Scrawl In Favor of Good Penmanship

A while back I had an exchange with a student of mine who had just handed in an essay on why students should no longer be taught writing – how to write by hand, that is. Her argument (and she herself was definitely a strong writer) was that since kids are using text messaging, IM, the internet and various word processing programs, handwriting was redundant. It is, according to her, an outdated technology. And the capper for me was that she is a teacher.

My mind scrambled to refute her. All the handwriting I’d never been able to read in my life flashed before my eye. There were all the margin notes I received from teachers on my assignments. I eventually decoded the blurred pencil jottings that explained how my handwriting was not the best. There have been countless prescriptions that but for a doctor and dentist decoder ring every pharmacist wears I would be dead from some misprescribed medication. There was the note from my dorm roommate telling me I had an appointment with my advisor on Thdesmday the 19th or 17th at 2:00 or 5:00. And, most painful of all, was the scrap of paper I got from that hot girl at the university graduation party. She told me that since we were about to head off to different parts of the country, it was time to have one last fun but meaningless magic moment. But the number her drunken hand scrawled on the slip of paper I’d stolen from somebody’s thesis bibliography was almost illegible. I kept getting a service for pet neutering.

So is getting rid of handwriting such a terrible thing? After all, kids have embraced technology and most of them will never turn out to be masters of penmanship anyway.

I wish I had had Joel Best’s book, Flavor of the Month: Why Smart People Fall For Fads, at the time this student made her case. His argument is that many people often mistake fads for genuine innovation because when either of these things begin, they look pretty much the same. One section early on strikes at the heart of the educational fads involving technology. At various times in American education, the radio, films, and TV were all theoretically poised to eliminate the need for textbooks. And, of course, the computer is the latest candidate to take a run at traditional teaching methods. Best argues that it is the very idealism about progress that has so many intelligent people leaping forward every time they think they hear a starting gun only to find soon after it was just something backfiring.

I guess my overriding thought on computers in the classroom is not a new idea – it’s that the computer is only as full of resources as the student is resourceful. I’m not saying that computers in the classroom are a fad – I’m saying that the belief that computers will create super students is a fad.

Besides, I’d miss handwriting. I start all of my poems with pen and paper. And I can anecdotally support the contention of scientists who study the brain that you use different brain muscles writing by hand than you do by typing. The hand written poem and the one than ends up in typed form are different both from the process of rewriting and from the change of medium.

Finally, I come to associate those who are close to me with the way they write. Writing reflect personality. So what does it mean that when Rainer Maria Rilke met one of the many loves of his love, her maturing effect on him actually changed his handwriting? Talk about a relationship setting a guy straight.

This is a sentimental attachment I have to handwriting, then. All I know is I would rather watch a drunk woman try to scrawl her number on my hand than watch her try to tap a note into my Palm. I can take her handwriting to graphologists and decide whether or not her personality is a good match for mine. If she’s cute enough, her handwriting will start to resemble her in my mind. Leans a lot to the right and is a little loopier than most. But this is the carbon graph of her mind and I’ll keep it close to me.