Unwrapping some thoughts for you...
I was so fortunate to have a handwriting expert leave a comment on this series a few weeks ago. (Part 3). I was very taken by her thoughtful and comprehensive contribution to the discussion of the importance of handwriting in our lives.
I emailed her and asked her if I could publish her response and she graciously agreed. Her name is Kate Gladstone and this is a short bio about her. I am excited to publish for you how she weighed in on this subject. She is dedicated and thorough and I know you will benefit from her profound wisdom when it comes to handwriting. I want to thank her so much for sharing her expertise and allowing me pass her findings on to you.
I emailed her and asked her if I could publish her response and she graciously agreed. Her name is Kate Gladstone and this is a short bio about her. I am excited to publish for you how she weighed in on this subject. She is dedicated and thorough and I know you will benefit from her profound wisdom when it comes to handwriting. I want to thank her so much for sharing her expertise and allowing me pass her findings on to you.
Who is Kate Gladstone?
An interview series featuring notable people whose lives intersect with the world of pens. Kate is a handwriting repair expert who has made a career of helping individuals with poor penmanship improve and develop their own unique, legible script.
My name is Kate Gladstone, and I am a professional handwriting repair expert.
I live in Albany, NY, with my husband, whom I have been married to for twenty years. I was born in Brooklyn in 1963, and have a brother and two sisters. Both of my parents spent most of their lives teaching English, but my father was also an inventor working mainly on energy systems for alternative fuels.
Although I am right-handed, I have taught myself to write left-handed well enough to demonstrate effectively with that hand for left-handed students (I can also write in mirror-writing — with either hand — but there is less practical use for that ability).
What exactly does a Handwriting Repair expert do?
Since I formally launched my career in 1992, I have been helping people in the USA and around the world improve and maintain the speed, legibility, and attractiveness of their handwriting, through classes taught in person and through distance learning arrangements. I have taught individuals of various ages and families, as well as a variety of businesses and organizations. I almost always teach an italic handwriting, generally with some customization to suit the individual.
Until the early 2000s, most of my clients were in the healthcare profession — hospitals looking to improve the legibility of physicians' handwriting without loss of speed. Since the spread of electronic prescribing, there have been far fewer medical clients; most of the current and recent inquiries are from individuals in a variety of walks of life. About half of them are looking to improve their own handwriting, while a growing number are teachers, curriculum coordinators, and such people concerned with education. Others are looking to improve the handwriting of one or more of their children.
Until about ten years ago, the average age of people referred to me by their parents or other family members was around 15, but over the past decade it has been steadily rising and is now around 25. Usually, the inquirers are interested in gaining two skills: how to read cursive and how to write legibly and rapidly, but in some simpler way than what conventional cursive offers. To read more go to...
- source: www. jetpens.com
(PenPalsInterview: Penmanship Expert Kate Glastone on How to Improve Your Handwriting)
Unwrapping Kate's Comment to Storywraps...
Handwriting matters — but does cursive matter? The research is surprising. For instance, it has been documented that legible cursive writing averages no faster than printed handwriting of equal or greater legibility. (Sources for all research are listed below.)
More recently, it has also been documented that cursive does NOT objectively improve the reading, spelling, or language of students who have dyslexia/dysgraphia.
This is what I'd expect from my own experience, by the way. As a handwriting teacher and remediator, I see numerous children, teens, and adults — dyslexic and otherwise — for whom cursive poses even more difficulties than print-writing. (Contrary to myth, reversals in cursive are common — a frequent cursive reversal in my caseload, among dyslexics and others, is “J/f.”)
— According to comparative studies of handwriting speed and legibility in different forms of writing, the fastest, clearest handwriters avoid cursive — although they are not absolute print-writers either. The highest speed and highest legibility in handwriting are attained by those who join only some letters, not all: joining only the most easily joined letter-combinations, leaving the rest unjoined, and using print-like shapes for letters whose printed and cursive shapes disagree. (Oscar Wilde's handwriting — which you illustrate — plainly falls into this category. Where and when Inwe T to school, it would not have been regarded as "cursive" at all — but it is more legible, and by all appearances probably faster too, than handwriting that was considered "cursive" and therefore "correct.")
