Asymmetrical Information

Women are inefficient and sentimental and so want to write on the page florid, flowery prose. Men are efficient and so invented the typerwriter.

I've actually been observing the opposite, of late. I'm an undergraduate student at a large Canadian university, and have been surprised to see that handwriting among my peers is very gender-ambiguous. This might have to do with the fact that just about everyone taking lecture notes uses lowercase, well-formed printing rather than cursive writing and capital letters.

By the way, this is my first comment, and it would be reassuring to know that my e-mail address (required for the comment) will not be displayed on the site before I post it.

I suspect it's in part that Palmer Method handwriting, which was the standard for a couple of generations, is simply quite difficult and requires at least a modicum of manual dexterity--and perhaps even artistic talent--to do effectively. Like most of my childhood friends, I gave up using cursive altogether (signature aside) in my early teens, since my script looked like (and was) a childish, inept copy of my female elementary school teachers'. (Of course, the italic script I affected was pretty illegible too, but it was distinctive. When, much later, I joined the Navy, I started using block capitals for anything I had to hand-write.) The only two men I knew who *didn't* stop using cursive as teenagers are both also artists of considerable talent, who can actually write neat cursive without it looking feminine. Young women, on the other hand, even if their handwriting wasn't particularly good, wouldn't have much reason to be embarrassed about it being "girly." (Some women I know--most notably my wife--also did, and do, prefer to print, but this seems to have been rarer, at least until quite recently.)

In other words, I suspect it has something to do with the combination of the (1) adoption of typewriting for practically all formal documents, and (2) the rise of women in the late nineteenth century to dominate the teaching profession, particularly in the elementary grades. Of course, in the last two decades the widespread availability of PCs has greatly accelerated the process (probably for both genders!); there is a lot less reason even to want to learn cursive.

This doesn't, of course, explain the fact that there was probably at least some underlying gender difference in handwriting style even before this, or else we wouldn't be able to tell neat masculine and neat feminine, or messy masculine from messy feminine, handwriting anyway. Has anyone attempted to do a comparative study of handwriting styles in older documents?

Daniel

This is somewhat off-topic, but I'd like to know if anyone has done a study of the effect on children when teachers try to force their handwriting to slant to the right. My daughter has beautiful handwriting but kept losing points on it because it naturally slants 'backwards', to the left, just as mine always did (and no, neither of us are left-handed). Thanks to the teachers, my daughter is convinced that her handwriting is horrible, even though each letter is extremely well formed.

My writing (especially cursive) used to look like I was having some sort of mental struggle, because at the beginning I would consciously work to make it slant the "right" way, but as I kept writing it would gradually revert to its natural left-slant.

They've found that, for children that are natually left handed, forcing them to write with their right hand can cause stuttering and is generally not a good idea. Has any research been done on how (non-)productive it is to force an artificial slant into all children's writing? At the very least, devoting huge resources to fighting their natural tendencies for arbitrary reasons would seem like a waste of time.

Isn't just that women have great manual dexterity, like the commenters suggest?

Hasn't that been proven or am I falling for a sexist urban legend?

I do not know if women have greater manual dexterity,but because girls mature faster a 7 year old girl will have more manual dexterity then a 7 year old boy.

See "Gender Matters in the Learning Brain" on Eide Neurolearning Blog
http://eideneurolearningblog.blogspot.com/

The answer which comes to mind is "Just lucky, I guess."

There is a worse crime committed by school teachers than penalizing students with an excellent but non-standard script; penalizing those who switch to script from printing ahead of schedule. I know several people who were told "We don't write in 2nd grade. We don't learn to write till third grade." Every one of them suppressed excellent penmanship and retained poor handwriting into adulthood. I know an artist who is capable of excellent calligraphy but whose normal hand is no better than in grade school.

As for me, I'm left handed. I print, draftsman style. The only time I've written anything but my signature in script in the last 38 years was at the absolute insistance of someone who wanted to do a handwriting analysis. He came up consistantly, blatantly wrong.

Here's an interesting twist to this: if I have my information right*, men and women in China also have distinctive handwriting styles, but it's exactly the opposite as in the US: men write in large and flowery characters, whereas women write in small/compact characters.

So I am not sure that dexterity plays much of a role in handwriting style differences. Rather, I would expect that the social element is most important: boys who write like girls will get made fun of in elementary school. Now, there's still a question of how "boys write compact and sloppy, whereas girls write large and flowery and elegant" came into play. Thus, you can call my answer the neoclassical approach: I can't tell you why you get to the equilibrium that you do, but I can tell you that you stay there...

* - This comes from my Chinese-born girlfriend and was corroborated by some other Chinese friends but it's hardly sound evidence which would hold up under scientific inquiry. That and she sometimes likes to yank my chain...

Boys and girls develop different abilities at different rates. Schools start teaching handwriting when only girls have the fine motor skills to do it well, and stop teaching it by the time the boys are ready to learn. The difference may be becoming less pronounced as schools de-emphasize cursive in favor of keyboarding, but that just means that girls will have lousy handwriting, too.

Cursive is silly anyway. In real life, who actually handwrites more than a page or so anymore? Healthcare still frequently depends on handwritten documentation, but most medical and nursing notes are fairly brief.

You could, I suppose, use this to argue that the differences might become more pronounced, as cursive becomes a purely ceremonial art. But the bulk of communication is typed, for very good reasons - it's easily edited, always legible(*), and much faster than handwriting. I'm 32, and don't know anyone my age who can't type with at least some skill. I certainly don't care if children learn to write in cursive; being able to jot a short note or grocery list that is legible is all the handwritten communication today's five-year-olds will ever do.

(*)The letters, that is. I make no claims about the words and sentences.

Chinese caligraphy, at least old style, may be artistic but isn't nessicarily legible. From what I've heard anyways. I can read almost none of it.

I'm a man whose handwriting ended up looking much like my mother's and nothing at all like my father's. My teenage son and daughter have similarly lousy cursive writing which they very rarely use -- they type on the computer or write in print. I wouldn't be surprised to see many elementary schools drop cursive writing instruction entirely (and why not)?

The one good reason for learning cursive is to take notes faster - there are still many situations where using a keyboard is impractical. Professors and bosses often just don't like the clicking of the keyboard in a class or meeting (or wonder whether you're taking notes or doing something unrelated.) Also, I'm often standing out on the factory floor next to some broken piece of machinery and noting down what it's doing wrong and what's been tried to fix it; I couldn't use a laptop most of the time because of no place to put it, and the noise level is so high that I doubt an audio recording would work. But much better than cursive writing instruction back in 3rd grade would have been shorthand once my motor skills reached the point that I could use it.

I have spent most of my life trying to refine my handwriting, primarily because I want it to look good and be legible. There are few things more obnoxious to me than trying to decipher someone else's chicken scratch, so I have always tried to make sure that my handwriting is easy to read, if not pleasant to look at.

I don't think many men care about what other people think of their handwriting, which is why it's generally so much messier than women's.

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