Hardly anyone writes in longhand anymore.  Even when students put pen or pencil to paper, they're not necessarily writing in cursive.  According to data released in 2007 by the College Board, a national college-preparatory nonprofit, only 15 percent of students used cursive in the essay section of the SAT — 85 percent used printing.   educationviews.org/~

Mary Hudnall's perfect script comes from years of teaching handwriting to third graders.

Forty out of 50 states in the United States have adopted the Common Core curriculum, which phases out cursive writing in the classroom, for their public schools.  According to its mission statement, Common Core seeks to teach skills that are "robust and relevant to the real world, reflecting the knowledge and skills that our young people need for success in college and careers."  In Common Core, the time formerly devoted to teaching cursive is spent on learning to type and other digital skills.  [...]

The waning focus on handwriting comes as a welcome change to some who disliked handwriting lessons as students or felt they were a waste of time.

"I didn't particularly like (learning cursive) at the time, and honestly, I'm still wondering when all that practice will actually produce something," says Kelsie McWilliams, a student in Castle Rock, Colorado.  But educators like McGrann feel cursive is more than a traditional style of writing.  They believe it has intrinsic value for learning and self-expression.

"For struggling writers, cursive allows them to be more fluent and thus lets their ideas flow on the page more readily ... some students have more ideas in their heads than they can (print) on paper," says McGrann.  "If you integrate penmanship with other literacy activities, the formation of letters really does make a difference in the way kids retain information."

"The discipline of cursive is excellent for developing fine motor skills, especially in young children," agrees Mary Brennan, who has her own handwriting business in New York.  "It's part art training, part everyday work skill."  [...]

Besides the intrinsic value of cursive writing, some are worried that phasing it out may make texts written in cursive go the way of hieroglyphics, as McGrann pointed out.

"I rarely use it now.  Still, it should be taught so that students are able to read it — think historical documents," says Danici Conlon of Victorville, California.

And McGrann, whose private school has no plans to stop teaching cursive, says it doesn't take much extra time to teach if teachers plan well.

"I think teachers need to figure out how to integrate whatever they're teaching together.  So if you're teaching cursive, the words you're teaching the kids to write should be their spelling words.  Same with typing," he explains.

Still, with 80% of states in the country phasing out cursive and so much of today's communication being digital, the discussion may be purely academic.

Kristi Peck teaches English and theater at a Tipton, Iowa, high school.  She was taught cursive as a child, but finds herself printing more and more — mostly because of her students.

"Many students can't comfortably read cursive," she says.  [...]

Although many, like Vivica Sparks of Grayson, Kentucky, point out one relevant skill:

"Yes, cursive should be taught in school," she said.  "How else would a person learn how to sign a signature?"

This illustration is an example of a hand-written prescription for Metadate ER 10 mg tablets.  Metadate is a drug used in the treatment of Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD).  Due to the similarity in name, poor penmanship and the omission of the modifier "ER", the pharmacy filling the prescription incorrectly dispensed methadone 10 mg tablets.  Methadone is a morphine-based product used as a heroin substitution therapy and analgesic.  Methadone is not used for the treatment of ADHD.   www.fda.gov/~

An example of an illegible prescription appearing on the WHO web page, but unconnected with the Amoxil case.

Doctors are legally obliged to write clearly, as emphasized in the UK Court of Appeal ruling in the following case.  A doctor had written a prescription for Amoxil tablets (amoxicillin).  The pharmacist misread this and dispensed Daonil (glibenclamide) instead.  The patient was not a diabetic and suffered permanent brain damage as a result of taking the drug.

The court indicated that a doctor owed a duty of care to a patient to write a prescription clearly and with sufficient legibility to allow for possible mistakes by a busy pharmacist.  The court concluded that the word Amoxil on the prescription could have been read as Daonil.  It found that the doctor had been in breach of his duty to write clearly and had been negligent.  apps.who.int/~

By Jeremy Caplan    Monday, Jan. 15, 2007

Doctors' sloppy handwriting kills more than 7,000 people annually.  It's a shocking statistic, and, according to a July 2006 report from the National Academies of Science's Institute of Medicine (IOM), preventable medication mistakes also injure more than 1.5 million Americans annually.  [...]    www.time.com/~

Hold onto your prescriptions.  It looks as if some doctors are serious about improving their notoriously horrendous penmanship.

Since last year, more than 1,200 physicians — and counting — have sent away for a self-study program in italic handwriting.  [...]

"These doctors really cared and wanted to talk about their handwriting problems.  I personally never thought they cared. I thought they were just careless," she adds.  [...]

The flood of physicians requesting the self-taught penmanship program occurred after a publication of the American Medical Assn. ran an article about the life-and-death consequences of doctor scribbling.  The American Medical News article observed that there are "chilling stories" of delays in treatment, incorrect dosages and even fatalities, all because of rushed, illegible chicken tracks dashed off by physicians.  [...]

"We don't even try to read some of the handwriting of our physicians," Reagan admits.  "In some cases, all we know comes from the notes the nurse puts in the chart and the typed summaries that are dictated....  Obviously mistakes can get made.  Nurses can take orders off wrong and do things that weren't supposed to be done.  There are major legal problems because some doctors can't read their own notes from years earlier."  [...]

