Handwriting is the personal and unique style of Writing process with a writing instrument, such as a pen or pencil in the hand. Handwriting includes both block letters and cursive styles and is separate from generic and formal handwriting script/style, calligraphy or typeface. Because each person's handwriting is unique and different, it can be used to verify a document's writer.
Uniqueness
Each person has their own unique style of handwriting, whether it is everyday handwriting or their personal signature. Cultural environment and the characteristics of the written form of the first language that one learns to write are the primary influences on the development of one's own unique handwriting style.
[Sargur Srihari, Chen Huang and Harish Srinivasan (March 2008). "On the Discriminability of the Handwriting of Twins". J Forensic Sci.; 53(2):430–46.] Even identical twins who share appearance and genetics do not have the same handwriting.
[Tomasz Dziedzic, Ewa Fabianska, and Zuzanna Toeplitz (2007). Handwriting of Monozygotic and Dizygotic Twins. Problems of Forensic Sciences. ]
Characteristics of handwriting include:
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the specific shape of letters, e.g. their roundness or sharpness
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regular or irregular spacing between letters
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the slope of the letters
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the rhythmic repetition of the elements or arrhythmia
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the pressure to the paper
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the average size of letters
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the thickness of letters
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the spacing between letters, words and sentences
Medical conditions
Developmental dysgraphia is very often accompanied by other learning and/or neurodevelopmental disorder
like ADHD. Similarly, people with ADD/ADHD have higher rates of
dyslexia. It is unknown how many individuals with ADD/ADHD who also struggle with penmanship actually have undiagnosed specific learning disabilities like developmental dyslexia or developmental dysgraphia causing their handwriting difficulties.
Children with ADHD have been found to be more likely to have less legible handwriting, make more spelling errors, more insertions and/or deletions of letters and more corrections. In children with these difficulties, the letters tend to be larger with wide variability of letters, letter spacing, word spacing, and the alignment of letters on the baseline. Variability of handwriting increases with longer texts. Fluency of the movement is normal but children with ADHD were more likely to make slower movements during the handwriting task and hold the pen longer in the air between movements, especially when they had to write complex letters, implying that planning the movement may take longer. Children who have ADHD were more likely to have difficulty parameterising movements in a consistent way. This has been explained with motor skill impairment either due to lack of attention or lack of inhibition. To anticipate a change of direction between strokes, constant visual attention is essential. With inattention, changes will occur too late, resulting in higher letters and poor alignment of letters on the baseline. The influence of medication on the quality of handwriting is not clear.
Graphology
Graphology is the
pseudoscience[ "they simply interpret the way we form these various features on the page in much the same way ancient oracles interpreted the entrails of oxen or smoke in the air. I.e., it's a kind of magical divination or fortune telling where 'like begets like.'"] study and analysis of handwriting in relation to human psychology. Graphology is primarily used as a recruiting tool in the applicant screening process for predicting personality traits and job performance, despite research showing consistently null
for these uses.
[Nevo, B Scientific Aspects of Graphology: A Handbook Springfield, IL: Thomas: 1986]
Handwriting recognition
Pedagogy
Significance in education
As pen-and-paper assignments remain common throughout the century, handwriting practice exercises are still issued by instructors worldwide because handwriting is recognized as a primary tool for the
communication of ideas. In order for handwriting to be efficiently utilized by students, it is ideal for the process to be familiar and automatic.
The letter-writing skill can reflect the beginnings of orthographic knowledge well, and this knowledge has been shown to be important to spelling in older children.
[Puranik, Cynthia S.; Lonigan, Christopher J.; Kim, Young-Suk (2011-10-01). "Contributions of emergent literacy skills to name writing, letter writing, and spelling in preschool children". Early Childhood Research Quarterly. 26 (4): 465–474. doi:10.1016/j.ecresq.2011.03.002. ISSN 0885-2006. PMC 3172137. PMID 21927537.] Better letter recognition can be facilitated by practicing handwriting in late preschool, as studies suggest that elementary students benefit from explicit handwriting instruction. With sufficient practice, legibility tends to improve over time.
Additionally, research indicates that handwriting production is more cognitively costly and challenging for children than oral language production.
Also, it was found that movements through handwriting help children organize their perceptions and improve their ability to recognize letters by shaping their spatial understanding.
Students with different levels of handwriting ability, including those with physical challenges, showed greater improvements in manuscript handwriting after receiving instruction through a computer-based system, compared to traditional methods.
Cognitive processes in writers
Children with specific learning disorders, such as poor/slow handwriting, have been observed in
Psychology study to follow specific mental frameworks which instructors can use to help pinpoint weakness in linguistic skill and develop their students' fluency and writing composition. The Hayes & Berninger framework is a stratified web of interconnected thought processes which relate different cognitive processes to each other in their function of writing in general, and this framework has seen considerable use in pedagological research.
For example, underdevelopment of long-term memory, which is in the lower "resource level" of cognitive strata, can then be linked to underdeveloped
motor planning for hand-writing individual letters, which bottleneck higher-order cognitive processes such as sentence structure and other critical thinking.
Phenomenology
For a wide variety of writers, writing by hand has been described as a process which enhances expressivity and the discovery of individuality. The act of writing has been described as more "intimate", and the physical manipulation of a writing utensil on another physical medium, such as paper and pen, has been asserted to be more effective in conveying personal experiences and creating writing as
art.
In comparison to technological methods of printing writing, such as with a typewriter or a word processor, handwriting is said to be less impersonal and distancing by writers such as
Pablo Neruda and William Barrett. Among many writers who agree with such viewpoints, the sensuality, touch, feel and materiality of handwriting seem to all contribute to a bodily experience which allegedly enhance creative writing.
See also
Further reading
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Douglas, A. (2017). Work in hand: script, print, and writing, 1690-1840. Oxford University Press.
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Gaze, T. & Jacobson, M. (editors), (2013). An Anthology of Asemic Handwriting. Uitgeverij.
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Hofer, Philip, and John Howard Benson. 1953. The art of handwriting: a loan exhibition of writing books and manuscripts from the collections of Philip Hofer, Harvard University, and John Howard Benson. Providence: Rhode Island School of Design, Museum of Art.
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Thornton, Tamara Plakins (1998). Handwriting in America: A Cultural History. Yale University Press.
