More on handwriting

[Sorry! I was trying to get rid of a dead link in this old post and it posted as a new one.] 

 

The Washington Post has an article, "The Handwriting Is on the Wall" about the death of cursive (not handwriting per se--thanks, Sisyphus, for making that distinction). Here's a snippet from p. 2:

In one of the studies, Vanderbilt University professor Steve Graham, who studies the acquisition of writing, experimented with a group of first-graders in Prince George's County who could write only 10 to 12 letters per minute. The kids were given 15 minutes of handwriting instruction three times a week. After nine weeks, they had doubled their writing speed and their expressed thoughts were more complex. He also found corresponding increases in their sentence construction skills. But Graham worries that students who remain printers, rather than writing in cursive, need more time to take notes or write essays for the SAT. Teachers may say they don't deduct for bad handwriting in class, but research tells another story, he said. When adults are given the same composition written in good handwriting and poor handwriting, "they still give lower grades for ideation and quality of writing if the text is less legible," he said. Indeed, the SAT essays written in cursive had slightly higher average scores than those written in print, according to the College Board.

I'm not as worried about the first statistic. First graders aren't college students, and by the time students have practiced some form of handwriting for 12 years, they're bound to get pretty good at it. Some people can print as fast as they can write (anyone ever teach engineering students? I rest my case), so that statistic may not hold true. But what about the second part? Have you ever noticed a correlation between types of handwriting and the content of the work? Most people I've talked to who've graded a few thousand essays have formed some impressions, although they don't let it get in the way of assessing a paper. Maybe if everyone starts printing, those differences in scores will be erased--or maybe the advantage then will go to the fastest typists. Also, will it become difficult for people who don't know how to write in cursive to read cursive writing? Disclosure: the handwriting thing is hitting home for me because it seems to be going down the tubes just as I've gotten all interested in pens, inks, and paper. I've been trying to keep a notebook recording word counts, notes, page counts, information to look up, etc., and have been writing in it with my new pen. (I'm not obsessed yet the way some are, but I can spend far too much time pondering the qualities of J. Herbin versus Noodler's Ink or Clairefontaine versus Moleskine notebooks. Okay, maybe I'm a little obsessed.)

The Five Commandments of Writing: A Response to the 10 Commandments of Twitter

At the Chronicle, Katrina Gulliver has written the "10 Commandments of Twitter" for those who want to break into this medium. Most of the actual commandments are pretty basic: ask questions, engage in conversation, don't just post news articles, and, implicitly, don't just use Twitter for self-promotion, although some well-known people do exactly that. She also recommends that you "show your personality" since it "impresses students."

Here is the key point I'd like to address: "Twitter can be something you have on in the background while you work."

That all depends on how you define work.  I can stuff envelopes and look at Twitter.  I can alphabetize student papers and look at Twitter.  I can grade and look at Twitter or organize my bookshelves and look at Twitter. I could certainly write a blogpost and still look at Twitter.

But write and look at those Twitter pop-ups every 10 seconds? Not so much. I'm ready to throttle the little TweetDeck bird after about 5 minutes.

I look at the advice from real writers on the sidebar, on the web, from a lot of my previous posts quoting writing experts, and from Boice and Silvia, and they all have just about the same Five Commandments:

1. Thou shalt leave the internet off or at least minimize distractions while you write.  
2. Thy writing should be thy sole focus for a period of time.  "Multitasking" is a myth if you're actually writing something worthwhile that requires thought. 
3. Thou shalt give thyself an extended period of time, if possible, so that thoughts can develop.
4. Thou shalt not interrupt the "flow" of writing that occurs once you get absorbed in your subject for the day, especially not for extraneous stuff like worrying about whether you turned in a report or whether X likes what you did that day. 
5. Thou shalt write every day, in the morning, if possible, or whenever works best for you. As Francis Ford Coppola puts it in his comments on writing, get up and write before anyone has a chance to be mean to you, to which I'd add "including you being mean to you," by giving space to that incessant internal monologue of tasks and worries. 