Reading cursive still matters — but reading cursive is much easier and quicker to master than writing the same way too.
Reading cursive, simply reading it, can be taught in just 30 to 60 minutes — even to five- or six-year-olds (including those with dyslexia) once they read ordinary print.
There's even a free iPad app teaching how: called “Read Cursive” — appstore.com/readcursive
Given the importance of reading cursive, why not teach this vital skill quickly — for free — instead of leaving it to depend upon the difficult and time-consuming process of learning to write in cursive (which will cost millions to mandate)?
We don’t require our children to learn to make their own pencils (or build their own printing presses) before we teach them how to read and write. Why require them to write cursive before we teach them how to read it? Why not simply teach children to read cursive — along with teaching other vital skills, such as a form of handwriting that is actually typical of effective handwriters?
Just as each and every child deserves to be able to read all kinds of everyday handwriting (including cursive), each and every one of our children — dyslexic or not — deserves to learn the most effective and powerful strategies for high-speed high-legibility handwriting performance.
Teaching material for practical handwriting abounds — especially in the UK and Europe, where such handwriting is taught at least as often as the accident-prone cursive which is venerated by too many North American educators. Some examples, in several cases with student work also shown: http://www.BFHhandwriting.com, http://www.handwritingsuccess.com, http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2009/09/08/opinion/OPED-WRITING.1.pdf, http://www.briem.net, http://www.HandwritingThatWorks.com, http://www.italic-handwriting.org, http://www.studioarts.net/calligraphy/italic/hwlesson.html, http://www.freehandwriting.net/educational.html )
Even in the USA and Canada, educated adults increasingly quit cursive. In 2012, handwriting teachers across North America were surveyed at a conference hosted by Zaner-Bloser, a publisher of cursive textbooks. Only 37% wrote in cursive; another 8% printed. The majority — 55% — wrote with some elements resembling print-writing, others resembling cursive.
(If you would like to take part in another, ongoing poll of handwriting forms — not hosted by a publisher, and not restricted to teachers — visit http://www.poll.fm/4zac4 for the One-Question Handwriting Survey, created by this author. As with the Zaner-Bloser teacher survey, so far the results show very few purely cursive handwriters — and even fewer purely printed writers. Most handwriting in the real world — 75% of the response totals, so far — consists of print-like letters with occasional joins.)
When even most handwriting teachers do not themselves use cursive, why glorify it?
Believe it or not, some of the adults who themselves write in an occasionally joined but otherwise print-like handwriting tell me that they are teachers who still insist that their students must write in cursive, and/or who still teach their students that all adults habitually and normally write in cursive and always will. (Given the facts on our handwriting today, this is a little like teaching kids that our current president is Richard Nixon.)
What, I wonder, are the educational and psychological effects of teaching, or trying to teach, something that the students can probably see for themselves is no longer a fact?
Cursive's cheerleaders (with whom I’ve had some stormy debates) sometimes allege that cursive has benefits which justify absolutely anything said or done to promote that form of handwriting. The cheerleaders for cursive repeatedly state (sometimes in sworn testimony before school boards and state legislatures) that cursive cures dyslexia or prevents it, that it makes you pleasant and graceful and intelligent, that it adds brain cells, that it instills proper etiquette and patriotism, or that it confers numerous other blessings which are no more prevalent among cursive users than among the rest of the human race. Some claim research support — citing studies that invariably prove to have been misquoted or otherwise misrepresented by the claimant.
So far, whenever a devotee of cursive claims the support of research, one or more of the following things has become evident as soon as others examined the claimed support:
/1/ either the claim provides no source (and no source is provided on request)
or, almost as often,
/2/ when sources are cited and can be checked (by finding and reading the cited document), the sources provided turn out to include and/or to reference materials which are misquoted or incorrectly represented by the person(s) offering these as support for cursive,
or, even more often,
/3/ the claimant correctly quotes/cites a source which itself indulges in either /1/ or /2/.
