When I was in the early grades in the Houston public schools, we learned penmanship. At the time, we dipped our quill pens into an inkwell. It was messy, at least for me. At some point we switched to pens that had ink reserves, and you filled them up and wrote with ink. That was better than dipping the quill.
Then a new writing technology came along, called the “ballpoint pen.” No messy inkwells or ink bottles. You just wrote until they were dry, and then you threw them out. The ballpoint pen was a nightmare for me because I am left-handed and all the desks in my classrooms were meant for people who wrote with their right hand. That meant that as I wrote, I smudged my hand across what I had just written. Not only was the writing smudged, but the fingers on my left hand were always ink-stained.
We were taught the Palmer Method of writing. We made big circles, again and again. We were supposed to make round, beautiful letters.
That never worked for me. My handwriting was atrocious. As I have gotten older, it has gotten worse.
Be all that as it may, it turns out that writing by hand is good for you!
It is supposedly good for your brain and your emotions.
I suppose that may be true for many people but not for me.
My handwriting is close to illegible.
I bless the day in 1983 or 1984 that I started using a computer, a TRS-80 (Trash-80) that was prone to frequent breakdowns and crashes.
The computer broke down so frequently that I bought a second one so that one would be available when the other was in the repair shop.
At last, I could write almost as fast as I could think.
I had many misadventures with my TRS-80, but no one had to puzzle over what I was trying to say.
So, yes, do revive handwriting. Everyone should have a signature. Everyone should know how to read and write script.
But I will stick with my computer for the sake of legibility.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
You think that was bad? When I was a kid, you had to press the stylus into a clay tablet, and by the time you got to the end, your hand was tired, and you made mistakes and had to start all over again on a fresh tablet. And talk about heavy and bulky! The abacuses were bulky too, but at least they didn’t weight fifty pounds apiece!
And then came the Microsoft papyrus scrolls. After a day or two, all the writing would fade in the sun, leaving nothing on the page but the words, “A system error has occurred.”
And that’s the way it was, and we liked it!
No doubt you were also subject to only learning about Pangea, the continents being contained therein during your day. I recall how sadit was to see them drift apart.
In class once, a student asked me how old I was. I replied, “Hmm. Let’s see. The city of Tyre was sacked by Alexander in 322 BCE. . . .” A few days later, my principal said to me that she had received a call from a parent who said, “That Mr. Shepherd is a crazy person. He thinks he’s thousands of years old.”
And then there was my son, Kai, who at the age of five or so asked me if I had known Abraham Lincoln personally.
As a fellow lefty, I share your frustration. Although I missed the quill pens by a year or two, I think you would have had a difficult time with the quill pens as well. I remember from my brother’s experience. The ink took a long time to dry. Many of the modern ballpoint pens dry more quickly than the early pens. Years of teaching helped me to print and write clearly. My handwriting is much better than my right handed husband’s. In college I recall leaving my “blue book” with some smudges as I was writing as fast as I could. I also remember getting to exam rooms early in order to be sure to sit in one of the few left handed chairs. I can write a good signature by putting the card or paper on a slant. Writing on a computer seems less personal. Although I had a semester of typing in high school, I remain a mediocre typist.
Cursive is making a comeback too. It has also been proven that taking notes by hand helps students to remember better than writing on a computer. Also, without learning cursive, students will have a hard time reading historical documents. Of course, there are pro and con arguments for spending time on cursive.
I write almost exclusively on computers, like most people. But if I actually need to think through a problem, to be creative, to map out the structure of an argument, I need to go to paper. It’s a little disturbing, because the clearly implication is that most of the time, I am just “typing stuff,” not actually “thinking.”
I do this–resort to paper–almost always at the beginning of a piece of creative writing–poetry, fiction, a script for the stage or film. But I soon resort to the computer. I have a compulsion for the neatness of the work as it’s being done, something I’ve never been able to cure, and I LOVE the ability to revise easily and quickly as I write on-screen. To your point, that ability–to revise easily–is all about thinking, so I’m not sure that computers hinder “thinking,” though working on paper does help me capture the initial idea. It seems appropriate for creating, which is followed by the shaping, the crafting.
