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I was standing in line at the grocery store -- something I spend a
large percentage of my life doing -- when the lady in front of me
pulled out her checkbook. At first, I thought, "Who writes checks at
the grocery store these days?" That was until I saw her
handwriting. If I hadn't seen it with my own eyes, I would've
thought a computer had done it. Now I knew why she writes checks at
the grocery store. Handwriting like that deserves to be admired by
other people! She should get some kind of award for that!
I spent many of my elementary school years practicing cursive
handwriting. Pages and pages of loops and dips were laboriously and
tediously formed and presided over by my grade school teachers
before we could even begin to make real letters.
Even with this early meticulous attention to details, my
handwriting skills leave much to be desired. My handwritten pages
now look like a snail had somehow crawled into an inkwell and
slithered across my paper. Those lovely loops and dips are a thing
of the past. Speed became more important than aesthetics.
If my handwriting is bad, my children's handwriting is atrocious.
I thought I would give them some handwriting worksheets during the
summer to strengthen their fine motor skills. I thought that by
fall, I might be able to read the work they do in school.
I started them with the loops I remembered from grade school. I
demonstrated: round and round and round, all the way to the end of
the line and start again on the next line. Then I left them to
finish the task.
I'm not sure what I expected when I returned to check on them.
Lyrical loops and delicious dips, I supposed. What I got was pages
of geometric figures connected together. The geometric figures were
not circles or ovals or even egg-shaped. They were more like
parallelograms, triangles and pentagons. It looked like a sketch of
a train wreck.
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I praised them for the pentagons -- those were the closest
looplike figures -- and then I reminded them that loops do not have
corners.
We eventually moved on to letters and the numbers, which they
insisted on doing from bottom to top.
Then I asked them to practice their newfound skill by writing a
journal page every day telling what they did the day before.
Their entries became shorter and short each day as they, too,
opted in favor of speed over elegance.
They wrote: "We ate. We wrote. We went to bed."
I praised them for using a noun and a verb in each sentence and
reminded them that future generations may read this journal and
conclude that they were very boring people.
They were not inspired to do more. Apparently, future generations
could go hang themselves.
I tried another tactic: I asked them to write an inspirational
quote from a famous person each day. These may have been more for my
benefit than theirs. I knew this was the case when I read an
amazingly legible version of Helen Keller's "Optimism is the faith
that leads to achievement."
I was optimistic that my children would soon develop better
handwriting. According to Ms. Keller, we were halfway there!
[By LAURA SNYDER]
Laura Snyder is a nationally syndicated columnist,
author and speaker. You can reach her at
lsnyder@lauraonlife.com
or visit www.lauraonlife.com
for more info.
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