Today's Washington Post has an article on the sad and swift decline of handwriting among today's students. It's taken a very low spot on the priority list of teachers whose days are filled with getting students prepared to take standardized achievement tests, which require little handwriting at all. As the Post points out, keyboarding killed shorthand and is apparently whacking away at cursive writing too.
When handwritten essays were added to this year's SAT, only 15% of the 1.5 million taking the test used longhand in their essays. The rest used block printing.
Many educators shrug. Stacked up against teaching technology, foreign languages and the material on standardized tests, penmanship instruction seems a relic, teachers across the region say. But academics who specialize in writing acquisition argue that it's important cognitively, pointing to research that shows children without proficient handwriting skills produce simpler, shorter compositions, from the earliest grades.
Scholars who study original documents say the demise of handwriting will diminish the power and accuracy of future historical research. And others simply lament the loss of handwritten communication for its beauty, individualism and intimacy.
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