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compiled by Tenzing Terwilliger, Improbable Research staffwith instructive illustrations from the book Penmanship, Theoretical and Practical, Illustrated and Explained by Benjamin Franklin Foster, Souter and Law, London, 1843.
Doctors often find themselves the butt of jokes about their supposedly horrendous, illegible handwriting. These four studies suggest that, except in one department in one hospital in Indianapolis, Indiana, the reputation may be deserved.
“Deciphering the Physician Note,” E.A. Kozak, R.S. Dittus, W.R. Smith, J.F. Fitzgerald and C.D. Langfeld, Journal of General Internal Medicine, vol. 9, no. 1, January 1994, pp. 52–4 (http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/BF02599144). The authors, at Indiana University School of Medicine, Indianapolis, explain:
Objective information about legibility of physician handwriting is scant. This retrospective chart review compared handwritten general medicine clinic chart notes from internal medicine faculty and housestaff with their typed counterparts. The written counterparts took 11 seconds (46%) longer to read and 5 seconds (11%) longer to answer comprehension questions. The authors’ comprehension measure (developed specifically for ambulatory clinic notes) was only slightly higher for typed notes. The legibility of physician handwriting is not as dismal as assumed; physicians can effectively communicate on paper.
“Reputation and the Legibility of Doctors’ Handwriting in Situ,” G.A. Cheeseman and N. Boon, Scottish Medical Journal, vol. 46, no. 3, June 2001, pp 79–80. The authors, at the Royal Infirmary in Edinburgh, report:
Our study evaluates if doctors deserve their reputation and investigates how legibility is affected by the time taken to write. Sets of in-patient hospital notes were selected at random. The first written entry by a doctor and a nurse in the current admission were analysed. In addition to this, 10 doctors and 10 nurses, unaware of the true nature of the study, wrote out lists of words and the time taken to do the task was recorded. The doctors’ handwriting was significantly less legible and they wrote significantly quicker. However a small minority of the doctors was responsible for the majority of illegible words written by that group.
Illegible Handwriting in Australia“The Facts on the Legibility of Doctors’ Handwriting,” H. Goldsmith, Medical Journal of Australia, vol. 2, no. 12, September 18, 1976, pp. 462–3. The author writes:
A large number of people, both doctors and others, were tested. The handwriting of each participant was graded and four different statistical tests were performed on the results. In all of these tests the doctors’ handwriting came out significantly worse. Thus the only conclusion which could be established from these results was that doctors’ handwriting is indeed less legible than others.
“Legibility and Completeness of Physicians’ Handwritten Medication Orders,” E.H. Winslow, V.A Nestor, S.K. Davidoff, P.G. Thompson and J.C. Borum, Heart and Lung, vol. 26, no. 2, March–April 1997, pp. 158–64 (http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/S0147-9563(97)90076-5). The authors, at Presbyterian Hospital of Dallas, Texas, report:
OBJECTIVE: To assess handwritten medication orders for legibility and completeness, legibility of physician signatures, and presence of date and time the orders were written. SETTING: Three patient care units in one hospital in Texas. METHODS: Six experienced nurses evaluated medication orders and signatures for legibility using a rating scale developed for the study… RESULTS: Twenty percent of the medication orders and 78% of the signatures were illegible or legible with effort. Twenty-four percent of the medication orders were incomplete. Date was omitted on 18% of the medication orders, and time was missing on 58%.
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The article above is from the March/April 2008 issue of the Annals of Improbable Research. You can download or purchase back issues of the magazine, or subscribe to receive future issues. Or get a subscription for someone as a gift!
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Neither
snow nor rain nor bad handwriting will stop the post office from delivering
mail. But how exactly does the postal service deal with bad handwriting?
With humans. Lots of them.
Barry Newman of the Wall Street Journal tell us what happened to the letters whose addresses are deemed indecipherable by the post office's automated sorting machines:
Computers have since learned to see words in scrawls and squiggles the way voice-recognition software hears them in hemming and hawing. The Postal Service says their reading score today is 95%.