Cursive devotees' eagerness to misrepresent research has substantial consequences, as the misrepresentations are commonly made — under oath — in testimony before school districts, state legislatures, and other bodies voting on educational measures. The proposals for cursive are, without exception so far, introduced by legislators or other spokespersons whose misrepresentations (in their own testimony) are later revealed — although investigative reporting of the questionable testimony does not always prevent the bill from passing into law, even when the discoveries include signs of undue influence on the legislators promoting the cursive bill? (Documentation on request: I am willing to be interviewed by anyone who is interested in bringing this serious issue inescapably before the public’s eyes and ears.)
By now, you’re probably wondering: “What about cursive and signatures? Will we still have legally valid signatures if we stop signing our names in cursive?” Brace yourself: in state and federal law, cursive signatures have no special legal validity over any other kind. (Hard to believe? Ask any attorney!)
Questioned document examiners (these are specialists in the identification of signatures, the verification of documents, etc.) inform me that the least forgeable signatures are the plainest. Most cursive signatures are loose scrawls: the rest, if they follow the rules of cursive at all, are fairly complicated: these make a forger's life easy.
All handwriting, not just cursive, is individual — just as all handwriting involves fine motor skills. That is why any first-grade teacher can immediately identify (from the print-writing on unsigned work) which of 25 or 30 students produced it.
Mandating cursive to preserve handwriting resembles mandating stovepipe hats and crinolines to preserve the art of tailoring.
SOURCES:
Handwriting research on speed and legibility:
/1/ Arthur Dale Jackson. “A Comparison of Speed and Legibility of Manuscript and Cursive Handwriting of Intermediate Grade Pupils.”
Ed. D. Dissertation, University of Arizona, 1970: on-line at http://www.eric.ed.gov/?id=ED056015
/2/ Steve Graham, Virginia Berninger, and Naomi Weintraub. “The Relation between Handwriting Style and Speed and Legibility.” JOURNAL OF EDUCATIONAL RESEARCH, Vol. 91, No. 5 (May - June, 1998), pp. 290-296: on-line at http://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/27542168.pdf
/3/ Steve Graham, Virginia Berninger, Naomi Weintraub, and William Schafer. “Development of Handwriting Speed and Legibility in Grades 1-9.”
JOURNAL OF EDUCATIONAL RESEARCH, Vol. 92, No. 1 (September - October, 1998), pp. 42-52: on-line at http://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/27542188.pdf
Handwriting research on cursive's lack of observable benefit for students with dyslexia/dysgraphia:
"Does cursive handwriting have an impact on the reading and spelling performance of children with dyslexic dysgraphia: A quasi-experimental study." Authors: Lorene Ann Nalpon & Noel Kok Hwee Chia — URL: http://www.researchgate.net/publication/234451547_Does_cursive_handwriting_have_an_impact_on_the_reading_and_spelling_performance_of_children_with_dyslexic_dysgraphia_A_quasi-experimental_study
and
Zaner-Bloser handwriting survey: Results on-line at http://www.hw21summit.com/media/zb/hw21/files/H2937N_post_event_stats.pdf
Ongoing handwriting poll: http://poll.fm/4zac4
The research most often misrepresented by devotees of cursive (“Neural Correlates of Handwriting" by Dr. Karin Harman-James at Indiana University):
Background on our handwriting, past and present:
3 videos, by a colleague, show why cursive is NOT a sacrament:
A BRIEF HISTORY OF CURSIVE —
TIPS TO FIX HANDWRITING —
HANDWRITING AND MOTOR MEMORY
(shows how to develop fine motor skills WITHOUT cursive) —
Yours for better letters,
Kate Gladstone
DIRECTOR, the World Handwriting Contest
CEO, Handwriting Repair/Handwriting That Works
handwritingrepair@gmail.com
I hope you have enjoyed the series and it has given you some useful information about the future of handwriting in our lives. I personally think it is a beautiful thing and needs to be preserved and passed on to future generations. It is part of our heritage and language. It would be interesting for others to speak up to let us know how you stand on this very important subject. Please feel free to leave me a comment so everyone can hear your point of view. Write on......
Your John Hancock is truly important... it is you in writing!
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It's a wrap.
1 comment:
Great blog. This was really helpful stuff. I wish you luck as you continue to follow that passion.
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