Good Handwriting Skills May Bring School Success

Your handwriting can change in 5-7 years

Here's an idea worth jotting down: your handwriting may reveal clues to how smart and successful you are.

Handwriting has been in a fight for academic survival and Florida has even considered dropping cursive from the curriculum. With that in mind, a Florida International University assistant professor decided to see if there was academic value to good penmanship.

She studied the handwriting skills of 1,000 second grade students and found that students with good penmanship tend to get better grades. For the next phase of her research, she and others will work with struggling pre-K students to see if a writing intervention will lead to better results in reading and math.

Besides helping students academically, researchers say handwriting can reveal people's creativity, passion, anger, and happiness, among other traits.

In the FIU study, Laura Dinehart, an assistant professor in FIU's College of Education, compared the grades and test scores of second graders in Miami-Dade County to handwriting assessment scores they received in a pre-K program three years earlier. Those with higher handwriting scores averaged a B in school; those with lower scores averaged a C. "We think it has something to do with kids' ability to pay attention, to focus and hold things in their working memory," Dinehart said.

She said students who struggle to craft letters and words may be focusing on their writing at the expense of the actual subject matter.

But if handwriting is a measure of achievement, how do you explain all the highly educated and successful doctors known for their illegible scribbles? It's most likely because they are in a hurry, experts say.

Dr. Stuart Markowitz, a senior associate dean in Florida Atlantic University's College of Medicine, said teachers and families members used to tell him he had "gorgeous handwriting." But Markowitz, who practiced internal medicine before coming to FAU, then spent decades writing patient reports, prescriptions and notes to insurance companies.

"I'm convinced it's been a deterioration of years and years of massive writing, and the necessity to write as quickly as possible," he said.

But Shirl Solomon, a handwriting expert in Lake Worth, warns against making broad generalizations. "If a person is sloppy, they may have poor skills in writing, but they don't necessarily have poor math skills," she said. "The brain may work beautifully in other areas."

Still, she said, handwriting can reveal a number of traits. For example, people who don't use much space on the page may feel constrained or inhibited, while those who write all over the page, including in the margins, may feel more deserving, she said.

"If one’s handwriting is pretty, it can mean someone's a beautiful, eloquent speaker, but you have to be careful," Solomon said. "If it's too perfect, it often means they're trying to keep everything under control and they're on the verge of cracking up."

Source: SunSentinel.com