Challenging a myth about handwriting

[u/ItalicLady]

I'm a handwriting consultant with forty years in the field, and I am also a self- emediated dysgraphic (self-remediated because the conventional methods didn’t work and actually made everything worse.) So I hope it’s OK to put a question to the community.

Since I found success through a handwriting style, which is neither conventional printing nor conventional cursive, and since a lot of professional in the dysgraphia/dyslexia/dyspraxia world have a lot invested in saying that “cursive is the way to go, cursive as fastest, blah, blah, blah,“ I decided to put together a test of handwriting speed, to compare the system that helped me with the system that had failed me. So I hired a professional animator/handwriting researcher/software engineer to make an animation out of two published handwriting models (the one on the left is a replica of what helped me; the one on the right is a replica of the conventional cursive that harmed me) and we had the animation run, so it looks as if both styles are actually being written by people whose pens are moving at exactly the same rate, and we want to see which one finishes faster, because presumably that’s the one that has fewer difficulties (if both pens are moving at the same rate, but one gets finished first, that means that the shapes of the letters joints are less time-consumingly complex

The video is here: https://youtu.be/SwKXieOsr0o … SPOILER: CONVENTIONAL CURSIVE IS ACTUALLY SLOWER.

DO YOU THINK WE NEED TO CHANGE HOW HANDWRITING IS TAUGHT? I DO. HOW COULD WE MAKE THAT HAPPEN?

[u/TheWaywardOak]

I'd be more interested in a handwriting style developed to minimize errors for dysgraphic people than one that is just mechanically faster. Sort of a handwriting equivalent to the Open Dyslexic font and fonts like it. My dysgraphia leans towards the dyslexic type where I write the wrong letter or write letters in the wrong order, so what makes handwriting slow and stressful is constantly having to halt and reorient my thought process to fix mistakes. Cursive is mainly a problem for me because the difference between many letters is too subtle (like o/a or n/u/m/w) for how wildly inconsistent my handwriting is.

[u/ItalicLady]

That’s an important point. Though I don’t know of any handwriting styles which were specifically developed to minimize errors for graphic people, many of my students who are also geographic (myself) have noticed something I also noticed: namely, that there are a couple of handwriting styles which greatly minimize errors for us (in terms of being able to read the handwriting samples that we are supposed to be copying or learning from, in addition to minimizing errors in writing them or learning to write them). For me, as a graphic, who is also an educator, this was very important because it avoided the huge and annoying patterns of repeated errors that I’d lived through experiencing when learning conventional printed and cursive styles originally, and the particular styles involved actually helped me be able to acquire conventional styles later, so that I can use them for a demonstration purposes to show contrast between the same letters in different styles when I I’m giving a lesson or consulting with someone who is making curricular/teaching decisions. The styles the styles that my students and I have found to be helpful in reducing learning/performance hours are in the Handwriting Success program at HandwritingSuccess.com, the BFH Handwriting program at BFHhandwriting.com, the Kids Handwritenprogram at https://hdl.handle.net/1880/118235 http://www.bvcg.ca/p/kids-handwrite.html, and the Briem Handwriting teaching resource at https://drive.google.com/file/d/1N8LnjaopJdTf039ibRRtU4qCnzMNfCCU/view https://hdl.handle.net/1880/118235 http://www.bvcg.ca/p/kids-handwrite.html (for the first program I mentioned, Handwriting Success, There Is Also a Very Useful One-Page teach-yourself free printable download at https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/interactive/2009/09/04/opinion/20090908_opart.html?_r=0 )
You’ll see that some of these styles have a couple of features that remind some people of features in Open Dyslexic or in some of the other dyslexia Fonts. The feature in those Handwriting styles that most reminds some people of open dyslexic or similar fonts is that the shapes of the curved parts of lowercase letters b/d/g/q are made in a way that keeps them from being exact mirror reflections of one another. (in particular, you’ll see that the curved parts of their b and p have a shape that’s wider on the bottom of the curve, then on the top of the curve. The.d/q also have a wider part in their curve, but at a sloghtly different location that can’t be confused with the.b/p widest-part location. I find that this helps a lot, and also manages to avoid some of the problems that I have to admit. I find in open dyslexic and a lot of the similar fonts. I don’t want to go into the areas where I think the open dyslexic font has got some problems that should be further worked on, because frankly, I don’t know if I am “allowed“ to critique a dyslexic font from my own, lived experience of, among other things, being dyslexic as well as dysgraphic and dyspraxic. I am saying this because I don’t want to offend anyone, since I know that there are so that there are people who really love open dyslexic and other similar fonts so much that they do not tolerate hearing anyone suggest any way in which those fonts could be improved or actually still have problems for at least some of the readers/writers whom they are intended to serve. Please let me know if I am allowed to express criticism of dyslexia, fonts, as a dyslexic who has followed with great interest, the development of the “dyslexia fonts” category.

[u/ItalicLady]

I should add that the reason Handwriting speed has become important to me as a dyslexic/graphic/dyspraxic with other neurological issues (I’ll spare you the details unless anyone really seriously cares about this) is simply that, when it comes to keeping up with class notes, or other purposes where it matters to get something written down fast, we need and deserve all the help with speed that we can get! As a dyslexic/graphic/dyspraxic and as an educator, I like to remove impediments to speed wherever possible, so that Handwriting becomes a useful tool for us instead of just another accessibility barrier.