Many years ago, experiments by graphologists indicated that
just as a person's nature can be revealed in his
handwriting, so a person can change his character by
altering his handwriting.
A new method of treating ADD was announced recently which
claims to cure ADD using penmanship. The developers of the
system assume that ADD is really a behavioral problem and
they declare that just as the brain controls the hand, so
can the hand control the brain. Chazal tell us that "The way
a person behaves affects the way he thinks," so this new
system might have some basis.
Nowadays, education is tending to reduce the amount of
writing a child needs to do. Exams are often of the multiple-
choice type and exercises in text books often only require
the student to fill in a few blanks. Ostensibly, this is
done to protect the dyslexic children or those who cannot
write clearly. But it could be that this is itself
exacerbating the problem, escalating the numbers of children
who have difficulty in processing language.
Writing requires a high degree of fine motor control and
coordination. Writing is essentially a task performed by the
small muscles connected to the bones of the ends of the
fingers. The writer grasps the pen with the tips of his
first three fingers and maneuvers the tip of the pen over
the paper.
Be wary of trying to teach a child to write before he is
ready. If a child's fine motor skills are not yet developed
sufficiently, the child will hold the pen in a fist-grip and
try to maneuver the pen using his wrist and arm muscles. If
a child becomes accustomed to writing that way, it can
become difficult to retrain him and then writing will always
be unnecessarily difficult.
Girls develop fine motor skills before boys do, so they can
be expected to learn to write before boys.
Small children will be able to grasp a thick pen more easily
than a regular thin pen, so you can introduce small children
to writing by first giving them thick crayons or felt-tip
pens (markers). Give them plenty of scrap paper and let them
enjoy themselves scribbling over the paper. Often, a child
will automatically experiment with holding the crayon in
various positions and making different types of marks on the
paper.
There is an old joke that people with bad handwriting should
become doctors. Illegible handwriting is often symptomatic
of high intelligence and a fast mind, simply because a
person blessed with such a mind needs to transfer his
thoughts onto paper at the fast rate at which he is thinking
them and does not have patience to take care over forming
the characters.
In the 1950s, when ball point pens first became readily
available, they were banned by many schools because teachers
insisted that they "destroyed good penmanship." If you want
to help a child develop pride in good handwriting, try to
find a type of pen which enables `thicks' and `thins.' You
can also use a penknife to sharpen a pencil to a chisel
point, instead of the sharp, round tip produced by a regular
pencil sharpener.
Many mechanchim encourage their students to write
summaries of their lessons in order to help them understand
and remember them. But the benefits of requiring children to
write goes beyond their achieving the ability to put their
thought onto paper. The discipline of learning to write
clearly is itself an important developmental activity.
Practicing to write clearly also develops persistance and
develops pride in personal achievements.