What's left over is the handwriting from hell. It pours into just two remaining RECs—here and in Wichita, Kan. Their 1,900 clerks cope with machine-unreadable mail from the whole country. Last year, that included 714,085,866 chicken-scratch first-class letters.
In late afternoon, when volume peaks at the Salt Lake center, a blinking panel showed 67,000 letters awaiting attention—from San Juan, Paducah, Los Angeles, Kokomo. A clerk wearing a headset had hit a patch of pen-pal letters from pupils in Memphis. She was decrypting them at a rate of 800 per hour, down from the desired 1,100.
"We ought to teach kids how to address letters," said Bruce Rhoades, a manager looking over her shoulder. His boss, Karen Heath, stood watching beside him and sighed, "A lost art."
Link (Photo: Barry Newman/The Wall Street Journal)
Here’s one person who wishes now that he’d practiced his handwriting like his elementary teachers wanted him to. Thomas J. Love went to a bank in New Castle, Delaware, with a plan to rob it. He handed the clerk a note written on a deposit slip.
The teller, unable to decipher what was on the deposit slip, handed it back to Love to rewrite. Empty handed, he then fled the bank on foot.
After a description was provided, a New Castle County police officer located Love in the area of New Castle Avenue and Rodney Drive and took him into custody.
Love is being held on a $2,000 bond for attempted robbery. Link -via Arbroath
The drumbeat of lamentation of how cursive handwriting is dying continues (It seems like every year we have a post on the death knell of cursive, so why should 2011 be any different?)
Young people rarely use cursive anymore, and that may be fine for their daily communication needs, but consider this report by Katie Zezima for The New York Times: the death of cursive also means that a growing number of historical documents will become indecipherable to them.
Jimmy Bryant, director of Archives and Special Collections at the University of Central Arkansas, says that a connection to archival material is lost when students turn away from cursive. While teaching last year, Mr. Bryant, on a whim, asked students to raise their hands if they wrote in cursive as a way to communicate. None did.
That cursive-challenged class included Alex Heck, 22, who said she barely remembered how to read or write cursive. Ms. Heck and a cousin leafed through their grandmother’s journal shortly after she died, but could barely read her cursive handwriting.
“It was kind of cryptic,” Ms. Heck said. She and the cousin tried to decipher it like one might a code, reading passages back and forth. “I’m not used to reading cursive or writing it myself.”
Link | The Atlantic has the counterargument
Nicholas Maxim was born without hands or forearms, but the fifth grader can write -and well, too. Nicholas has won a special award in Zaner-Bloser’s 20th annual National Handwriting Contest.
“We submitted his entry because we felt his penmanship was amazing considering he completes most of his work without using his prostheses,” said Cheryl Hasenfus, Readfield Elementary School principal.
At those times, Nicholas writes by holding a pen or pencil between his upper arms.
On behalf of Zaner-Bloser, a publisher of educational materials, Hasenfus presented a trophy to Nicholas during a school assembly for his excellent penmanship. The school is in Readfield, Maine.
Inspired by his ability, Zaner-Bloser decided to create a new award category in his honor: Nicholas Maxim Special Award for Excellent Penmanship
Other winners of the competition will be announced in May. Link -via Arbroath
Turn your handwriting into a font! Pilot Pens asks you to use your ink pen at least once more to write out your letters, then feed them into their font generator. Download your personal font, and then you can type with your own handwriting! Link -via Core77 -Thanks, Senor Mysterioso!
Missouri University School of Journalism, original photo by Mollie Sterling that went viral some years ago- via Losing Context
We’ve posted about the (purported) obsolescence of cursive handwriting on Neatorama before, but should all forms of handwriting be dead? Yes, according to Anne Trubek. The Oberlin College associate professor argues that handwriting is a technology that’s just too slow modern times (and even for our minds) that we should just do away with it:
Nevertheless, people seem to think that school kids should be spending more time honing their mastery of the capital G. A 2007 U.S. Department of Education study found that 90 percent of teachers spend 10 minutes a day on handwriting. Zaner-Bloser, the most popular handwriting curriculum used today, deems that too little and is encouraging schools to up that amount to at least 15 minutes a day.
