Is handwriting necessary?

Handwritten English is much less important than it was.  But handwriting is not.

Our tutoring consultant (who works by computer video link nowadays, as much of the world does) was recently presented with a Middle Schooler’s Algebra I homework.  It had been completed by hand on notebook paper, then scanned and uploaded, a process that would have excited wonder in our own youth but is now routine.  There were difficulties with it.  Not so much in the algebra, which was almost entirely correct; but in the reading.  It was difficult to tell a “2” from a “4” from a “y,” and things like that make a difference if one is trying to tell if the answer is right.

The curmudgeonly thing to do at this point is to lament the sorry state of schools nowadays.  In the Old Days much time was spent in Elementary School on handwriting, first on block letters and then on cursive, and one’s output was graded.  It was a long and tedious process, meaning it took up time that might have been spent on other things, and penalized those students who were not so good at fine muscle control.  It had its payoff later, when English and History teachers were presented with handwritten papers that they could actually read.  (We remember typewriters only making their appearance late in High School.)

These days, of course, almost any written assignment is banged out on a word-processing computer.  Not only is it guaranteed to be legible, it will be spell-checked and grammar-checked.  Neither of those programs is infallible, and the content may be anything from stellar to gibberish, but handwriting does not enter into the process.  So less time is spent in school on developing good personal calligraphy, and more on other things.  Which is no doubt right.

But not everything is machine-written, even in this day and age.  Algebra homework is one example.  Any mathematics above the simplest becomes very difficult to squeeze out of a keyboard.  Putting together a summation or integral in Microsoft Word, for example, is tedious and sometimes painful.  The software we use for scientific papers, something called LaTeX, has a beautiful output but the input is arcane.

So we’re presented with an irony: the subject that most benefits from good handwriting nowadays is not English but Mathematics.  We may leave aside the pictures of Dickens or Tolstoy with ink-stained fingers, scribbling page after page of a masterpiece.  Instead, consider a physicist or mathematician writing line after line of mathematical development, on a piece of paper (how archaic!) or perhaps whiteboard.  Now and then there may be a diagram, also tedious to include in a word-processed document, or even symbols of his or her own devising.

Everything is now processed and published electronically.  But mathematics does not start that way.