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A Closer Look » Other Subjects » Experts bemoan decline of handwritingThread ID: M117
Topic: Experts bemoan decline of handwriting
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Andy
Experts bemoan decline of handwriting in age of keyboards, gadgets http://ca.news.yahoo.com/s/capress/061111/technology/technology_cyberfile_penmanship
Sat Nov 11, 3:24 PM
By Cassandra Szklarski
TORONTO (CP) - Every year at Christmas, Santa's mailbag is a little lighter than it should be.
Some hand-scrawled letters to the big guy just don't make it past the postman, says longtime Canada Post employee Allan MacNeill, bemoaning the state of the handwriting he's seen.
"I usually have a small pile every day that I have to try and decipher," MacNeill says of the year-round influx of cards and letters with illegible names and addresses.
"And, boy, I tell you, there's nothing worse for a kid when he's sent a letter to Santa that can't be read. ... It's a heartbreaker."
Letters with an unreadable return address don't get a reply from Canada Post on Santa's behalf.
Handwriting experts say they've seen a general decline in the quality of people's penmanship - young and old - and some observers link the weakening craft to a corresponding rise in the reliance on computers.
Why write a letter when you can just send an e-mail, says Toronto resident Simon Zelcovitch.
"I remember well that I used to write personal notes and letters," says Zelcovitch. "I haven't done that in 20-odd years."
An especially odd admission given that Zelcovitch is a handwriting expert hired by companies to examine the script of prospective job applicants for clues to their personality.
He says roughly 90 per cent of people that submit to analysis want to print.
"They scream at me that they can't write, they haven't written in years and they can only print and that's as good as it's going to get," Zelcovitch says.
"I blame it completely and totally on the keyboard."
It's true that penmanship has suffered in recent years, says psychology professor Marvin Simner, a handwriting expert at the University of Western Ontario.
But Simner blames more than just computers, noting that schools have reduced their emphasis on learning longhand.
Until the late '70s and early '80s, mastering penmanship was a daily task in most Ontario elementary schools, he says.
But that was phased out in favour of "whole language" education, a philosophy of teaching that suggested children would learn handwriting by watching others, Simner says.
"That's simply not true. They need very specific instruction and without that instruction their handwriting does deteriorate," he says.
"If you go back a lot before that, you will find that handwriting tended to be much better simply because children were receiving instruction."
He says he's heartened by guidelines in some western provinces that are starting to emphasize handwriting again.
Simner, whose publications include teachers' guides on handwriting, notes that technology has long been cast as a foe to cursive writing.
"Back in the 1920s and '30s they made the same argument when the typewriter came in - that you don't need to teach handwriting anymore because typewriters are here, and obviously it didn't turn out that way. People didn't carry typewriters around with them, and the same is true today."
But with an increasing number of gadgets now available to record even the shortest note, it's not surprising that some fear the death of an ancient custom.
Aside from the wide assortment of personal digital assistants, digital audio recorders and cellphones on the market, pens themselves have gone high-tech, with some doubling as calculators or connecting directly to computers.
Tens of thousands of Santa's letters are sent by e-mail, via a link on the Canada Post web page where children can type in their request.
When the program started in 2001, Canada Post received 18,530 e-mails to Santa. Last year, they received 34,039.
However, the numbers still pale in comparison to the more than one million pieces of regular mail that Santa receives.
"Stickers are big," spokeswoman Nicole Lemire notes of the decorated letters.
Handwriting is an important creative outlet that should be encouraged, says Zelcovitch.
Committing ideas to paper, instead of a computer screen where words are just as easily deleted as they are created, forces people to be more thoughtful, he says.
"You're looking at kids today that are being denied any kind of a personal contact, even with themselves," Zelcovitch says of those more inclined to type than write.
"When we were kids, we'd sit down, we'd touch a tactile piece of paper, we would have ink that you could see and we would apply a pen to it and we would then begin to scratch. ... Now you sit at the keyboard ... and what are you creating? You're using a software program that's doing it all for you.
