Is it farewell to good handwriting?

Jun 06, 2008

FLIPPING through the adverts, Rita Ndagire, a 24-year-old graduate, picks up a pen to write an application letter. But the would be simple task turns out pretty hard: either she can’t write the letters upright as she easily did when she was a child or she simply has to refer to the dictionary to b

By Carol Natukunda

FLIPPING through the adverts, Rita Ndagire, a 24-year-old graduate, picks up a pen to write an application letter. But the would be simple task turns out pretty hard: either she can’t write the letters upright as she easily did when she was a child or she simply has to refer to the dictionary to be sure of the spellings.

“The other day, I couldn’t write the word ‘opportunity,’” Ndagire says, laughing with poorly concealed disappointment.
“I am even faster on the computer,” says Ndagire, an administrative assistant at a communications firm at Colville Street in Kampala.

It has been just two years, since Ndagire finished school and started using a computer because of the nature of her job. And it is in these same two years that the characters and spellings have simply slipped away.

“Other than the signatures I make here and there, I can go for two months without using a pen. The computer corrects the mistakes for you, so you don’t need to cram all those little things,” says Ndagire.

“I think computers have killed us; I even use the computer for brainstorming.” Ndagire’s 27-year-old colleague chips in. “In high school, I used to write really well that those with boyfriends and girlfriends would ask me to write their letters to their sweethearts. But now, I scribble something on paper and you wonder if it is a dog writing!”

It used to be an old joke that you could never read your doctor’s handwriting. But with computers all around us, the old good traditional handwriting is disappearing into oblivion. And it’s not just that the writing is illegible, but also the difficulty in getting the spelling right.
What is even more appalling is that it is not just the working lot who are vulnerable to this trend.

Children from elite families are growing up with laptops and computers in their homes equipped with word-processing aids like spell checks. While the art of penmanship is still taught in schools, some teachers reveal that they have notes an alarming deterioration in students’ skills as soon as a computer enters their world.

“‘There is this little girl who was spelling everything right as early as primary four, but now she is in Primary Seven and has nothing in her head!” commented Christine Katusiime, an English teacher at Rubaga Hillside Junior School.

“Since we started teaching them computer, spell-check has made them lazy at spelling,” Katusiime adds.

“The other day one of the children was “slanting” his letters and when I asked him why, he said he was trying to italicise! This was on pen and paper and not a typed script; and yet we cannot stop teaching computer, because parents are paying for it.”

But the question stands; will the computer render the good old art of handwriting a thing of the past?
“Very unlikely,” argues Robert Senabulya, a handwriting expert on Nkrumah road, who specialises in billboard ads. “People are just using the computer as a scapegoat. I have a computer right here with me, but in most cases I use my pen to write and I know that I will lose money if I don’t do better.”

David Bryatu, a tutor at Wanyange Girls’ School, says: “By the time somebody finishes primary school, they are already either good or bad writers because legible handwriting and spelling is determined right at the foundation level; they are taught and emphasised in primary school, but some stubborn students don’t want to listen.” This rings so true for 30-year-old Prima Babirye.

She feels the reason why her handwriting is poor is because she was “stubborn” in class. “My friends would tease me about it but now I wish now that I had listened to my parents and given some serious attention to my pen. I don’t believe computers will replace handwriting in my lifetime, and it would be nice to be able to write better.”

Scientifically, there has been little, if any research on the effect of computers on handwriting. Experts are tigh-tlipped on the issue.

“We have heard people talking about it, but we need to examine it in detail,” says language expert Francis Kaleeba of the National Curriculum Development Centre.

“It could be that there is a gap somewhere in our roles,” says Prof. Arthur Gakwandi, a literature lecturer at Makerere University.

But when all is said and done, illegible handwriting and poor spelling affects our level of development. Take Ndagire, who has difficulty in writing her job application. It means chances of her getting the job are minimal.

Iryatu agrees: “even us examiners, when we are marking we are keen on spelling and the general neatness. Take a word like receive; what some candidates do, because the word is confusing, is they just scratch an “e” or “i” somewhere, and rub, then, you cant know which is which. They lose marks.”

Senahulya also emphasises that the idea behind writing is to communicate. “If you cannot write clearly, then you will kill the flow of communication.”

Neuro scientists say writing and reading are handled separately by the brain. Patients with brain damage are able to read but not write, and others may have the opposite problem.

“Reading involves recognition,” said Alfonso Caramazza, a Harvard professor of cognitive neuropyschology in a 2001 article in New York Times.

“You don’t have to generate the parts. They are given to you. The task of the brain is to find the match for the parts that are given to you.”

Writing something, whether it is an English word or in vernacular, involves retrieving the basic elements of either letters or brush strokes - from memory.
It is the recurrent construction of a word or character that reinforces the writing process.

“If you were to try to retrieve a word as a whole without going through parts you would not be practicing with letters and strokes,” Caramazza said. “You
are short-circuiting the process.”

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