All that said, I’m a big proponent of using freewriting as part of writing instruction–getting kids to spill it all out without worrying about grammar, usage, mechanics, format, or even sense. The idea is to teach them to generate copy and discover along the way AND to enforce the idea that writing is REWRITING. Too many kids HATE writing and want the first draft to be the only one. Big mistake. When Dylan Thomas died, his editor wanted to include the poem he was working on at the time in the Collected Poems. He found that poem in some sixty drafts. Ray Bradbury put it this way: a baseball player gets three strikes, and then he’s out. As a writer, I get as many swings with the bat as I need in order to hit a home run.
My biggest problem on the computer is that I lose sight of the big picture. I will revise and rewrite paragraphs over and over, pushing earlier versions of those paragraphs down the page, until I will have a long document that consists largely of different versions of set of core paragraphs. Sometimes reminds me of Jack Nicholson’s character’s novel in the Shining. Paper makes me stop and map, and allows me to see the forest again.
And then there is Ansel Adams, who said that the secret to his photography was what he threw away.
I remember what a laborious task typing a paper on a typewriter especially when footnotes were involved. I had a bottle of whiteout by my side. Computers make the task so much easier.
Great point. Arguably word processing software has created an explosion in footnote usage. I use footnotes a lot, but I hate footnotes. One of the judges I clerked for had a “no footnote” rule that I admired. His view was, if you can’t say it in the body of the opinion, then it’s not essential. And, I believe in the words of Mark Twain, he “eschewed surplusage.”
That is exactly what I do. My grandfather’s fountain pen does it best.
In the summer before taking the required typing class in junior high school, I persuaded my parents to let me take a six-week typing course at a secretarial school in Houston. After six weeks, I typed 80 words per minute. I don’t recall why I did that but I’m glad I did. Typing is so much faster than laborious indecipherable script—for me.
What a lovely piece, above, Diane! Such fun to hear these reminiscences!
As we expect young children to work using computers, we are failing to teach them keyboarding skills. I’ve watched my 4th grade grandson type, and he has a lot of habits that prevent him from typing faster, The main problem is that he has to look at the keyboard and does not use all his fingers.
Real typing requires the use of both hands and nine fingers. (One thumb is inactive).
Hunt and peck is a waste of time.
I think typing class was the most valuable class I took in middle school. A single class that gave me a skill that I would use and improve for the rest of my life, for work and for pleasure. I used to be able to do over 100 wpm (on a computer, with minor errors), although I think I’ve gotten slower (and much sloppier). In a very strange twist, one of my sisters ended up marrying the son of the woman who taught me to type. So 30-some years after the fact, I got to personally thank my typing teacher in a wedding toast.
That’s wonderful, FLERP!
I think your mother encouraged you to take typing so your would always be able to support yourself. I can recall getting a speech from my mother indicating that I could then work as a secretary if I learned to type. Perhaps your mother was trying to give you an option at a time when there were fewer options for women.
Plus shorthand . . .
Retired, you may be right. A girl who could type would always have a job.
Typing class!!!! Yes!!!! Essential. Hunt and peck won’t do it. I have always been grateful to the high-school I went to that forced me to take typing. By the time I was in college, I could out-type most any secretary. This has been an enormous boon to me throughout my life.
A Trash 80. LOL. My first laptop was from Apple Computer. At 16 pounds, it was referred to as a “luggable.” My first cellphone had the size and shape of a brick. I often told my students that their cellphones had far, far more computing power than did the ENIAC, which filled a building and used so much power that whenever it was turned on, the lights all over Philadelphia dimmed. The Apollo Guidance Computer, which directed astronauts to the moon and back, had about as much memory and processing power as the chip in a present-day card that sings Happy Birthday. But the first computer I used was a mammoth beast. I would type out a program on a stack of punch cards, take it to the priesthood who fed the beast, and wait for three days for the output, at which time I would learn that I had failed to enter a comma on line 349 and had to do it all over again. But it was great, that computer, for printing out pictures of the Mona Lisa or of swimsuit models made out of x’s.
