Did you know that January 23, 2011 is National Handwriting Day? Some people don’t believe in the emotional evaluation of handwriting, but I’m guessing a lot fewer people would argue with the brain-related evaluation. Here are 3 examples:
- Messy handwriting: Don’t assume your child is just being lazy. For younger kids, an inability to form letters correctly may be more about “motor dysgraphia,” or slow-developing motor skills. For school-age children and teens, writing illegibly may be a sign of dysgraphia (“problems with writing”), which is more about a lack of ability than effort – often due to weak cognitive skills like visual processing.
- Misspelled words: Sometimes referred to as “dyslexic dysgraphia,” misspelling words when writing is often a sign that certain brain skills like phonemic awareness are weak. One quick way to evaluate the problem is to ask your child to copy written work from another sheet of paper. If the copied work has few or no mistakes, the issue may be less about poor handwriting and more about weak reading and spelling skills.
- Extra, reversed or omitted letters; heavy pressure: A 2007 study (in Israel) found that students with attention deficits (like ADHD) were more likely to have dysgraphia. In addition to these graphemic buffer errors, writers with ADHD tended to write faster and exert “abnormally high levels of pen pressure.”
While analyzing your child’s handwriting is by no means a scientific means of determining a learning disorder, there are clues that may help parents recognize a need for professional cognitive skills evaluation.
About National Handwriting Day
The day was founded in 1977 by the Writing Instrument Manufacturers Association to promote the use of pencils, pens and paper. January 23 is also the birthday of John Hancock, whose name is synonymous with the word “signature.”
Tags: ADD, ADHD, disability, dysgraphia, dyslexia, learning, National Handwriting Day, reading, school, writing