"The most bizarre case I know of was a case where a pharmacist gave a woman a potassium supplement instead of birth control pills," says Reagan.  "It was a very sobering experience for the people involved." articles.latimes.com/~

LOS ANGELES — The class began with a gentle but humbling plea: "Pretend like you're in first grade."

For the next three hours, dozens of doctors who work at the prestigious Cedars-Sinai Medical Center here spent a grueling night last week confronting one of the most notorious problems in medicine: Horrible penmanship.

Their own.

Shamed into attending by the hospital's chief of staff, fingered by nurses for having an undecipherable scrawl, they all trudged into an auditorium with paper and pencil [...] to hear two experts coddle and coach them to forget everything they know about handwriting and start from scratch.  [...]

"My kids think it's very funny that I'm stuck here tonight doing this," he said.  "But most of us are trying to take this idea in the right spirit and give the lessons a chance.  I admit it: I have terrible handwriting."  [...]

Across the medical profession, there is growing concern that serious errors in both patient prescriptions and treatment are often rooted in the age-old habit of harried physicians scribbling off requests that pharmacists and nurses later have a difficult, if not impossible, time understanding.

Just six months ago, a Texas jury blamed a physician's illegible handwriting in the accidental death of a 42-year-old man who had a heart attack after receiving the wrong prescription.  In a handwritten note, his doctor had prescribed 80 milligrams a day of "Isordil," a medication for heart pain.  But a pharmacist misread the order as "Plendil," which is used to treat high blood pressure, and gave him the same dosage.  The maximum recommended daily intake of that drug is 10 milligrams.  The jury in the extraordinary case ordered the doctor to pay the victim's family several hundred thousand dollars.

A scathing report by the Institute of Medicine late last year also concluded that a range of medical errors that include written miscommunication between doctors and other providers in the nation's health care system may claim as many as 98,000 lives each year.  [...]

Almost all surgeons are constantly seeking to increase the skill of their hands and their ability to coordinate brain and muscle.  One surgeon of my acquaintance took up etching as an aid to developing more delicate control over his fingers.  Several whom I know learned to play the violin in order to increase the nimbleness of their hands.  Again, Dr. Forbes Hawkes, noted for his remarkable operations upon the kidney, learned to play the piano as training for his fingers although he did not care for it as a musical instrument.

In fact, so far as the hands are concerned, there are many points in common between the pianist and the surgeon.  The active hands of a Paderewski would have no difficulty in tying a row of stitches rapidly and unerringly.

Manual Dexterity

A dentist must have superior manual dexterity skills.  Stop and consider for a moment the size of the average person's mouth.  In order to perform dental procedures, a dentist must be able to work with precision on an extremely small scale.  A dentist must be able to exercise very fine motor control and possess excellent hand-eye coordination.  If you aspire to a career as a dentist you should engage in deliberate activities through which you can develop manual dexterity skills that are transferable to the practice of dentistry.

Dental school admissions committees expect that applicants have worked to develop these skills prior to admission.  When you apply to dental school, you must be able to do more than say, "I'm good with my hands."  You must be able to demonstrate to an admissions committee that you have systematically engaged in activities through which you have developed the necessary manual dexterity skills.  [...]

You should choose an activity that you will enjoy and participate in it on a consistent basis over an extended period of time, preferably throughout your college years.  It is helpful if you can find a way to document the level of skill you have developed for an admissions committee, such as taking courses for college credit, performing in a concert, providing samples of your artwork, or obtaining a letter of recommendation from your teacher in an art or music class, or your supervisor in a lab.    hpplc.indiana.edu/~

Fallen soldier Jamie Janes

Even politicians need good handwriting because occasion may demand that they project the image of not merely signing a form letter, but of actually giving their letter their personal attention, and of spending time to compose it, as for example British Prime Minister Gordon Brown writing a letter of condolence to Mrs Jacqui Janes upon the loss of her son, soldier Jamie Janes, killed in Afghanistan.

The Daily Mail article covering Gordon Brown's letter circles what may be errors, though the legibility is so abysmal that one can't be sure: Mrs Janes seems to be incorrectly rendered as Mrs James, greatest as greatst, your as you, condolences as condolencs, Jamie ends in a scribble, colleagues as colleagus, and security as securiity.  But it is the letter's suffocating illegibility that is the letter's salient feature.  It may be wondered whether Prime Minister Gordon Brown would be able to decipher his own attempt to write the word "contribution":



And Mrs Janes's reaction:

"The letter was scrawled so quickly I could hardly even read it and some of the words were half-finished," Mrs Janes said.
"It's just disrespectful."
She added: "In the days after Jamie's death I got letters from Prince Philip, Buckingham Palace, the Defence Secretary and his regiment.
"They were all written from the heart and made me feel Jamie's death was important to them.
"Then I got Gordon Brown's.  I only got through the first four [lines] before I threw it across the room in disgust."

Grief-stricken mother, Mrs Jacqui Janes

And much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on.  Let me give you one example:  Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country.  Throughout the campus every poster, every label on every drawer, was beautifully hand calligraphed.  Because I had dropped out and didn't have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this.  I learned about serif and sans serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great.  It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can't capture, and I found it fascinating.

None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life.  But ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me.  And we designed it all into the Mac.  It was the first computer with beautiful typography.  If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally-spaced fonts.  And since Windows just copied the Mac, it's likely that no personal computer would have them.  If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on that calligraphy class, and personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do.