The “Macintosh Portable”? I coveted those. I also coveted the old two-piece Compaq portables, which basically resembled one of those old “portable TVs,” with a handle and a detachable keyboard that covered the screen when in place. It probably made the Macintosh Portable feel like a feather. Alas, my parents refused to buy me a computer, so I spent a weird amount of time looking at computers in catalogs as a kid.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compaq_Portable
The Compaq shipped in 1983 starting at $3,000 (!) and weighed 28 pounds.
I was also one of the–what was it?–5,000 or so people who owned the Macintosh Lisa, which looked like a ham radio with an oscilloscope screen. I wish I had kept these pieces of junk. I finally got tired of lugging them around and threw them all out.
I know, I certainly never expected that they would one day be museum pieces. The pace of obsolescence was fast, but maybe not quite fast enough to make the historical significance of those old machines obvious to all.
A frequent commenter on this blog recently included a tiny rant about “sketchnoting,” which is teaching students to use sketches as part of their notetaking. But I suspect that there is some value to this as a memory aid, as there is for writing notes by hand, in accordance with dual-coding theory: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual-coding_theory
Diane, sorry about the problems that you had using a ball point pen.
I am R handed and have some artistic ability. I also learned handwriting by the Palmer method. My teacher would always put up my circles and loops as an example of how the work should be done.
I think it is a great injustice for children to not be taught handwriting. They may receive thank you notes, attend weddings and funerals whereby they have to sign their names in a guest book, have checkbooks or sign on the line to get a mortgage. Reading cursive is still a required bit to assimilate into society. [I’m not guessing what will occur 200 years in the future.]
Indiana has made it not required. I guess there is much more important work to be done on studying for the state standardized tests.
I can type but always make mistakes somewhere. I’d never make it as a secretary for some corporation. I had one semester of typing in the 10th grade.
Texas had eliminated cursive, and they are now putting it back in the public schools.https://www.houstonpublicmedia.org/articles/news/education-news/2019/04/29/330958/texas-bringing-back-cursive-to-elementary-schools/
I would have liked to have a had a sister. When I was a kid, girls were TOTALLY MYSTERIOUS to me. They could not have been more alien if they had wings and traveled about on moonbeams. They always gathered in these clutches and whispered to one another, and they would write their own names over and over in their notebooks in big, neat, loopy, curly letters, as though they might forget them if they didn’t do this. I thought they were very beautiful, in their neat skirts and blouses, with their neat pink cases for their pens and pencils. Beautiful but ungraspable, like a snowflake that disappears in your hand. So, one day in fourth-grade chorus, having become enamored of a round-faced GODDESS who sat behind me, and two seats down, I wrote a note. Well, actually, not a note—I drew a heart on a piece of paper and folded it and labeled it “Helen.” Helen. Helen of Troy. The most beautiful creature in all of Fairview Elementary! Nay, in all the known universe! I asked the girl behind me to pass the note down to the fair Helen. The girl, of course, opened it and snickered and showed it to everyone around her, and I thought, I shall never live this down. But I triumphed in the end. The note made it to Helen, and at recess, she came to me, and we kissed beneath the fire escape around the corner from the playground, and thereafter, we would meet and hold hands and kiss and play Beatles records and she was, like any boy, my friend.
What a lovely reminiscence. I had the same awe of the fairer ones when I was young. I never got up the courage to do what you did. Those goddesses did without their hearts.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QLF-f1RiFS0 how it is done in France. I too love technology and the computer makes up in part for my shortcomings in spelling and neatness. I strongly feel we rob students of their first “learning by hand” experience and the hand eye precision that translates into other areas. We rob also the first re-engineering experience – making writing graceful through script – So much of this STEM push is a result of taking hand – on away. The German “basteln” experience so commonly found in elementary education is so important –
My elementary female ELLs sometimes brought in amazing intricate embroidery they had done to show other students and me. These students were often illiterate in their first language, When it came to handwriting, these girls took to it like a fish to water. The boys from the same country had a much harder time with handwriting. There is something in what you are saying.