The thing is, as Gulliver correctly states, you can't just be on Twitter a little bit. The reason that's a problem is that it, like Facebook, has become such a primary means of scholarly communication for a lot of groups and scholars. Ignore these two, and you miss out on important information because that's where the information is being disseminated.  

So here is the quandary: 

• To write and eventually be part of the scholarly conversation, you need fewer distractions and as much time as you can manage to actually do the writing. You need to slow down, minimize interruptions, think, and pay attention to what's in your head.
• But to be part of the scholarly conversation, you have to pay attention to Twitter and Facebook on a daily (or, for Twitter, several times daily) basis, since there are resources there that you won't find elsewhere. You need to speed up, be ready to be interrupted, follow links when they occur (and everyone has a link to share), and give your attention to social networking. 

Someone needs to reconcile the 10 commandments with the 5 commandments. 

Analogies

1. The Skinner box of the present is email. You press the bar, and out pops a new message; if it doesn't, you press it again, and again, and again. Doesn't matter if you don't want to act on the messages; the process is addicting. If you make a pact with yourself not to check email for a couple of days (a weekend or whatever), the first hour is hard, and the rest are easy. Unless I'm expecting to hear from the Nobel Prize committee-and I understand that they call you rather than emailing--there's nothing that can't wait for a while.

If you do walk away from the Skinner box for a while, you will become calmer and your concentration will be better.

If you walk away and only check email after a day or two, you will be surprised at how fast you can respond to everything. You'll reply and move on rather than looking at it, thinking about a message, signing out, logging in, thinking about it, etc. before replying.

If you have colleagues who like to send you reports or action items late on Friday, which (ahem!) might tend to make you feel martyred, as in "why should I spend my weekend responding to you?" pay attention next time to when Friday colleague gets back to you if you do respond over the weekend; 95% of the time it isn't till Monday, even if you spend Saturday in crafting your response. A slow learner, I finally realized that I don't have to respond until Monday, either. I also realized that Friday colleague doesn't necessarily expect me to respond over the weekend. What can I tell you? I'm a slow learner.

2. What you can do with this non-Skinner box time is write, especially once you realize that the world will still turn on its axis and that your colleagues are not necessarily waiting for you to respond.

3. Not to mix a metaphor, but the blogosphere is the cookie or the M & M that awaits you if you get your writing done. If you read blogs before your writing is done, they will not taste the same, because you will be consuming them with guilt sauce rather than "job well done!" sauce.

Random bullets of writing

The number of days that you go without actually writing something on your project equals the number of hours (one hour for each skipped day) that it will take you to actually write something once you sit down to do it. Five days = five hours at the desk before my brain really engages.

Rewriting and even retyping what you have written is a good way to prime the pump for writing. You retype your own words, and the ideas start to change them as you write.

You might be in the midst of a writing project if every time someone gets introduced on Colbert, The Daily Show, or Fresh Air as "the author of a new book on X," you see it as a dog whistle-level reproach ("why is his book finished and mine not?") and inspiration ("someday that will be me, except without the fame").

On writing: stars and zeroes

I started out this month with such hope. I would Write! Every! Day! and give myself stars for the days that I wrote, a la jo(e)'s stars for self-care and Jonathan's "Seinfeld Chain" of writing.

This was supposed to have been a service-light semester for me, and it has instead been a service tsunami. Thus when I found myself having to leave the house at 5:30 a.m. for a campus meeting and not returning until after 8 that night, the writing just didn't happen. I just couldn't do it. My calendar for the week looks like a chain bracelet: 0 0 0 0 0. I read and thought about the writing every day; I just didn't generate any new words.

But it struck me today that this is the beginning of a whole new week, and a whole new chance for stars. That's the way to think about each week, right?

Excitement and annoyance

Excitement:

• I like what I'm writing now. I find it interesting, so interesting that my patient family has to listen to me talk about it. It's a different approach to an already-published piece that I'm fitting into this chapter.
• Even after all the committee work, memo-writing, teaching prep, and so on I look forward to getting back to this piece. I want to see where it leads!

Annoyance:

• Oh, never mind. Let me just be excited about my writing!

