21st Century Writing Habits

Today is National Handwriting Day, and its sponsor, the Writing Instrument Manufacturers Association, suggests we take this day to get creative, use a pencil or pen, and uniquely express ourselves through writing. Not a bad idea. After all, NCTE’s Beliefs About the Teaching of Writing note the obvious, that “People learn to write by writing.”

But, today, it’s all-together possible that many students are busy writing not with pens or pencils or even with crayons or spray paint or lipstick. They’re using computers or cell phones or message boards, they’re texting each other, and they’re posting to MySpace, YouTube, Facebook and other social networking sites. PBS’s Frontline program “Growing Up Online” notes that for some kids today, writing an email is as old-fashioned as writing by hand! These students show us that, in fact, how we write and the tools we use to get the job done are evolving--well…as I write. And, these students’ writing activities certainly must give us pause as we think about how we teach writing to our students.

While today some will decry the loss of readable script developed through the Palmer Method, others will acknowledge that for many of our students, learning to write means learning what to say in writing or how to say it, not how to form their letters with pen or pencil. We might join the teachers interviewed for the news article “Writing off cursive” to think about the meaning of handwriting to our students and to their ability to communicate in writing.

For me, writing in my journal still means using not only my hand and a pen, but a special sort of pen that flows across the paper as I hope my words will do. Yet, here I comfortably sit composing this blog on my computer, and enjoying, along with the consummate ability to create, move, and erase text, being able to insert hyperlinks to bolster my message. And, for all of us who’ve read stacks of student papers, of course, typed papers trump handwritten papers in terms of readability every time. More importantly, according to “The effect of computers on student writing: A meta-analysis of studies from 1992 to 2002” as cited in NCTE’s 21st-Century Literacies – A Policy Research Brief,“digital technology enhances writing and interaction in several ways. K–12 students who write with computers produce compositions of greater length and higher quality and are more engaged with and motivated toward writing than their peers.”

So, today, let’s use this occasion to think about handwriting along with other ways of writing, and to consider just why we write and why we want our students to be writers, adept writers—always.