This reaction against handwriting is part of the accursed push to have kids “excel” at academics early on. Pretests and test prep for kindergartners. It’s sickening. We need to teach them art and dance and meditation. We need to let kids be kids and give them plenty of time to play and socialize.
Agree –
Like unequivocally and enthusiastically, Bob–and thanks.
EARLY YEARS:
Knitting not coding
Writing not keyboarding
Blackboard not Smartboard
Art – art and more art in the form of classical music
Art in the form of drawing and learning how the artist sees –
I need not go on – trouble is – the corporate profiteers could give a you know what.
Educators should KNOW BETTER!!
Amen, Brother David
About 10% of people are left-handed. Soft lead pencils are probably better than other tools for lefties who are learning to write. The gestures for cursive writing make better sense if you have become adept at shaping upper and lowercase letters, especially for your name. There are many YouTube pointers and devices intended to make handwriting easier for lefties, and without the twisted wrist syndrome or bands of ballpoint ink.
In the olden days (but later than clay tablets) all children practiced lettering and handwriting at eye level, at a chalkboard. Lefties were not so disadvantaged by that practice. Children also learned to make rhythmic symmetrical designs by simultaneously using both arms and hands while facing the chalkboard. This exercise in bilateral balance could be done with a wet rag in each hand, helping to clean the chalkboard.
There are also scissors designed for lefties. And art teacher reported that some of her fourth graders did not know how to use scissors, primarily because they have spent so little time doing hands-on projects with varied materials. These inexperienced students held the scissors in the palm of their hands, blades pointed at their wrists, as if cuts in paper were to be made by motions moving toward the body, not away from it. You have to try this to understand their confusion.
I remember the following things about learning to draw letters of the alphabet, and my first moves toward cursive: drawing letter on newsprint paper with solid guidelines for the height of upper case letters and dashed lines for lower case letters, how easily newsprint paper tore if you tried to erase a mistake, how gritty the erasers were on pencils, how sharp or dull my pencil was. I also recall watching my classmates in grade four beginning to develop their signatures, with some of these more stylized than others.
I use my right hand for scissors. Necessity is the mother of invention. There were no left handed scissors when I was little.
I am left handed but when I played tennis or baseball, I was right-handed. Go figure
My son writes with his left hand. He does everything else right handed including play guitar and all sports including baseball.
The grit in the erasers!!!! I had forgotten how freaking annoying that was back in second grade!!!
I just bought a box of Blackwings. An indulgence. the Holy Grail of pencils.
Until I reached my current posting–which is as tough as any inner-city school in which I’ve served–I only worked in urban schools, and tough ones, in The Bronx, Manhattan, and Springfield, Massachusetts. In every one of these schools, and I do mean every one, the one thing that avidly interested students, and these are very tough kids, was learning cursive handwriting.
So over the years, I’ve developed a variety of materials to satisfy that interest. Last year, I actually spent 26 bucks to buy a Spencerian (think the Coca Cola and Ford motor logos) font to make tracing worksheets.
The evidence for the pedagogical and cognitive merits of teaching cursive handwriting is extensive and, I suspect, if one went looking for it, overwhelming. Personally, I have used instruction in this area to engage kids who otherwise just would not have come to school.
Teachers interested in pursuing this with their students would benefit from at least a look at Kitty Burns Florey’s “Script and Scribble: The Rise and Fall of Handwriting.” Ms. Florey is a warm and engaging stylist whose books, for me at least, have been a joy to read. Her “Sister Bernadette’s Barking Dog: The Quirky History and Lost Art of Diagramming Sentences” is also well worth a look.
This is a marvelous topic, Diane, and a favorite of mine. Thanks for raising it.
Ah, diagramming sentences! That is one of my arcane passions. I recall when my younger son was in fifth grade, and I asked his teacher if she was teaching diagramming sentences. She said she knew how, but no, she was not. So I taught him how to do it. He enjoyed it, it was like playing “hangman” with words and phrases. The other students saw what he did, and they wanted to do it too. Soon, the teacher was teaching everyone how to do it.