On writing: Starting over after a hiatus

It may not be exactly "starting over," but the poor book ms., abandoned in the flurry of MLA and associated paper-writing, not to mention the holidays and the start of classes, must feel, well, neglected.

How to begin again? Here's the plan:

(1) Print it out. Reading on the screen just doesn't give me the same perspective, and I will recycle the paper, so yes, that's necessary.
(2) Read it--all of it--while resisting the temptation to fix things at the sentence level.
(3) Go back through the research journal (printed version) and see what I've forgotten or missed. Highlight those parts and put an X through what's already done.
(4) Assess the roughest parts of more or less finished chapters and list the improvements needed--and then leave them alone for now.
(5) Generate some actual new text on the chapters not yet started and rough in some sections on the half-finished chapters.
(6) Go back to the "write every day" plan, even if that means using 750words.com again, since that really did help to establish the habit.
(7) Rev up the Excel chart again, since that acts as a conscience in tabular form.

As part of this new plan, I also have two resolutions:
(1) I'm going to try to reserve the computer where I write for writing and class work, not reading distraction sites.
(2) I want to have a complete draft of my next conference paper done at least 3 weeks before the next conference.

No outrage, no deep thoughts--just writing

I know it seems all tech tips and web-o-matic writing inspiration (but it does work) around here lately. The thing is, I've been spending time on the Big Project, and to do that, I have to talk to myself.

Talking to myself is taking the form of a research journal or writing journal in which I argue with myself--"Do you want to put in that part? Why not?"--that sort of thing. I write it out, and then I answer my objections, and then eventually I go away and write. A few bullets of this week:

After stuffing one already published piece into this new material I'm writing, I figured out that one chapter really needed to be two. No more stuffing, and a more coherent chapter--or at least I hope so.

My own NaNoWriMo this month was to try to get on 750words.com every day and write something. Sometimes I'd spend all day editing and rewriting, but when evening came, I started itching to get to that clean expanse of the site and type something. If you don't write, you can't edit and make what you wrote better, and even if what came out was repetitious, it worked: the repeated version was usually better and made the editing task easier the next day.

Writing this way made me realize again that writing is discovery. If I was writing in the research journal file or at 750words.com, I kept thinking of things as I wrote. I know--that's an old saw about writing, but it hadn't been working as well lately.

The problem with writing is that academics have to read before they can write: we can't spin webs like a spider unless we have the material already packed away somewhere from someone else's words. Unlike creative writers, we're spiders with a backpack of that kind of material, and once the backpack is empty, we have to fill it back up again no matter how much we might want to write.

I was so committed to this that I graded all the papers, tests, etc. at the very beginning of Thanksgiving break--I even felt like doing it then--so that I wouldn't have to think about grading or classes for the whole break.

This isn't the most exciting post, but I didn't want you think this was becoming Pogue's Posts over here.

Renegade writing

I've been reading Clio Bluestocking's posts on writing with mingled envy and excitement about the process--envy (in a good way) because she's writing so much and excitement because the other day, for the first time in a long time, I worked on a piece of writing that was interesting and exciting to me.

Mostly what I've been doing is editing and writing stuff for others: editing my own work, responding to others' work, and doing service work that I'm committed to doing. What it reminded me of was this: you can, and I did, spend 16 hours on something (a report, say), and no one will notice it or say anything about it, unless it doesn't get done. You can spend 5 hours responding to something (and I did), and what you'll hear by return email is, "Fine. Now how about this other task?"

If it's what you signed up to do, you put in the hours, and you mark them on Google Calendar so you can see the real number of hours that it takes. You vow to remember this when someone contacts you about another piece of work that's a distraction, the kind of thing you deludedly think won't take much time but always does, and you vow not to commit to this kind of work until you're willing to put in the hours it really takes. I've already turned down 2 such tasks this week.

No wonder working on that piece of writing felt like such a guilty pleasure. Reading things I hadn't read before as well as some I had, making connections, putting it together and writing the words on paper, staying up well into the night when it was just me and the ideas and the cool night air coming in through the window--I had forgotten how that felt, writing about something that I cared about and that I wasn't responsible to anyone else for writing.

I'm going to hold that feeling in mind as I turn to grading and, yes, more duty-writing.

