Penmanship is a physical skill, an art form too. Secondary courses do not provide instruction for this, yet lack of this physical skill could cause students to fail required courses. As per Regents and Common Core grading rubrics, "A response that is...illegible...must be scored as a 0." See the rubric here: ELA Scoring Rubric. Declaring illegibility is subjective, thus a slippery slope.
My solution: Go digital (of course!) and let's relegate penmanship development at the secondary level to art electives. Students with interest or parents who feel strongly could opt for an art elective on handwriting. What a cool class that could be - maybe look at the history of writing, penmanship, hieroglyphics, perhaps some handwriting analysis, practice letter formation, ...
After exploring the handwriting issue closely for over a year now (and casually for over 19 years, the duration of my career), I realize I've opened a can of worms; the issue of penmanship and the associated expectations placed on students and teachers is thorny and multi-faceted.
Bottom line: I do not think that most of my students will go into careers where their penmanship matters or will play an important role, if any role at all.
What's best for students? College and career readiness!
Much of my clarity on this issue has come from going paperless over a year ago. I've seen the other side and it's beautiful!
Hindsight 20/20! Poor penmanship can be a roadblock to success for many students. Not to mention an inconvenience. What a waste of time and energy to scrawl by hand when there are so many more effective and efficient ways to record and convey information. Also not to mention, what do students write on? Pieces of paper that are vulnerable to so many mishaps and loss, but that's a whole other article!
Some students would rather go chop a load of wood over sketching out each letter of each word of each sentence of each paragraph of each essay or report. It's practically manual labor! Think of how that time and energy could be better spent!
Sad to see handwriting fall by the wayside? People were probably sad to see quill pens and ink wells go away at one time too. Some probably experienced discomfort and mistrust moving from stone tablets to making marks on slices of papyrus too. And that all seems rather ridiculous now.
I have found myself in some debates on this topic in the past year, most notably with a class of college students who I expected to be the most cutting edge of my audiences. After getting real about penmanship's role going forward, the friendly argument always somehow turns to someone (desperately) saying that citizens of the future should at least be able to write a grocery list. If a citizen of the future was indeed determined to enter a store with reminders on a piece of paper, he/she could draw a loaf of bread and a cupcake, and I say that because each person's penmanship, nearly as unique as fingerprints, is a set of highly individualized symbols anyway.
With each student's interpretation of letters varying drastically, even day to day for some students, on paper assignments, I used to find myself doing as much decoding as reading.
I fought the good fight for nearly two decades, really digging in and trying to work with specific students on the way they formed specific letters. Changing the student's style was really the only hope before the recent and massive wave of tech integration. What did I discover? That at the high school level, students' handwriting styles were already set. I did not see any improvement. Moreover, the more students wrote, the more ingrained their poor penmanship habits.
I did discover a number of unintended benefits. Using tech tools allowed students access to proper spelling. Not only could students look up words, they were alerted to misspellings immediately. No need to go get a dictionary. No need to guess at spelling or go unaware of misspelling until an assignment was returned with the misspelling marked. Another unintended benefit was the elimination of the blank page in writing. Somehow a new doc is way less intimidating and stressful.
Of course, always use the best tool for the job, never tech for the sake of tech. Taking that into consideration, I can think of a few circumstances where handwriting could be valuable for students, as opposed to cumbersome and inefficient as it often is.
Elementary - I understand the importance of and fully support children learning to form letters and the physical skills involved.
Memorization - Studies show that handwriting aids memorization. (No need to memorize an essay!)
Field notes / lab notes - Outdoors and science labs may require more portability and weather-proofing than technology provides.
Drafting - I encourage students to draft however they think best, at a keyboard or writing by hand.
Recently and very notably, the Common Core standards don't require handwriting instruction. Some are concerned that cursive may already be dead. As pointed out by Ruth Graham in a Boston Globe article, "Is handwriting, particularly cursive, really necessary in the digital age? Increasingly, the answer is not really." ("Fighting to save cursive from the Common Core")