I think that diagramming made me a better, more logical writer. I pay attention to adjectives and adverbs and their placement. Of course, diagramming was reinforced by taking a class in Latin.
It’s something I want to learn to do so that I can teach it to kids. I actually have the “SenGram” game on my iPhone, but my aging eyes find it difficult to work at that scale. There is actually a relatively inexpensive book for Kindle on the Reed & Kellogg system for diagramming sentences that I should just buy.
Thanks again, Diane, for bringing up this topic.
How did we teachers ever stray so far from these tried and true methods of not only teaching kids to write, but getting them to use pens and pencils to develop crucial fine motor skills? Oh, yes! Big Tech needs to sell more keyboards….
I loved diagramming sentences. I think it started me on the road to an interest in linguistics. Diagramming sentences were a precursor to Noam Chomsky.
Absolutely. We need to bring back sentence diagramming and memorization (particularly of passages containing complex syntactic constructions).
There was this 7th grade math teacher that had us diagraming sentences. I do not know if it helped me, but I loved the process. I remember her for those sentence diagrams and for her emotional speech to us when MLK was assassinated. What a wonderful teacher, a black lady raised in the Jim Crow south. She was teaching at our school because of integration. I am sure many of us did not understand the depth of her feeling that April day. I was much older when I got it. I remember her for that eulogy and for diagraming sentences.
My first years in school were in a Catholic parochial grade school and the nuns did wack our knuckles with foot-long wood rulers.
My penmanship was almost perfect.
Then for economic reasons, my parents could not afford to keep me in that Catholic school and I ended up in a regular public school where my handwriting turned unreadable to this day, even by me.
I “really” prefer a keyboard and computer screen for writing. At least I can read even my typos and/or misspellings.
I love this post and all the comments. Diane, your handwriting is not atrocious. It’s artful. Write for yourself. I’d like to see Picasso paint a DaVinci — bet he couldn’t do it. Every artist has her own style. When I write with a pen, as I try to do as often as possible during my vacations, it’s exhilarating to slow down and take my time writing fiction and poetry just for my own eyes to see instead of typing things to post for others, to try to get it right the first time instead of relying on heavy editing. It’s my art.
And I do everything I can to preserve that art for my students. Remember this post from two years ago: https://dianeravitch.net/2017/10/21/teacher-i-opted-out-all-my-english-classes-from-taking-sbac/ ? Congratulate my students again because I opted all of them out of Smarter Balanced interim assessments again this year. Hooray! We will write our assessment essays with pens instead of the internet. This year, for the first time, the district officially accepted my application to conduct my own alternative assessments instead of using the state testing website. Times are changing. My school administrators are even talking about using my assessments and application to opt the entire school out of SBAC English interim assessments next year. Everyone will write with pens. Everyone will read whole literature in paper books. No more data. Much less screen time. Pens are the real technology. Handwriting is art.
By the way, three things:
I’ve seen your penmanship, Diane, when you wrote a lovely note and signed my copy of Death and Life… Again, not atrocious.
To be clear, the interim assessment waiver I was granted in 2017 was unofficial from my school, not the district office like the official one I got this year..
And off topic, if Michael Bloomberg is the Democratic candidate for president, I will not vote for him. Worst possible scenario, Bloomberg is. (Sorry to taint this lovely post with a little contentious politics.)
Bloomberg’s potential candidacy is a dilemma for me. He is great on gun control, the environment, public health. Absolutely awful on education. He has spent millions of dollars to support charters and vouchers across the nation. He would be a disaster on education issues.
I agree and disagree. As far as I am concerned, there is only one issue that matters: getting the wealthy to pay higher taxes to support all public and social services, and keeping them all owned and run by the public. Education is a big part of that issue. So, Bloomberg is wrong about the only thing that really matters to me. (Also important but related, no more war.)
One of the reasons I like Warren is that she wants to cut the bloated military budget. So does Bernie:
Bernie: “We will present a thoughtful budget that meets the defense needs of this country without just simply supplying billions of dollars of unnecessary money to the military industrial complex.”
Sanders’s position on defense spending is clear: He wants the United States to stop spending money on unmerited wars.
