. His evidence is anecdotal and not research based. The research that I have read is defensive and does not convince me that there is a correlation between handwriting and academic success.
It seems to me that we are lamenting a lost “art,” but not celebrating new “arts.” For example, I consider it a greater tragedy for a student to not be able to type proficiently than for him to have illegible writing. I also consider basic graphic design knowledge to be essential to succeeding as a 21st century communicator. Poorly laid-out posters (and church bulletins) are ineffective at best, and imply that the organization is crude and juvenile at worst.
Before our age of computer communication, it was essential to write in a way that ensured the message was sent clearly. Today, I know my students will communicate their messages clearly if they can represent their ideas in many forms, not just written (videos, speeches, debates, graphs, blog comments etc.).
Becky, my esteemed colleague and alum of the MLC General Education Committee – nice to interact with you here!
You might recall that as we worked at establishing learning outcomes and assessments for the general education program at MLC, we included the following sorts of literacy:
… Information literacy
… Visual literacy
… Technological literacy
And under communication, we included:
… Written communication
… Oral communication
… Interpersonal communication
… Artistic communication
Communicating messages clearly — as you so well put it — is the point. And communication today takes a variety of forms, including visual presentations. The skill set that our kids need in the world today is not limited to practicing their penmanship.
– David Sellnow