The Missing Ink

by Philip Hensher

  That, really, is the extent of any auxiliary play-type behaviour induced by a computer, and it’s no wonder if we haven’t yet evolved many warm sensations towards the object, being unable to suck it, enjoy the sensory quality of its minor operations, or regard it as a direct extension of our being. Those other writing apparatuses, mobile telephones, occupy a little bit more of the same psychological space as the pen. Ten years ago, people kept their mobile phone in their pockets. Now, they hold them permanently in their hand like a small angry animal, gazing crossly into our faces, in apparent need of constant placation. Clearly, people do regard their mobile phones as, in some degree, an extension of themselves. There is, for instance, an unwillingness to lend a mobile phone, a sense that a request to borrow one in other than the direst emergency is in some degree overstepping the mark; a sense that is not to do with the fear that the lender may take the opportunity to telephone his aunt in Peru. And yet we have not evolved any of those small, pleasurable pieces of behaviour towards it that seem so ordinary in the case of our pens. We text, and let it rest again in the palm of the hand, and don’t quite know what to do with it: an extension of our being, but inert, meaningless, in no particular need of our ongoing attention. It doesn’t need to be cleaned, or cared for, and if you saw someone sucking one while they thought of the next phrase to text, you would think them dangerously insane.

  Probably at some point in the future, we will start thinking of our communication devices as warm, in the way that we think, or used to think, of our pens. But in the meantime, we have surrendered our handwriting for something more mechanical, less distinctively human, less telling about ourselves and less present in our moments of the highest happiness and the deepest emotion. Ink runs in our veins, and shows the world what we are like.

  This is a book about the disappearance of handwriting. We don’t quite know what will take its place – the transmission of thought via a keyboard into words; the rendering of voice commands into action; the understanding by a piece of technology of a gesture or, conceivably, a thought. The shaping of thought and written language by a pen, moved by a hand to register marks of ink on paper has for centuries, millennia, been regarded as key to our existence as human beings. In the past, handwriting has been regarded as almost the most powerful sign of our individuality. In 1847, in an American case, a witness testified without hesitation that a signature was genuine, though he had not seen an example of the handwriting for sixty-three years: the court accepted his testimony.1 Handwriting is what registers our individuality, and the mark which our culture has made on us. It has been regarded as the path to riches, merit, honour; it has been seen as the unknowing key to our souls and our innermost nature. It has been regarded as a sign of our health as a society, of our intelligence, and as an object of simplicity, grace, fantasy and beauty in its own right. At some point, the ordinary pleasures and dignity of handwriting are going to be replaced permanently. What is going to replace them is a man in a well-connected electric room, waving frantically at a screen and saying, to nobody in particular, ‘Why won’t this effing thing work?’ Before that happens, perhaps we should take a look at what we’re so rapidly doing away with.

  3 ~ There’s Nothing Wrong with my Handwriting, They just Need to Pay Someone who Can Read it

  In 2012, a gentleman at Lancaster University decided to sue the institution after markers criticized the legibility of his handwriting. Comments on his exam scripts included ‘I cannot read this’ to simply ‘cannot read’. The Times Higher Education Supplement, reporting on the case, observed with horror that ‘One marker even commented: “Can you do anything about your handwriting?”’ as if it were an obviously absurd or prejudicial thing to ask. Fatally, the institution sent an e-mail, in which somebody wrote: ‘His handwriting is not particularly good, but it is no worse than some others who do not suffer from a disability.’ The university had to apologize for ever criticizing the student’s handwriting, despite the fact that nobody could read it. The student, who was dyslexic, said that he understood that his exam papers would be transcribed because of concerns about his handwriting. The university countered that after concerns about his handwriting were voiced, his papers were re-marked with no change to the final marks. At the time of writing, the student is suing the university for the return of all his fees.1

  Our attitude to our own handwriting is a peculiar mixture of shame and defiance: ashamed that it’s so bad and untutored, but defiant in our belief that it’s not our fault. What shame and defiance have in common, of course, is the determination to leave the cause of the shame or defiance unaltered. The blithe assumption that bad handwriting doesn’t matter, and shouldn’t be improved by its perpetrator, may be on the increase inside and outside education. The view expressed as long ago as 1987 by the Regional Examinations Board, that there were competent candidates whose work was ‘degraded by the technical accuracy’2 is falling away. Instead, the view of the 1970s radical head teacher from Islington who told an inquiry into his teaching practice that he didn’t teach the kids to read and write because ‘it’s all typewriting nowadays’3 is, apparently, on the rise.

  The question is: should we even care? Should we accept that handwriting is a skill whose time has now passed, or does it carry with it a value that can never truly be superseded by the typed word?

