The Goal of Handwriting Instruction

The Goal of Handwriting Instruction

This article was contributed by Jennifer Schweighofer, co-author of the Universal Handwriting series.

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Years ago, at an educational conference, a teacher stopped to ask some questions about handwriting instruction. She was particularly frustrated with one of her first-grade students, who just wouldn’t hold her pencil correctly. The girl held her pencil with her thumb tucked under her first and second fingers.

“I’ve tried everything!” the teacher lamented. I assured her that we could find a solution to help her student.

To get a better understanding of what we were dealing with, I asked the teacher how the student’s pencil grip was affecting her handwriting. The teacher asked, “What do you mean?” To clarify, I asked about some common effects of incorrect pencil grip:

• Is her writing illegible?
• Does she get tired or experience discomfort when she’s writing?
• Does she write so slowly it’s difficult to complete her assignments in time?

In response, the teacher laughed. “Oh, no, her handwriting is fine!” she said. “She writes beautifully. She just refuses to hold the pencil correctly.”

We frequently hear similar comments. The third-grader with beautiful cursive writing, except for the fact that the letters are perfectly vertical (“How do I get her to slant her letters?”). The kindergartner who makes a perfect a, d, g, and q, but does so using continuous stroke (“He just refuses to make the circle and then lift before making the top-to-bottom stroke! How do I fix it?”). The students who write just fine, but have adopted an unconventional pencil grip or paper position that “needs to be fixed.”

What Is the Goal of Handwriting Instruction?

The examples above raise the question: What’s more important, the mechanics or the end result? The goal of handwriting instruction is not a perfect pencil grip or cursive letters with a precise 65-degree slant. The goal is practical application of the skill, which can be broken down into three points:

1. We want students to write legibly. Writing is meant to be read, to communicate a message to the reader. If students’ writing is so messy they can’t read their own notes or their teacher can’t read the answers on a test or assignment, that’s a serious problem that can affect achievement across the curriculum.
2. We want students to write fluently. Handwriting should be an automatic process, so that students can focus on the content of what they’re writing, not the mechanics. If their handwriting is slow and labored, they may have trouble taking notes and completing tests and quizzes in time. They may also produce shorter, lower-quality compositions.
3. We want students to write comfortably. If students experience muscle fatigue and discomfort (due to incorrect pencil grip or posture, for example), it’s likely to interfere with both the fluency and the legibility of their writing. Associating handwriting with discomfort may even cause students to avoid writing altogether.

In order to accomplish our goal of practical application, we do recommend certain practices to maximize the chances for success. We recommend a tripod pencil grip. We recommend specific paper positions for left- and right-handed students. We recommend writing the strokes of a letter in a specific order and direction. We recommend a certain posture and desk height.

That said, it’s important to remember that these are recommendations. Yes, they’re based on years of experience and research, and we’ve seen them lead to enough successes to consider them best practices. However, just like every other aspect of education, handwriting development is not one-size-fits-all.

Remember, a person’s handwriting style is as unique as a fingerprint! We can’t become so focused on adhering to the “rules” that we forget what we’re working towards: helping students learn to write so that they can write to learn. And that means accepting those occasional quirks that, while perhaps not considered “best practice,” don’t interfere with the student’s ability to effectively write by hand.

The goal of handwriting instruction is not perfect handwriting; it’s functional handwriting!

Key points:

• The goal of handwriting instruction is to help students develop functional handwriting (practical application of the skill). 
• Functional handwriting includes writing legibly, fluently, and comfortably.
• Students may deviate from recommended best practices, and that’s okay – as long as it doesn’t affect legibility, fluency, and/or comfort.