Though this article implicitly speaks about Braille, the intention of this cross posting is to draw your attention towards the dwindling use of Braille, , among vi people especially among blind students, like print in case of sighted people.
WRITING WRONGS Take extra care when writing those thank-you letters. Handwriting still matters - even in the digital age, as Richard johnson discovered School used to be all about writing, whether it was the exercise books we wrote in, the notes we passed round, or the lines we stayed in to do. But not any more. Now it's all about the typing. Learning your QWERTY is almost as important as learning your ABC. I was fine with that. My six-year-old daughter is part of the first generation that is truly computer-literate and I really didn't want her learning copperplate writing. I could see that spelling, grammar, syntax and punctuation were important, but handwriting? Like a Victorian? By the time she's at university, surely handwriting will be about as relevant as needlepoint. So when my daughter came home last year with cursive handwriting homework, I was nonplussed. Cursive was originally developed to make it easier for children to write with a quill. By joining up the letters, it kept the quill on the parchment and minimised ink blots. But my daughter writes with a laptop. I explained as much to her teacher at the next parents' day. But her teacher explained something to me. Research suggests that the process of writing information down on paper, by hand, has a more direct effect on the formation of memories in the learning process than typing. Taking notes in class is still the most effective way to learn. It's a better way to store the skills for written language in a child's brain than pressing keys. There's nothing old-fashioned about handwriting. Handwriting is where it's at. Maybe my hostility to handwriting came from the fact that I don't like my own. It's scruffy and ill-ordered. But it never bothered me until the day I saw the loops on my daughter's ys and the uplift on her ts. She had inherited my handwriting genes. If I was going to help her, I needed to get help myself. Remedial work Angela Webb, chair of the National Handwriting Association (NHA), has one heck of a pencil case. She's got pens with disjointed heads, pens for left-handers and pens for writers who have difficulty maintaining their grip. Luckily for me, she's also got spare pens - the ones I brought along appeared to have run out of ink. Angela has offered to cast her eye over my handwriting. She starts by asking me to write my name and address. Easy. "One measure of legibility," she said, "is to ask how well we can identify a word if it's taken out of context. I assume that's meant to say 'London'?" It was. "If we took it out of context, would we know it says London?" No, not in a million years. I'm lucky my post doesn't get delivered to Lada. "There are five things you look for in handwriting" says Angela. "Legibility: if you can't read it, there's no point in doing it. Comfort: you've got to be able to write comfortably. Speed: so you can get everything down. You've also got to be writing automatically, because if you're thinking about your handwriting then it deflects cognitive resources away from the content of what you're writing. And you've got to be able to sustain your writing over a period of time." I write, "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog," uninterrupted for two minutes. I'm fast, but difficult to read. Webb says that I know how to form my letters, but I'm not joining them properly. Especially my lower-case r and the lower-case n. To save time, I'm not bothering with the joining strokes (between v and i, for instance), which are so important for legibility. My daughter's lucky she was born a girl - boys don't write as well, as Gordon Brown can testify. They are prone to scrawl, which goes some way to explaining their underachievement in writing tasks. Bad handwriting has been shown to limit exam success by as much as 40 per cent. So I want my daughter to write well - and quickly. According to research, students who write quickly by hand achieve up to a grade higher at GCSE regardless of academic ability. But Angela doesn't want to ditch computers - she believes that children should be taught to touch-type early on. She just feels that particular types of composition are aided by the physical act of handwriting. "Authors often write their first draft by hand. Whether it's to do with the pace of thought, or some kind of stimulation the physical act has, we don't know. But it's a fact." The French would doubtless agree. They love their handwriting. Teachers in France believe that fluency with a pen "unlocks the mind" and they spend more time on writing than reading between the ages of three and eight. In this country, we teach children the formation of letters and the appropriate joining strokes. But after Year 4 we leave them to their own devices, just as the written workload starts to increase. That's when the bad habits set in. Practice makes perfect Angela sent me away with some homework. And, if I do it, one day I'll have handwriting I like. At the moment, my handwriting says I'm a busy man who doesn't mind how my writing looks. But as proper writing becomes rarer, spending some time improving your handwriting is a good investment. In the future, sending a handwritten letter or postcard will be a display of affluence and class, which is why sales of fountain pens are on the increase. It will take time. Anything that has motor involvement has to be learned. So I will have to unlearn the old motor pattern and learn a new one. I've got to copy a sentence every day for a month and build up my handwriting muscles by towel scrunching. I'll use my fingers to "walk" up the towel, "scrunching" as I go. I just hope my daughter appreciates it. But I'll be sure to tell her. I'll write her a letter that says what I want it to say. I do care. And I don't live in Lada. Socrates got it wrong when he predicted that writing would replace memory and cause the human soul to dissolve if it was translated into "ambiguous inscription". We got the same warnings about the typewriter, the telephone, the computer, the fax, the email and the text. But our souls haven't dissolved. Or, if they have, it's not down to the latest method of communication. Technical telepathy: 09969636745 Saints are not always saints; sinners are not always sinners. Voice your thoughts in the blog to discuss the Rights of persons with disability bill at: http://www.accessindia.org.in/harish/blog.htm To unsubscribe send a message to [email protected] with the subject unsubscribe. To change your subscription to digest mode or make any other changes, please visit the list home page at http://accessindia.org.in/mailman/listinfo/accessindia_accessindia.org.in
