It is common for parents to worry about their teenagers’ handwriting. If the handwriting is messy, parents are concerned that the teacher will award a lower mark for a piece of writing than they might if the student’s handwriting is neat. Concerns around handwriting seem to be particularly intense when it comes to English, even though high literacy levels are important in all subjects. It is easy for a teacher to be dismissive of concerns around messy handwriting. Neat handwriting is not a success criterion in any of the language or literature papers. Why on earth would it matter then? Here are the reasons parents have a point when they express concerns about their teenager’s writing. Handwriting matters if
It’s barely legible
Although teachers are adept at deciphering the most tricky script, that is not to say they enjoy doing it. It takes longer; when I was a class teacher, I tended to mark the books of those students who had messy handwriting first, as I just didn’t have the energy to engage with spidery scrawl after marking 15 or so books. The perseverance it takes to understand difficult-to-read longhand may cause a teacher to become frustrated, and in turn, to award a slightly lower mark.
Neat handwriting, for better or worse, casts a halo effect. We, as teachers and parents tend to conclude that a writer who has well-formed, legible handwriting is also more intelligent. Research suggests that parents should take heart, however. Although plenty of studies do show that handwriting bias exists, modern studies of formal exam marking suggest that experienced examiners are not susceptible to handwriting bias, if the handwriting is legible.
It takes a student ages to write something
If a student finds handwriting laborious, it is likely that it will have a negative effect on the content of their writing. Basically, if a teenager’s attention is occupied by the manual process of putting pen to paper, their capacity to think clearly is reduced. As David Didau outlines, according to Nelson Cowan, ‘we can only complete a cognitive task if we have sufficient ability to hold onto information as it is processed, and most people are only able to concentrate on between 3 to 5 ‘chunks’ of information at any one time.’ When a student is writing, they will give some attention to content, some to style and some to being accurate. This all occupies working memory. If the process of handwriting is not automatic – if they have to give a lot of conscious attention to it – they will not be able to pay attention to what they write.
To conclude this part of the blog then, a parent needs to worry about their teenager’s writing if a) it is very difficult to read b) if the teenager in question has to put a lot of effort and attention into writing by hand. If this applies to you and your teenager, you might like to read on.
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What you can do to improve your teenager’s handwriting
There are various things that can be done about handwriting. Tutors such as myself use handwriting interventions suggested in books such as these in order to promote handwriting automaticity.
Teenagers should check their pen grip. Some grips increase the difficulty of writing. Ideally we should use the tripod grip to hold a pen.
Surely handwriting is outdated?
If your teenager bemoans the need to write an assessed task by hand, you might be tempted to agree. Few people nowadays write anything longer than a shopping list by hand. Handwriting longer texts may seem archaic to both yourself and your teenager. Why, then aren’t exams written on a computer? It would make for a more level playing field, surely? Yes, and no. It would certainly reduce a lot of the administrative hassle of having to scan exam papers into the digital system. However, research suggests that handwriting is of value both to children and to adults. For example, studies suggest adults can capture more when we write notes by hand, than if we take notes on a laptop. Another study by a group of French researchers found that pupils who learned to write by hand had a better recognition of letters than those who learnt with a keyboard. Of course, these are not reasons against using word processors in exams, but assessed tasks are one of the few high stakes tasks for which we practise handwriting for. Without them, teenagers may be even less motivated to write anything by hand.
It could be that your child’s struggle with handwriting is due to an undiagnosed special educational need. Talk to your chosen school’s SEND department. Ask for your child to be assessed for dyspraxia. It could be that your child is eligible for a laptop in lessons, or a scribe or laptop in their exam.