Small post on writing

With all due respect to Profacero, Dame Eleanor, Dr. Virago, and Jonathan at Prose Doctor, writing is not either* neither easy or fun right now. I'm still finishing up a promised piece that I thought I could get done before Notorious/ADM's writing challenge--the one I listed so confidently last Friday--but it isn't happening despite many long hours of working on it this week (and the week before that, and the week before that, and so on).

It's sucking up vast quantities of time that I'm supposed to be putting to other things. It's slow work, and it's harder work than it ought to be. Some parts are pretty good, some are okay, and some are bad but getting better. Instead of a word count meter, maybe I should put in a suckitude meter and measure the gradual progress in the right direction that way.

But it will get better, and it will get done.

*"Neither." Sheesh. See what I mean about the words not working?

Leaving on a jet plane

Some are jetting off to exotic climes like Blargistan or the Berks conference. Dame Eleanor, What Now, ADM, Dr. Koshary, and others are doing the summer writing challenge that Notorious and ADM are hosting. Still others are contemplating workspaces, like Profgrrrl, or devising monthly challenges, like nicoleandmaggie, or thinking about summer writing, like Dr. Crazy, or being (rightly) concerned about the editing they're receiving, like Horace.

As for me, I'm doing some of the above, including enough travel to disrupt the writing process, not that it takes much to disrupt the writing process. I was away, and now I'm back, and shortly I'll be leaving again. It's all stuff I signed up to do, so I shouldn't complain, but when has that ever stopped me from complaining?

Those long quiet days of trying out arguments on the cats as I sat at the desk may be over for a while, but I'll bet--or hope--that there's a burst of writing when I get back.

T. S. Eliot critiques my manuscript

So, Tom, I've been working along here on this manuscript pretty intensively. When you said my argument was like nothing you had seen before, did you mean that it was brilliant and original?

“That is not what I meant at all.
That is not it, at all.”

But the prose is good, right? After so many drafts, isn't the language in the introduction pretty clear?

By the waters of Leman I sat down and wept...

Well, maybe it could use another draft. Once I get this next part done, it'll be ready to go, though, won't it?

And time yet for a hundred indecisions,
And for a hundred visions and revisions

Oh, all right. But don't you think I should get out a little more? I have no conversation any more because all I do is sit and type or stare at the screen.

The typist home at teatime, clears her breakfast, lights
Her stove, and lays out food in tins.

Yep, that's my life, all right. Wouldn't it be better if I went to campus and saw some people for a change?

Only a flicker
Over the strained time-ridden faces
Distracted from distraction by distraction
Filled with fancies and empty of meaning
Tumid apathy with no concentration
Men and bits of paper, whirled by the cold wind
That blows before and after time

Maybe not. So tell me, is this process of writing going to get any easier?

Words strain,
Crack and sometimes break, under the burden,
Under the tension, slip, slide, perish,
Decay with imprecision, will not stay in place,
Will not stay still.

Sorry I asked, but thanks for the advice.

So how's your new employee, writing boss?

• The first week of the "pay yourself" plan went pretty well. I finished the edits on an accepted article and got it sent back, made some inroads into a conference paper due soon, and got some textbooks ordered and a secondary reading list started for the fall. The textbook order and reading list weren't the scholarly work I'd assigned myself to do, of course, but it did need to be done, and I got to perform the magical operation of crossing an item off the to-do list. Yes, I am one of those people who will write an item on the list just for the pleasure of crossing it off later.
  
• Once again, I discovered that my favorite time to write is really in the evening. The house quiets down, the sky opens out in darkness, and it's just me, the computer screen, and ideas. This would be perfect if I didn't wake up unbidden at 5 a.m. every day regardless of when I get to sleep.
• The write at night/get up early syndrome may explain why yesterday was a trance day. I got a fair amount of reading done, but every time I stopped moving for too long, I fell asleep.
• On the other hand, getting up early means that I can walk early, thus being exposed to the smell of early morning (which dissipates by about 9 a.m.). I can't explain it, but the air just smells different at that time. I'm working on a theory that it is somehow much better for the brain to get out and walk then since there are some kind of special chemicals that will make writing better later.

