I'm just getting around to
online-bookmarking the websites and pages I've saved in my "when i get a chance" file, which is how I came across
this article for
Good magazine called "Stop Teaching Handwriting" by Anne Trubek.
I've excerpted much of the article below, because I really super like her idea. Plus, the history of writing technologies she gives is very interesting, I think.
Let’s stop brutalizing our kids with years of drills on the proper formation of a cursive capital “S”—handwriting is a historical blip in the long history of writing technologies, and it’s time to consign to the trash heap this artificial way of making letters, along with clay tablets, smoke signals, and other arcane technologies.
Many will find this argument hard to swallow because we cling to handwriting out of a romantic sense that script expresses identity. But only since the invention of the printing press has handwriting been considered a mark of self expression. Medieval monks first worried that the invention of printing would be the ruin of books, as presses were more idiosyncratic and prone to human error than manuscripts produced in scriptoriums. And the monks never conceived of handwriting as a sign of identity: For them, script was formulaic, not self-expressive. That concept did not appear until the early 18th century. Still later came the notion that personality and individuality could be deduced by analyzing handwriting. All the while, print became widely available, and handwriting lost its primacy as a vehicle of mass communication.
Huh. Makes sense.
The typewriter took handwriting down another notch. Henry James took up the then-new writing machine in the 1880s, most likely because he, like my son, had poor handwriting. By the 1890’s, James was dictating all his novels to a secretary. And as novelists and businesses were putting down their pens, others started to valorize handwriting as somehow more pure and more authentic, infusing script with nostalgic romanticism. The philosopher Martin Heidegger was particularly guilty of this, writing in 1940 of the losses wrought by typewriters: "In handwriting the relation of Being to man, namely the word, is inscribed in beings themselves. …When writing was withdrawn from the origin of its essence, i.e. from the hand, and was transferred to the machine, a transformation occurred in the relation of Being to man."
This make me feel a lot less guilty for sometimes allowing my students, especially those with disabilities, to dictate parts of their writing assignments to me while I write or type for them.
The pattern doesn’t change: As writing technologies evolve, we romanticize the old and adapt to the new. This will happen with keyboards, too—some contemporary novelists have ceased using them already. Richard Powers uses voice-recognition software to compose everything, including his novels. “Except for brief moments of duress, I haven’t touched a keyboard for years,” he says. "No fingers were tortured in producing these words—or the last half a million words of my published fiction." Powers is wonderfully free of technological nostalgia: "Writing is the act of accepting the huge shortfall between the story in the mind and what hits the page. …For that, no interface will ever be clean or invisible enough for us to get the passage right," he says to his computer.
Thinking about it this way almost makes me want to send some of them to the learning center where we've got some voice-recognition software. For although I'm often alarmed at how poor their typing skills are, it's pretty liberating to think of teaching writing as teaching thinking. It makes it much more difficult, actually, but much more important-seeming.
I don't know, maybe that's a cop-out. Would allowing voice-recognition software for students for whom writing or typing presents a roadblock to creative production sacrifice their ability to "get by" in a world that, whether I like it or not, currently requires typing skills? I fear the unintended consequences that pushing my hippie ideals on my students.