  Sometimes, however, it does matter in the most brutal economic or human sense. This has been true even before the invention of the Internet transformed everything. American Demographics claimed that bad handwriting skills were costing American business $200m in 1994. Thirty-eight million unreadable letters couldn’t be delivered. Kodak said that 400,000 rolls of films couldn’t be returned because names and addresses were unreadable.4 * Does it still matter now that there is no film industry any more and not so many hand-addressed envelopes to misread? Well, in 2000, a US court awarded $450,000 to the family of a Texas man who died after a pharmacist misread the doctor’s handwritten prescription.5 In a 2005 Scottish case, the handwriting of a staff nurse called Fiona Thomson in Airdrie, Lanarkshire was so appalling that a colleague misread an instruction to give 4 units of insulin for 40. The patient, Moira Pullar, died, and the nurses and hospital were savagely criticized by the judge at the inquest, Sheriff Dickson.6

  Repeated anecdotal evidence suggests, however, that few people now believe that handwriting is something that ought to be improved in the interests of communication. What does it matter if your aunt’s birthday card gets lost in the post? All these cases are arguments for the printed prescription, ordering everything over the Internet with typed details, never setting pen to paper. They don’t seem to be arguments for improving competence in handwriting. But in a hurry, would a nurse making a note to a colleague always find a computer terminal? A lecturer called Tim Birkhead tells of an encounter with an undergraduate. ‘While the essay was excellent, the handwriting was appalling, so I said that a bit more care with the hand writing wouldn’t go amiss, particularly under exam conditions. Most undergraduates take such advice with a grateful smile. But not this one. After a moment’s pause, he looked me straight in the eye and coolly said: “If you cannot read my handwriting, then the university ought to be employing someone who can.” Then he left.’7 Did not that undergraduate exhibit some failings that went beyond a mere inability to write well? Nor is this a purely British phenomenon: we hear from an Australian academic* that ‘Marking the final exam, it emerged that few could write neatly: from bold childlike printing to spidery scribblings in upper case, it is obvious that handwriting is a dying art.’8 Some other elements of civilized life may die with this art, or skill, or habit.

  If we want to understand why so many people now have very little command over their handwriting, and see no reason why they should ever make an effort in that direction, we ought to look at what their education has prepared them for. This is what is demanded of schoolchildren in the UK with regard to handwriting. At the earliest stage of the National Curriculum, which in the UK controls what
is learnt and what may be taught from infant school onwards, the following is prescribed:

  Handwriting and presentation

  5. In order to develop a legible style, pupils should be taught:

  Handwriting

  a. how to hold a pencil/pen

  b. to write from left to right and top to bottom of a page

  c. to start and finish letters correctly

  d. to form letters of regular size and shape

  e. to put regular spaces between letters and words

  f. how to form lower- and upper-case letters

  g. how to join letters.

  But that’s only the beginning of a child’s engagement with handwriting. Naturally, the government has decided that the child must progress. In the consolidated set of ‘level descriptions’ by which schoolchildren work their way through the education system, a series of demands with respect to handwriting is smuggled in. It goes like this:

  Level 1: Letters are usually clearly shaped and correctly orientated. Level 2: In handwriting, letters are accurately formed and consistent in size. Level 3: Handwriting is joined and legible. Level 4: Handwriting style is fluent, joined and legible. Level 5: Handwriting is joined, clear and fluent and, where appropriate, is adapted to a range of tasks. Level 6: Handwriting is neat and legible. Level 7: Work is legible and attractively presented.9

  There are further stages, but by that point the teacher and the administrator have both grown bored with saying that handwriting should be legible and clear, and no further demands are made on the student. Clearly, nobody at any point has followed handwriting through the syllabus as a developing skill, or they would have noticed that ‘legibility’ is something to be attained newly at every age from eight to twelve. At the earliest stage, teachers are supposed to set children some very complex tasks, joining up letters and showing how to enter and leave letters correctly. After that, it looks as if they’re on their own. A student who has attained the level required at Level 3, and certainly at Level 4, shouldn’t really need much more instruction. How many students really do come up to the mark of writing fluent, joined, legible writing at Level 4 is another matter. What happens if they don’t? The teacher rolls his eyes and makes a small but devastating tutting noise, I expect.

  In fact, a study in 2006, carried out by London University’s Institute of Education, discovered that fewer than half of British primary schools set time aside in a week to teach handwriting. Despite widespread support for the value of handwriting – more than half of the teachers surveyed supported the idea of a nationally prescribed handwriting school – only a fifth of the teachers taught pupils how to write more quickly.10 Familiarity is said to breed contempt, but in this corner of contemporary culture, what attracts contempt is what individuals cannot do, or have not been taught to do. The other half of teachers, or perhaps four-fifths, may be represented by the teacher who said ‘In business, rarely, if ever, do you have anything handwritten. Nothing ever comes across my desk handwritten. Children do need to have a little more pride in their penmanship, but if you look down the road, will it make any difference when everything is typed?’11 The Islington head teacher I earlier referred to as justifying the failure to teach the children to read or write was, in the 1970s, struck off. In the twenty-first century, a Scottish headmaster says ‘The importance of perfect handwriting is overplayed [sic] . . . I am much more interested in what a child writes about than the quality of their [sic] handwriting. So much time can be spent in primary schools on the correct formation of letters that it impacts [sic] on the learning of other, perhaps more important, literacy skills [sic].’12 *

