…er — the Writing Center.
By virtue of our role, we encounter students and their challenges in ways that their instructors might not. Over the past few years, we’ve noticed an increase in the number of students who struggle to read their instructor’s feedback, specifically when it includes standard cursive, personalized cursive, or “print-script” hybrid handwriting.
Students who grew up reading and writing in other systems of writing (e.g., Arabic, Burmese, Chinese, etc.) find it especially difficult. When they learned English, they memorized the Latin/Roman print alphabet that is used to write it. This alphabet looks vastly different from their own systems of writing, and when they encounter substantial deviations from it, reading English becomes doubly difficult.
This is even true for students whose first language shares the Latin/Roman alphabet but isn’t English (e.g., Spanish, French, German, etc.). Deciphering handwriting, even a familiar cursive style, requires another act of decoding in addition to the translating of the language itself.
Students with certain learning differences may struggle, too, as their assistive technologies might not work as well (or at all) with handwritten text.
Additionally, because New York State stopped requiring the teaching of cursive handwriting in 2010, the Writing Center has also begun seeing American-born students who cannot read their instructor’s comments… or the Declaration of Independence.
Finally, students of all backgrounds struggle with abbreviations, acronyms, and symbols (e.g., proofreading marks) both in print and handwriting unless they have been actively taught them.
Published: by j.beaudry