Handwriting

Many years ago, at my younger brother’s parents’ evening, excellent reports of his work were given by nearly all staff – he always was a creepy little twerp at school. (Sorry bruv!) The exception was the English teacher who declared that he would never achieve anything in the subject until he improved his handwriting drastically. My father nodded sagely and said that the same had been said of his elder sister (me!) when she was at the school.

‘Really’, said the English teacher. ‘And what’s she doing now?’

‘She’s an English teacher,’ replied Dad.

Nowadays, students tell me that handwriting doesn’t matter – we all communicate via typewritten emails, texts and the like. And the days of having to copy out stupid sentences to improve our cursive script (not that it did me any good, clearly) have long gone. Being brought up in Norfolk, I can remember loudly disputing one of those sentences which stated:
‘Yarmouth is on the Isle of Wight.’

Eventually I had to concede there might be two Yarmouths – but we had the ‘Great’ one, at least!

No one needs worry about clarity of handwriting any more – right?

Wrong. I have pointed out many times that some of the most important texts we ever produce – examination answer papers – are still normally handwritten, and if the examiner misreads, or worse, cannot read, your handwriting, you fail.

Now I have a couple more bullets in my armoury. Gordon Brown’s letter to a mother in distress may well have been – and indeed was, to my thinking – over-played in the media, but it shows the difficulties that can be caused by poor penmanship. I’m not Mr Brown’s greatest fan (assuming he has one) but it is fairly obvious that he meant his letter to bring some shred of comfort to a bereaved mother: there was no malice or even disregard in his mistake.

In more amusing vein, Russell Brand’s latest error of judgement (again, characteristically lacking in malice aforethought) was to use a pen rather than a keyboard to write his contribution to The Sun’s Bizarre column this weekend, resulting in ‘snug’ being interpreted as ‘smug’.

Perhaps both gentlemen could do with a proofreader skilled in interpreting the average standard of handwriting of today’s teenager – or a few hours spent laboriously copying out stupid sentences….

But thanks fellas – telling students that they could get themselves into bother in the media for upsetting someone’s mum or misrepresenting a footballer’s jumper may well sway them more than the possibility of an examiner failing their history GCSE paper because they apparently think that:

Ancient Egyptians wrote in hydraulics, lived in the Sarah Dessert and travelled by Camelot.
The Greeks were a highly sculptured people.
Socrates died from an overdose of wedlock.
Sir Francis Drake circumcised the world with a 100 foot clipper.

But then, if they improve their handwriting we may suddenly realise just how awful their spelling is……