But typing in school has a democratizing effect, as did the typewriter. It levels the look of prose to allow expression of ideas, not the rendering of letters, to take center stage.
Trubek went on to explain the evils of handwriting, at least in grade school:
Does having good handwriting signal intelligence? No, not any more than it reveals one’s religiosity. But many teachers make this correlation: It is called the "handwriting effect." Steve Graham, a professor at Vanderbilt University who studies handwriting acquisition, says that "teachers form judgments, positive or negative, about the literary merit of text based on its overall legibility." Graham’s studies show that "[w]hen teachers rate multiple versions of the same paper differing only in terms of legibility, they assign higher grades to neatly written versions of the paper than the same versions with poorer penmanship." This is particularly problematic for boys, whose fine-motor skills develop later than do girls. Yet all children are taught at the same time — usually printing in first grade and cursive in third. If you don’t have cursive down by the end of third grade, you may never become proficient at it.
While we once judged handwriting as religiously tinted, now secular, we transpose our prejudices to intelligence. The new SAT Writing Exam, instituted in 2006, requires test takers to write their essays in No. 2 pencil. Not only will those with messy handwriting be graded lower than ones written more legibly, but those who write in cursive — 15 percent of test takers in 2006 — received higher scores than those who printed.
Link – Thanks Janice Sinclaire!
So, what do you think? Should we just get rid of handwriting altogether?
Schools are spending less time than ever teaching the art of cursive handwriting, especially as more time is devoted to typing in the early grades. On the 2007 SAT essay questions, only 15% of college-bound students used cursive writing. The rest wrote in print. Some teachers argue that writing in script helps hand-eye coordination, even though average legibility peaks around 4th grade.
Text messaging, e-mail, and word processing have replaced handwriting outside the classroom, said Cheryl Jeffers, a professor at Marshall University’s College of Education and Human Services, and she worries they’ll replace it entirely before long.
“I am not sure students have a sense of any reason why they should vest their time and effort in writing a message out manually when it can be sent electronically in seconds.”
For Jeffers, cursive writing is a lifelong skill, one she fears could become lost to the culture, making many historic records hard to decipher and robbing people of “a gift.”
What do you think? Is it important for children to learn cursive, or should it go the way of the dinosaur? Link -via Digg
(image credit: AP/Bob Bird)
Shaun Usher of deputy dog has a new blog called Letters of Note which shares classic correspondence of all kinds. One that stands out is from a slave named Vilet Lester to a member of her former owner’s family, written in 1857. Here is an excerpt.
I am well and this is Injoying good hlth and has ever Since I Left Randolph. whend I left Randolf I went to Rockingham and Stad there five weaks and then I left there and went to Richmon virgina to be Sold and I Stade there three days and was bought by a man by the name of Groover and braught to Georgia and he kept me about Nine months and he being a trader Sold me to a man by the name of Rimes and he Sold me to a man by the name of Lester and he has owned me four years and Says that he will keep me til death Siperates us without Some of my old north Caroliner friends wants to buy me again. my Dear Mistress I cannot tell my fealings nor how bad I wish to See youand old Boss and Mss Rahol and Mother. I do not now which I want to See the worst Miss Rahol or mother I have thaugh that I wanted to See mother but never befour did I no what it was to want to See a parent and could not.
The post contains a transcript of the entire letter and a photograph of the handwriting. Link
You may like land line phones and going out to Blockbuster video to browse down their aisles, but by the time your great grandkids are old enough to start to figure out the world, there will be plenty of things that will just be a faint memory in their little minds.
Here’s a list of 10 things from I Heart Chaos that your grandkids will barely even know existed.
From the Upcoming 
ueue, submitted by cbz3000.