"It may be more efficient. It certainly isn't better."
Andy
Experts bemoan decline of handwriting in age of keyboards, gadgets http://ca.news.yahoo.com/s/capress/061111/technology/technology_cyberfile_penmanship
Sat Nov 11, 3:24 PM
By Cassandra Szklarski
TORONTO (CP) - Every year at Christmas, Santa's mailbag is a little lighter than it should be.
Some hand-scrawled letters to the big guy just don't make it past the postman, says longtime Canada Post employee Allan MacNeill, bemoaning the state of the handwriting he's seen.
"I usually have a small pile every day that I have to try and decipher," MacNeill says of the year-round influx of cards and letters with illegible names and addresses.
"And, boy, I tell you, there's nothing worse for a kid when he's sent a letter to Santa that can't be read. ... It's a heartbreaker."
Letters with an unreadable return address don't get a reply from Canada Post on Santa's behalf.
Handwriting experts say they've seen a general decline in the quality of people's penmanship - young and old - and some observers link the weakening craft to a corresponding rise in the reliance on computers.
Why write a letter when you can just send an e-mail, says Toronto resident Simon Zelcovitch.
"I remember well that I used to write personal notes and letters," says Zelcovitch. "I haven't done that in 20-odd years."
An especially odd admission given that Zelcovitch is a handwriting expert hired by companies to examine the script of prospective job applicants for clues to their personality.
He says roughly 90 per cent of people that submit to analysis want to print.
"They scream at me that they can't write, they haven't written in years and they can only print and that's as good as it's going to get," Zelcovitch says.
"I blame it completely and totally on the keyboard."
It's true that penmanship has suffered in recent years, says psychology professor Marvin Simner, a handwriting expert at the University of Western Ontario.
But Simner blames more than just computers, noting that schools have reduced their emphasis on learning longhand.
Until the late '70s and early '80s, mastering penmanship was a daily task in most Ontario elementary schools, he says.
But that was phased out in favour of "whole language" education, a philosophy of teaching that suggested children would learn handwriting by watching others, Simner says.
"That's simply not true. They need very specific instruction and without that instruction their handwriting does deteriorate," he says.
"If you go back a lot before that, you will find that handwriting tended to be much better simply because children were receiving instruction."
He says he's heartened by guidelines in some western provinces that are starting to emphasize handwriting again.
Simner, whose publications include teachers' guides on handwriting, notes that technology has long been cast as a foe to cursive writing.
"Back in the 1920s and '30s they made the same argument when the typewriter came in - that you don't need to teach handwriting anymore because typewriters are here, and obviously it didn't turn out that way. People didn't carry typewriters around with them, and the same is true today."
But with an increasing number of gadgets now available to record even the shortest note, it's not surprising that some fear the death of an ancient custom.
Aside from the wide assortment of personal digital assistants, digital audio recorders and cellphones on the market, pens themselves have gone high-tech, with some doubling as calculators or connecting directly to computers.
Tens of thousands of Santa's letters are sent by e-mail, via a link on the Canada Post web page where children can type in their request.
When the program started in 2001, Canada Post received 18,530 e-mails to Santa. Last year, they received 34,039.
However, the numbers still pale in comparison to the more than one million pieces of regular mail that Santa receives.
"Stickers are big," spokeswoman Nicole Lemire notes of the decorated letters.
Handwriting is an important creative outlet that should be encouraged, says Zelcovitch.
Committing ideas to paper, instead of a computer screen where words are just as easily deleted as they are created, forces people to be more thoughtful, he says.
"You're looking at kids today that are being denied any kind of a personal contact, even with themselves," Zelcovitch says of those more inclined to type than write.
"When we were kids, we'd sit down, we'd touch a tactile piece of paper, we would have ink that you could see and we would apply a pen to it and we would then begin to scratch. ... Now you sit at the keyboard ... and what are you creating? You're using a software program that's doing it all for you.
"It may be more efficient. It certainly isn't better."
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