Warren eventually released her $20 trillion plan last Friday, which calls for a cut to military spending.
I was traumatized by a typing teacher in the 7th or 8th grade. More like terrorized, because the J key stuck on the Smith Corona that greeted me on the first day of class. A terribly unfortunate break.
She treated me as if it was my fault that I couldn’t make the very first right-hand home key yield to my touch. So, I never got past the threshold juj juj juj exercises. Touch typing became a world apart. Forget about entering qwerty territory, reaching down for the B, stretching for the numbers, shifting, the bell, tab setting, the joy of reaching the end of a line and swooping the carriage to start a new row. The only thing in life that I took from this were the limbering finger calisthenics that were done right before confronting the dooming J key.
I joined the firm of Hunt and Peck. Oh, what books I could have written had I not allowed myself to be defeated. Moral: Teachers make a difference.
I just read this bit if information. Sounds good. I can’t verify it. I always took notes in college by hand. Can’t imagine trying to keep notes by typing.
…….
Making handwritten notes and messages is pretty special, and not only because it has sentimental value. If you want to remember something better or focus more on the subject you’re writing about, it’s best to use your pen and not your keyboard to record it.This finding was established by a psychological study based at the State University of Indiana, which pointed out that writing engages more brain areas compared to typing, and so it makes for better memorizing and more engagement with the material. In the study, subjects who took notes on laptops were much worse at recalling and understanding the material than those who wrote down the notes, which only proves the obvious – writing isn’t going out of fashion any time soon.
I often tell a story of how when I was in fourth grade I brought home my report card and it was straight A’s except for a D in handwriting. My father (who had beautiful handwriting) was upset. I said, “But Dad, how do they know I deserve A’s in everything else if they can’t read my handwriting?” He yelled at me for being impudent, but I still think it’s a good question!! My handwriting never improved and I was very fortunate to have had excellent assistants in my life to whom I would frequently say “What did I write here?” and they would be able to decipher my chicken scratch. I envy those who have lovely script, but it’s never been an obstacle to me.
If speed is important,like when taking notes in a class, typing is better, but for writing litertaure when every word needs to be carefully chosen, handwriting could be advantegous since there is not much opportunity to change what’s written down.
Like digital photography: it’s easy to make hunderds of pictures at no cost, but for really memorable, artful pictures, the use of films forced people to think and look before shooting. The “I can always throw it away” mentality is not good for art.
There are software to create painting via software and just print out the result, but a real painting will always beat it.
What’s better: slow, careful thinking, pondering, or quick, fast reaction? It depends.
I think more clearly when I type because I am not slowed down by need to write by hand.
On the other hand (pun not intended), I served many years ago on the board of the NY Public Library with the esteemed historian Barbara Tuchman. I told her about the wonders of word processing and invited her to my home to see my amazing TRS 80.
She sniffed and pulled out of her very large handbag a big stack of computer paper, with the sheets attached. She said she wrote by hand on computer paper and intended to continue doing so!
My handwriting is also terrible, and my mom sometimes asks me about old letters I wrote to her to tell her what I wrote but uusually I can’t figure it out myeself, either.
Here is where things get tricky: when you are a teacher, do you write by hand on the board or show slides?
I still write by hand at the university but when I give math research talks, I use slides. I think kids find handwriting on the board more interesting, even if it looks (in my case) barely legible, since it looks more live and attached to a person. Not to mention the fact that a class becomes much more flexible, I can change topics, explore some of the ideas students come up with.
To this day, I recall the satisfaction I felt as I learned to write with a fountain pen. I wrote endlessly; anything that came to my mind. How my handwriting ended up so bad is a mystery.
On the other hand, Diane, if you handwriting writing education had been better, you may still enjoy handwriting.
Bad education can ruin things. Many people think, they are bad at math, but behind such an opinion I can always find bad school experience with math.
Penmanship is a dying art, I love writing and more so in cursive format. So what I do is to write down my things to do for the day in my diary, in cursive of course instead of doing the same in the computer. And I am getting my kids to start writing in cursive as well. I miss the days when we all wrote letters and an opportunity to show our skill in penmanship.