The Write Stuff

Wonder of wonders, handwriting is making a comeback. After twenty
years of neglect, and flying in the face of technologically advanced
alternate data recording methodologies, the art of writing legibly is
back in vogue, and in the curriculum.

Handwriting is making a slow comeback in some schools after decades
in which many educators shunned serious penmanship studies. Tests, blamed
in part for handwriting instruction’s decline, also are a part of the
reason for its return. This year, for the first time, the SAT will require
handwritten essays. Massachusetts, as part of its MCAS exams, also includes
handwritten essay questions. Graders claim they require only that the
essays are legible, but specialists say multiple studies correlate a
neat hand with higher scores. (from Boston
Globe)

Gadzooks! The SAT requires handwriting! In the past few years we have had dozens
of students who couldn’t hand write a legible ransom note if their lives depended on it. It is easy to understand
the correlation between good handwriting and good test scores. In a previous
life the Dowbrigade was an essay grader for the Educational
Testing Service,
the same friendly folks who bring us the SAT. We guess they are so friendly
because they have a monopoly on higher education testing in the US, At any rate
they hired us to read and grade the essays for the Test of English
as Foreign
Language, required of all foreign students who want to study at American
universities. Over 100
graders, all language teaching professionals, sat at long, white draped
dining tables in the conference room of an isolated hotel for eight hours
a
day, working
our
way through
stacks
and piles and sheaves of essays.

Every 90 minutes or so we got a break for coffee, pastries, fruit, etc.
We are sure the timing and content of the breaks was carefully calculated
to maximize our productivity and we are sure they were bothered by the
inevitable bias that entered into the grading process due to handwriting.
How could we avoid it! By mid-afternoon we were dog-tired, the letters
were starting to flow together into indiscriminate squiggles anyway,
and we were under increasing pressure to speed up, to finish so however
many tens of thousands before calling it a day. How could we NOT give
a lower grade to an essay that made us squint, slow down, reread
words
and
whole
sentences,
trying
to decipher
what
the hell
that
letter was, signs and symbols not known in English or any other language
of to our knowledge.

This, of course, gave a tremendous advantage to students from countries
whose languages share our Latin alphabet, mostly European tongues like
French, Spanish, Dutch and Italian. This in turn exposed them to a whole
range of criticisms for cultural bias and even racism; kids who grew
up writing Kanji or Arabic script were at a severe disadvantage.  So
they were very glad to go over to computer-based testing where students
had the option of suing a keyboard.

Over a million kids a year take the TOEFL test, at $125 a pop, and since
they NEED the test to attend any American University, this is an effective
government-sponsored monopoly and a licence to print money. The SAT
is an even bigger cash cow, as about 1,400,000 kids in the US alone take
that one every year. Add the law school test (LSAT) and the business
school test (GMAT) and a few other choice plums, and you have a virtual
empire. As a sort of over-the-top side deal ETS is also a major player
in the multi-billion dollar industry of PREPARING students for these
tests. And as the cherry on the sundae and another reminder of why it
pays to pursue higher education, ETS and its parent corporation, the
College Board, are non-profit, educational institutions and get to keep
almost all of that near billion (or more? nobody knows) tax-free, and
without having to release detailed financial statements that a private
or publicly traded company would.

The Dowbrigade has not always possessed the beautiful, flowing penmanship
we enjoy today.  In fact, in the third grade, which back in the
day was when kids transitioned from crude printed lettering to "script"
or cursive writing, we were awarded the first "D" grade of our storied academic
career. Being a reasonably clever child in a high-achieving family, this
was a cause for alarm and family trauma.

When called on it by the pee’s the precocious Dowbrigade replied that
we didn’t need to have good handwriting because we were going to be a
famous writer and write everything on a typewriter. Rather than disabuse
us of what they probably felt was an admirable ambition, they instead
promised to buy us our first typewriter if we raised our handwriting
grade to a "B" by the end of the school year.

We did, by painstaking repetition of tracing exercises in workbook after
workbook, and they did, a big old boxy Underwood in a hard metal case.  It
must have weighed about 20 pounds, enough that we needed both hands to
carry it. Despite this inconvenience, and anxious to get started on our
career as
a writer,
the
9-year-old
Dowbrigade
lugged
that monster back and forth to school for the better part of a year,
and set it up on our little-kid desk despite all the other kid’s snickers
and stares, in an incredibly obnoxious display of prepubescent geekiness.

Nevertheless, the experience gave us beautiful cursive handwriting and an appreciation
of penmanship and calligraphy that extends from handwritten torah scrolls
to medieval illuminated manuscripts. Although we appreciate and admire
some of the examples of Asian, especially Japanese, calligraphy, we have
trouble believing the more extreme examples of the genre, wherein visionary
artists meditate and contemplate for weeks or months in order to execute
to perfection a single word or character. At that rate, it would take ten
years to write a limerick!

At any rate, as an educator and semi-civilized wordsmith, we say "Hip,
hip" for handwriting.

article from the Boston Globe