[Edited because no one needs to hear my Cassandra-like political ruminations.]

Not much. How about you?

What I've been doing for the last week: reading other people's words.

• Reading student papers and expending good advice and ink upon them. Thanks, commenters, for the advice on writing comments by hand. The eco-unfriendliness of printing the papers (double-sided) is mitigated, I hope, by filling the fountain pens I used with ink from a bottle--and yes, I had to refill them a few times to get through the stacks.
• About grading: although the words I write are my words, sometimes, when I'm finished with the individual comments and am summing up, it feels like automatic writing, since the phrases are ones I've used before.
  
• Reading emails and responding to them.
• Reading and responding to drafts sent to me by students and colleagues.

What I haven't been doing: my own writing. I'm hoping to get back to it soon.

Winding down

As this sabbatical winds down, I'm doing two things:

1. Obsessively checking the enrollment stats for next semester's courses. Here's an academic conundrum: I (and we, really) want the courses to fill, because, like Sally Field, I want reassurance that "they like me! They really like me!"--conveniently ignoring that what they like, really like, may be a noon class or whatever fits into their schedules. Yet more students = more grading authentic assessment and hours of time devoted to it next semester. But I still can't stop checking the stock market of enrollment, as someone called it a few years back.

2. Frantically trying to get some more writing done before it ends while realizing how woefully short I've fallen from the rosy sabbatical plan I laid out.

What the sabbatical has given me more time to do is harder to measure than a simple word count. It's allowed me to read more, including primary texts, than I've been able to do in years, and it has allowed me to conceptualize the work I'm doing in a different way.

Here's an analogy from, you guessed it, Mad Men. In rewatching Season One, I noticed that amid all the retro flash that had the critics agog, every time the copywriters brought something to Don Draper (the creative director, for those who aren't MM fans), he'd ask them two questions about the product before pouring himself a drink. The first one was "What are the features?" and the second one was "What is the benefit?" The copy they produced had to make sense in terms of both of those questions.

As we all know from the Microsoft jokes ("It's a feature, not a bug!"), they're not the same thing. The first part, I think, appeals to the "ooh, shiny!" brain area, but the second one, the benefit, is the real reason for creating the product in the first place--or should be. One of the things that the sabbatical has let me do is to think more seriously about that second question in relation to the project I'm working on: not just "how is it different?" but "what is the benefit in thinking about the entire concept in this way?" I had ideas about this before, of course--no one writes without a purpose--but I've been able to think about it in more different ways, and, I hope, more creative ways that I'd done before. And although the report I write after I get back from sabbatical won't mention Don Draper or indeed this kind of thinking, it's one of the most valuable things that the sabbatical has given me.

Slowcoach writing

I think I first heard the term "slowcoach," as in "Slowcoach McClellan," in the sonorous tones of David McCullough. At any rate, I think I'm going to adopt it as a cautionary epithet.

Tenured Radical, a blogger I admire, said something in passing this week a couple of weeks ago that made me think:

But I should think that participation in group blogs that serve a field or a discipline should be taken into account as much as book reviews or encyclopedia entries, which everyone lists in endless, boring detail on their vitae as if they took more than a day to write. [and in the comments, in response to someone who challenged that timeframe] Two days. And seriously, why would they ask you for the entry unless you were an expert in that field?

I agree entirely with her main point, but the "one day" or even "two day" timeframe gave me pause. That pause was filled with writing speed envy.

Book reviews--okay, yes, those can be done quickly. Blog posts--nobody drafts those ahead of time, do they? Reports? Piece of cake. I can churn out administrativese at the speed of light.

But encyclopedia articles, even when I know the material, take time (at least at a slowcoach writing speed), which is why I've been turning them down lately. Here's what goes through my head with every single sentence:

1. Is it true? Am I misrepresenting the subject or the text in some way?

2. Is it useful? Is there a better example that I could use?

3. Is it new? Or am I just unconsciously plagiarizing myself or someone else?

4. Does it explain the concept efficiently and (let's hope) gracefully?

5. Does it relate to the sentences around it?

6. Does it hit the right balance of detail to generality?

Most of these questions apply to regular scholarly writing as well, which is why it's possible to wrestle with writing and rewriting a paragraph for an entire four-hour period and still not be entirely satisfied. But it's good to have comparisons of how it could be done if I were more efficient. If I don't speed up, someone's going to remove me from the Peninsular Campaign.

