HANDWRITING RESEARCH AND PRACTICE: A UNIFIED APPROACH

A man walked into a New England bank and shoved a. piece of paper under one of the teller's windows. The teller carefully examined the note, then kicked the alarm button. Within minutes police officers converged on the scene and arrested the man. They later discovered that the suspect was a respected businessman suffering from laryngitis and illegible handwriting. The note was a poorly written request for a new checkbook (O'Brien, 1959). The aftereffects of malformed print are usually not so bizarre. Nonetheless, within today's schools poor handwriting has aptly been dubbed an instructional time thief (Enstrom, 1967). Students with handwriting difficulties often lose considerable time completing assignments, and teachers forfeit precious time attempting to grade papers marred by illegible letters and words. Poor penmanship is a barrier to both expressive writing and spelling achievement (Strickling, 1973). Further, regardless of content, teachers assign higher scores to papers with handwriting of good quality (Briggs, 1970; Chase, 1968; Markham, 1976; Rondinella, 1963; Soloff, 1973). Poor penmanship has at least two possible causes. First, a learner may bring to the task certain predilections that impede effective instruction. For example, a spastic paraplegic with poor motor coordination may not respond well to standard techniques ·of teaching handwriting (Bachmann & Law, 1961). This is not the case for most students, though. Legible handwriting has not been found to relate significantly to either eye-hand coordination, race, intelligence, or anatomical age (Harris, 1960). Handwriting problems also do not seem to be particularly associated with mental retardation (K varaceus, 1954; Love, 1965). The second explanation that most handwriting difficulties are the result of inadequate instruction seems more viable. Enstrom ( 1966) has suggested that handwriting is the most poorly taught element of the elementary school curriculum. Only one of every 10 schools requires its teachers to have some kind of handwriting training (King, 1961). There is little instructional individualization, and some schools have no formal program for handwriting (Addy & Wylie, 1973; King, 1961; Wolfson, 1962). Additionally, handwriting is an unpopular subject with teachers (Greenblatt, 1962). And student teachers rank handwriting last among subjects