The 3 Ps: Pen & Pencil to Paper

CBS Sunday Morning's top feature story today focused on penmanship.  I was delighted about the topic, entertained by the musings of youngsters learning to write in cursive, and a little melancholic about the waning of what I believe is a magnificently primitive art form used every day around the globe. Well, perhaps I am being a little too optimistic about the suggested frequency.  In a world where 294 billion emails and 5 billion text messages are sent daily, (yes you read that correctly - daily) is penmanship teetering on irrelevant?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5nONgyP43Lo&hd=1

 Learning to write in cursive is one of those childhood thresholds that looms large.  Forming letters with rounded shapes that perfectly connect to make words is a milestone of early education.  According to the CBS report, penmanship legibility "peaks at about the fourth grade."  Yikes!  It seems as we increase our writing speed, we often do so at the sacrifice of letter clarity.  I learned to write using the Palmer method in parochial school.  Cursive writing was taught, practiced, graded as seriously as any other school subject.  I liked forming letters and having what was often called, "nice handwriting."  I think it is what led me to try calligraphy after graduating from college.

As I noted in my last post (1/14/11) about viewing letters and notes written by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., the decline in handwriting is nothing new, but it seems to be happening with little concern. Will children suffer critical thinking skills due to reduced time spent morphing letters into words?  "Probably not," noted Steve Graham, a literacy expert at Vanderbilt University, who was featured in the CBS report.  "You want to be able to make your text legible, and you want to be able to do it quickly, okay? It also can help you learn new words if you trace them or write them out. But if you're asking, 'Does it help you become a better thinker?' there's no evidence that that's the case."

 Naturally, there is disagreement with Mr. Graham's comments by those who assert that penmanship helps stimulate memory and language skills. Mr. Graham is not writing off penmanship altogether, however, he is clear that students are not less served by less time spent on penmanship. As long as there are schools and homes that do not have computers, and as long as paper and pencils are more portable than their larger electronic counterparts, the case for penmanship has staying power.

The question of clarity and quality of handwriting does rise, but not with the stringency I experienced in my grade school education. Handwriting does not have to be beautiful or ornate with multiple flourishes.  I believe it has to be personal and say something about whoever is forming the letters.  I feel connected to the writer when I see his or her handwriting; this results in my saving short notes I receive. It is this very attachment that makes me especially soft on the all too infrequent letter that arrives in the mailbox at the end of my driveway.  The correspondence is the tangible result of someone's hand touching a pen or pencil, which touched the paper, which wound up in my hands.  This physical form, along with its intangible sentiment, softens the sometimes too harsh world.

Listening to Frank Sinatra croon, "I'm gonna sit right down and write myself a letter," I wonder if that is going to be the only way we receive any handwritten correspondence in the all too near future.  Even the ultra smooth, uber cool Old Blue Eyes can't soften that uncanny possibility.