I wake up writing

Not screaming, but writing.

Not as in "I make writing wake UP!" but as in "I wake up early, about 4 a.m., and since that's too early to get up, my brain busies itself by writing things in my head."

This morning's writing was about Sandra Tsing Loh's pieces for the Atlantic, and it was in response to Timothy Burke at Easily Distracted. Short version of my response: She's the humor component of The Atlantic, now that they've gone to an editorial policy of publishing only serious articles that tell us we're going to hell in a handbasket. If you're worrying because her essays don't have a structure, don't: they're really just long, ranty, and often funny blog posts, with moments of truth interspersed with outrageously solipsistic and just plain bonkers logic (e.g., my marriage is bad; therefore marriage as an institution is unsustainable). She's better than the totally bonkers Caitlin Flanagan who used to fill this role, so lighten up.

Sometimes it's a letter to the editor or to a congressman, or a screenplay, or a short story, or (too rarely) a new approach to the piece I'm actually supposed to be working on. Here are my questions: If you also wake up writing, do you get right up and write it down, even if it isn't something you're working on? Or does that take time away from your real writing?

[Update: Historiann has a new post about Sandra Tsing Loh.]

This is your brain on multitasking, part 2

At the Chronicle, Mark Bauerlein is a little late to the party--he's just figured out that texting while driving might, just might, not be a good idea--but he cites an interesting study from Stanford in support of his proposition that multitasking is changing the brain, and not in a good way:

The primary finding was that "People who are regularly bombarded with several streams of electronic information do not pay attention, control their memory or switch from one job to another as well as those who prefer to complete one task at a time." When people spend months and years trying to multitask, their mental habits follow. Most important, their capacity to filter out distractions and irrelevant items deteriorates. As one of the researchers put it, "They're suckers for irrelevancy." The researchers set up experiments that isolated the ability to ignore things that didn't help subjects complete a problem, and low-multitaskers did well, high-multitaskers poorly.

They also did some memory tests. Result: "The low multitaskers did great," [researcher] Ophir said. "The high multitaskers were doing worse and worse the further they went along because they kept seeing more letters and had difficulty keeping them sorted in their brains."

Finally, they did a test of concentration and the pattern held.

"Again, the heavy multitaskers underperformed the light multitaskers. 'They couldn't help thinking about the task they weren't doing,' Ophir said. 'The high multitaskers are always drawing from all the information in front of them. They can't keep things separate in their minds.'"

A couple of things about this research:

1. Can we stop now, please, with the edu-gurus' insistence that we break up class activities into 90-second bursts or whatever because "that's how students learn now! They multitask! Their brains are better! They're digital natives! Isn't that great!"? I thought that part of the process of brain maturation and education was training students toward, among other things, developing a longer attention span. You don't expect a 3-year-old to have the same level of absorbed attention for an activity that's not of her choosing as you do for an 18-year-old. I'm not saying that we should go back to the old model of boring students to death just because we can ("It's good for them!"), but it seems to me that adopting a progressive infantilization of students through encouraging multitasking and decreased attention spans isn't in their best interests.


2. It makes me think of the internet information = firehose analogy so popular with librarians and others teaching students how to search. We can teach them good searching techniques to narrow that gush of water/information into a useful stream, but if the "multitasking is good for you" push is training their brains into being unable to avoid the full rush of water, what good are we doing?


3. I put one part of that in bold because I'm guilty of it, too. I hadn't thought that the whole idea of cheating on and procrastinating about one project because you're temporarily far more fascinated by another was an outgrowth of multitasking (I thought it was laziness and procrastination), but maybe it is. Maybe it's the Samuel Taylor Coleridge model (Pantisocracy! Wait--no, poetry!) of writing winning out over the Anthony Trollope one (up at 5:30 a.m., 250 words every 15 minutes or else). On the other hand, maybe Raymond Chandler had the right idea about acknowledging how attention wanders but disciplining it (through boredom) to get back on track.

