PENMANSHIP PART 1:

IS CURSIVE DEAD?

By Karl Barksdale © 2003

I have a new concern. It's cursive, or the lack thereof among our young people.

On a required school-wide writing exercise, only 4% of our students used cursive. The rest, 96%, printed. And the penmanship was iffy among those who used cursive/script.

CURSIVE/SCRIPT
4 %
PRINTING
96%

This lamentable situation is enough to make Austin Norman Palmer, Platt Roger Spencer Joseph J. Daley, Elmer Ward Bloser, and Charles Paxson Zhaner turn in their collective graves. (Look for "Penmanship Part 2: A Brief History of North American Business Penmanship" in the 1st quarter newsletter, January 2004.)

We've also noticed more than a few students have difficulty reading script!

I hope things are better in your area. They probably are. In fact, penmanship is a region by region issue, with some faring much better than others. But for us, things couldn't be worse. Oh, our students can print okay, but they never retained cursive or script.

We were encouraged by a few things in our survey. For instance, we noticed that many of our Latin American students had wonderful penmanship. Our ESL teacher explained that in many parts of Mexico, handwriting skills are encouraged heavily. And it shows!

There is another glimmer of hope. More students will try cursive-script when the pressure is off to perform. As many as 11% of our students did try cursive in an ungraded observation. Students were told to use either cursive or printing to complete an ungraded writing task. The penmanship was less than stellar, but at least in this nonthreatening environment, more students gave cursive a try

We ranked penmanship from very good to very poor. Here is the result of our informal in-school survey of 181 writing samples.

PRINTING/ALL STUDENTS
Very Good 15%
Good 61%
Fair 23%
Poor 1%
Very Poor 0

ESL STUDENTS ONLY
Very Good 54%
Good 38%
Fair 8%
Poor 0%
Very Poor 0%

CURSIVE/SCRIPT
Very Good 0%
Good 67%
Fair 22%
Poor 11%
Very Poor 0%

Perhaps your school system is doing better than ours, but here, the cursive skill was not cemented strongly enough in grades 3-5, nor is it required by any middle school teacher, so now we have to run remedial penmanship courses in cursive in DigiTools at the secondary level.

It's hard to fathom an entire generation of college students printing their notes, unable to use cursive. It's also hard to fathom handwriting recognition and tablet PCs achieving their full potential if people simply print or write like a "doctor."

KEYBOARDING AND PENMANSHIP

Many of us old enough to have learned cursive are asking, "How did this essential skill slip away from so many or our kids?" Rightly or wrongly, we should focus some attention on the elementary keyboarding programs proliferating through our school systems. Instead of spending 30 minutes three times per week practicing penmanship, students are keying instead.

It's not so much that typing practice in and of itself is the problem, it is the detrimental mindset keyboarding-centric thinking can create in the minds of many educators.

Many teachers actually believe that cursive or script is no longer valuable! In so many words, I have heard it said over and over again during the past 20 years, "Students are going to be typing everything anyway, so why worry about penmanship." USA Today (6/8/2003) reported in an article called Keyboarding Killed the Penmanship Star,

"The trend pervades Silicon Valley, where many schools have computer labs and students use 'keyboarding' software to learn proper typing techniques in third grade -- the same time they learn cursive. Many educators say the traditional cursive developed by Austin Norman Palmer -- the standard form of handwriting nationwide for much of the 1900s -- is on its way out." (www.usatoday.com/tech/news/2003-06-06-cursive_x.htm)

Nothing is further from the truth. The penmanship equation has been forever changed by Microsoft Office XP, 2003, tablet PCs, and OneNote. Penmanship is now an essential skill again, especially for mobile computer users.

And it's not like the elementary keyboarding effort is netting us a great result in exchange! The average on our keyboarding pretest in for the same group of students in the penmanship survey yielded only 5.25 NWAM. And they all start the typing in the third grade...

As many as 10-15 years of students may have missed the mastery of cursive. Our little survey raises an alarm for us, and we are out to help change this situation. Questions must be asked:

• Are teachers aware of the changes in input technologies?
  
• Have they heard of the tablet PC?
  
• Do they know that handheld computers are moving away from graffiti and toward more substantial handwriting recognition systems such as the one Microsoft introduced with Office XP and 2001?
  
• Have they seen the books now available to teach speech and handwriting recognition technologies?
  
• Have they attended a handwriting recognition training workshop?
  
• Have they read the NBEA policy statement number 73 exhorting education systems to teach speech and handwriting recognition along with keyboarding?

Penmanship is now the number one most important input technology skill. It is the foundation for all other input technologies, including keying and speech recognition.

We need to get back to some better practices. For instance, a teacher from New York said that they were not allowed to print any of their work after the sixth grade. This sounds very sensible.

Once again, it is up to Business Education to reverse a negative trend. Armed with policy statement 73, (http://www.nbea.org/curfpolicy.html) we need to raise awareness of penmanship needs. As we work with our elementary counterparts on input technology issues, we must remind them of the necessity of cursive -- whether it be Palmer, Zhaner/Bloser, or D'Nealian. Teaching better ways to write with a digital pen's text and ink tools is now an essential computer technology imperative.