  Of course, people have been complaining about bad hand writing in education for centuries. Lord Chesterfield in the eighteenth century was writing to his bastard that ‘Your hand-writing is a very bad one, and would make a scurvy figure in an office-book of letters, or even in a lady’s pocket-book. But that fault is easily cured by care, since every man who has the use of his eyes and of his right hand can write whatever hand he pleases.’13 Lord Chesterfield’s son, like many people of social standing before and since, had a hand which was ‘neither a hand of business, nor of a gentleman; but the hand of a school-boy writing his exercise, which he hopes will never be read.’ If he was alive today, he would probably feel free to tick off his father for being unable to read it, and probably sue him for being so insulting about something which wasn’t his fault, too. What seems to be new is the attitude that bad handwriting is nothing to do with the writer’s merits or application, and that people who can’t read illegible and ill-formed handwriting ought to get over themselves, or pay somebody to read it instead. And if a student says ‘It’s not my fault’, shouldn’t we look at the methods through which handwriting is taught nowadays, and consider whether they might not have a point here?

  What is driving the decline of handwriting? Why has it become, in some people’s eyes, totally unnecessary? The simple answer is the dominance of the keyboard. Many institutions are just giving up, in the face of an apparently hopeless situation. In April 2011, the Indiana Department of Education instructed its schools that only proficiency with a keyboard would be expected. ‘They can continue to teach handwriting if they want’. The new common core standards in education, which at that point had been adopted by forty-two states, no longer require schools to teach a cursive hand. The Daily Telegraph, reporting on this story, interviewed a psychologist called Dr Scott Hamilton who said it made sense to only teach children how to sign their names in joined-up writing. “The time allocated for cursive instruction could then be devoted to learning keyboarding and typing skills. From an intuitive standpoint, this may make sense, based on the increasingly digital world into which this generation of children is growing up.”’14 God save us all from Dr Hamilton’s intuitions, and from a brave new world in which the people of Indiana are unable to write anything but their own names.*

  In this world, we understand that people will write exclusively on keyboards. When such people are forced, by rare circumstance, to write a letter by hand, do we forgive the ugly confusion on paper made by those who have taken the decision, or had the decision forced on them, not to write by hand any more? Some recent public episodes suggest that this isn’t yet the case. We seem to believe both that handwriting doesn’t matter, since everyone types, and that when people do write a handwritten letter, it ought to be elegant, graceful, and well practised. In 2009, the war in Afghanistan was coming towards its eighth year. Like all wars in Afghanistan, it was proving much less easy than anyone had originally thought.* The Western public was getting restless, and a general belief was taking hold that the leaders of the willing actually didn’t much care about the dead soldiers coming back from Afghanistan. To counter this impression, political leaders took to writing personal letters, by hand, to the families of the bereaved.

  A grenadier guardsman, Jamie Janes, was killed in Afghanistan by a bomb on 5 October 2009. In the days following his death, the then Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, wrote to Jamie’s mother. When Mrs Janes received the letter, she, horrified, took it straight to the newspapers. Brown had written the letter in his usual felt-tip pen. It was filled with spelling mistakes which gave the impression that it was dashed off in haste, without much care – ‘Dear Mrs James, It is with the greatst of sadness that I write to offer you and you family my personal condolencs on the death of your son, Jamie. I hear from colleagus . . .’ Perhaps still more frightening was Brown’s handwriting, which not many people, probably, had seen. It leant backwards; it was printed and joined randomly; there were no real upstrokes or downstrokes. It was not, people said, the handwriting of an educated man.

  Gordon Brown’s handwriting.

  This was deeply unfair. Brown, as was only half-known at the time and rarely alluded to, was not far from partially sighted. He clearly knew how ‘condolence’ and ‘colleague’ were spelled. This was the letter of someone who had great difficulty in writing by hand for good medical reasons. The poor man was ob
liged to phone the indignant mother, and turn the whole episode into a discussion of his near-blindness.

  Nevertheless, the Brown episode shows that, sometimes, we expect people to write well. In certain circumstances, we deplore bad writing: the bad, ugly, illiterate, ill-formed writing of someone who has never practised writing, never considered that it might be a duty to write in ways which people can read and take some pleasure from. If we expect good writing on elevated occasions, is it not reasonable to expect people to write reasonably well all the time? It is not reasonable to think that people can write terribly, illegibly badly almost all the time and then elevate their handwriting for special purposes. Sometimes, it clearly matters a good deal.

  There are, perhaps, some signs that handwriting is being maintained in education by a handful of believers. The fightback in parts of education continues. One American schoolteacher boldly said in 2001 that ‘about 50 per cent of kids have illegible handwriting’.15 A UK 2010 survey by the pen manufacturers Berol found what they wanted to hear: 82 per cent of teachers said they had noticed a deterioration in recent years. The Confederation of British Industry Scotland said that ‘legibility of handwriting matters. There is a wide range of forms to be completed by hand in most organizations and in certain circumstances. Some of these are documents that may potentially be called in evidence in legal proceedings.’16