Learning how to sort, assess, filter, evaluate, and analyze information with the goal of producing intelligent, coherently expressed writing about those thoughts is what we're supposed to be teaching students. At least this study gives some support for considering that a process not necessarily served best by multitasking.

[Called "part 2" because part 1 is here. That one was on a UCLA study. What is it about California that makes its scientists so concerned with increasing attention spans?]

Only of interest to writers

For the next few days, I'll be in a different place (literally) and am trying to get to a different place figuratively with my writing. New library--new surroundings--new city (I'm tagging along at a conference not in my discipline)--and, I hope, new energy. I've left most of the books behind--that's what libraries are for--and am going to write out of what I know and add the citations later. This is an old trick that I've used before, but someone posted about it recently (Notorious PhD, maybe?), and it's time to pull that rabbit out of the hat again.

The trouble with a routine is that it becomes . . . routine. As you get tired of thinking your way through some of the ideas, you search for distractions, and if there are blog controversies going on (like the ones at Historiann's and Dr. Crazy's and profgrrrl's), you get all invested in that instead of in your work. These were interesting posts, of course, as were all the responses and comments, but if you're in a routine, that's the trouble. You think about that in the shower instead of about what you'll be writing that day, and that's not good.

So I won't be weighing in on any controversies, or have anything new to say about job letters, or teaching, or how everyone wants to kill the libraries. I won't be writing any new posts about what are apparently favorite topics here, judging from search results: human hibernation and capturing stills from a DVD. But if I see interesting things that I can post about without giving away too much about the location, I'll do it.

Goal for the week: some IRL writing and, here on the blog, some 30-second diversions for writers that you won't tax your brain about after you read them.

Death of handwriting--really?

Time Magazine, which I've been checking out of desperation as Newsweek becomes increasingly newsless, has one of its trademark scare articles this week: "Mourning the Death of Handwriting." After the obligatory "here are my fascinating memories" intro by Claire Sudduth,* the writer, there's this little factoid: "And aside from the occasional grocery list or Post-it note, most adults write very little by hand." The article goes on to cite standardized testing, a post-1980s emphasis on learning to write cursive, and computers as major reasons for the decline.

Is handwriting really declining, and do adults really not use it very much?

About the "decline": I can see that fewer people write messages by hand, but the poor quality isn't a new thing, is it? All of you who've read handwritten letters from earlier centuries can attest to the fact that some have that whole Palmer Penmanship down to an art form as if Sister Mary Agatha is still watching, and some, well, don't.

About use: The "decline in use" is probably true, but "write very little by hand"? Is this true in academe? What about essay tests? Annotating books? Taking notes in class? Commenting on papers? I know--it's possible to do all these by typing, but it's actually faster to do some of these by whipping out a pen.

When I ask students who write poetry how they write it, it's often with a pen. In other words, one kind of writing that means something to them is writing they do with a pen.

Since Time is happy to provide proof by anecdote, maybe we can follow its lead: Do you think that handwriting is really "dead"? Does most people's yearly output of handwriting consist of a couple of postage notes and a thank-you note or two?

*Do you really care when she entered third grade? No? I rest my case.

[Edited to add this, because of Carl's comments: When I was at the archives this summer, one of the librarians said, "Your handwriting is so legible! You must have taken calligraphy!" It isn't usually that legible, but I felt as though she'd given me a gold star. Maybe handwriting instruction went out with gold stars?]

Update: Sisyphus, in the comments, has a good perspective on the article:

The article is not about the death of handwriting, which she says is an umbrella category, but of cursive, claiming that people born after a certain point just never stuck with cursive anymore.

That's totally true in my case ---- I write things out by hand all the time, but I never use cursive. Everyone I know who's roughly my age prints things. And I even had an old-school mother (much older than everyone else's) who decided my cursive was so bad that for an entire school year she fought me by making me practice cursive for hours after school every day.

I had never thought of this as a generational thing and had conflated the two-- writing = cursive--but Sis is absolutely right.