USA: Some people ask if handwriting has a practical purpose in an era of computer keyboards beside the occasional retro appeal of a handwritten thank-you note?

When the Remington typewriter was introduced in 1873, people began predicting the death of penmanship. The Zaner-Bloser Co. published penmanship curriculum starting in 1904 and during the 1960s and 1970s recommended 45 minutes a day of writing. By the 1980s, they recommended only fifteen minutes a day, and now more like ten, and only 12% of teachers had taken a course in how to teach penmanship. Educators noticed decline in quality of students’ penmanship and increase in letter-reversals: they’d forgotten to mind your p’s and q’s.

But ‘when kids struggle with handwriting, it filters into all their academics. Spelling becomes a problem; math becomes a problem because they reverse their numbers. All of these subjects would be much easier for these students to learn if handwriting was an automatic process’, says Emily Knapton, director of program development at Handwriting without Tears.

Since this and other evidence suggests that handwriting fluency helps build learning, the College Board, to reverse the de-emphasis on handwriting and composition in 2005 added a handwritten essay to the Scholastic Aptitude Test. ‘If you put something like a writing test on the SAT, children’s skil level will begin to be addressed,’ says Ed Hardin, senior content specialist at the College Board. The effect will probably trickle down to the middle schools and to third grade, where the problem often begins.

A new study by Vanderbilt University professor Steve Graham says most primary school teachers believe students with fluent handwriting produce written assignments superior in quality and quantity and so get higher grades. From KG to grade 4, children think and write at the same time. Only later is mental composition separated from the physical process of writing. If they struggle to remember how to write, their ability to express themselves suffers. They need automatic motions, both for expressive writing and for note-taking, which they’ll need later in life. ‘Measures of speed among elementary-school students are good predictors of the quality and quantity of their writing in middle school,’ says Stephen Peverly, professor of psychology and education and Columbia University Teachers College. So now they want it back in the curriculum. ‘After all, no one has suggested that the invention of the calculator means we don’t have to teach kids how to add, and spelling is still a prized skill in the era of spell check. If we stop teaching penmanship, it will not only hasten the dreaded day when brides acknowledge wedding gifts by email; the bigger danger is, they’l be composed even more poorly than they already are’, says Raina Kelley, ‘The Writing on the Wall’, Newsweek 2007 Nov 12, p69.