Current Trends
Writing longhand no longer ....
We have worried for years that our children print their letter rather than write in longhand, but it seems cursive writing is on the way out. We can remember, however, a time when penmanship was one of the high points of the school day. Not only did you get to use old-fashioned fountain pens, but also some of us remember using quill pens – just to train you better how to keep ink off a page.
We can tell you there’s nothing like spattering ink around in grade school. Yet according to the Washington Post, when students who were planning to go to college in 2006 took the handwritten essay part of the SAT exams, only 15 percent of the nearly 1.5 million students participating wrote their answers in cursive. The rest printed.
Back in the 1940s and 1950s, teachers taught penmanship for as much as two hours a week. Even in the 1970s, the subject amounted to a separate daily lesson until sixth grade. Kids now get, maybe, 10 to 15 minutes a day for penmanship.
Blame it on the computer. Still, writing in longhand – the physical act of it – according to research may help us to write more sophisticated, complicated sentences and essays. But that would never work for text messaging!
(Source: “The Handwriting Is on the Wall: Researchers See a Downside as Keyboards Replace Pens in Schools,” by Margaret Webb Pressler, The Washington Post, www.washingtonpost.com, Wednesday, October 11, 2006, pg. A1.)
