Changing Our Minds: Negotiating English and Literacy

Something that stood out to me in this article was that students often use their signatures as a way of defining themselves. Additionally, the author describes a connection in the minds of students between handwriting and literacy. Unfortunately, I feel that this is not only a misconception of students. Many educators often define a student's intelligence by the legibility of his or her writing. An example of this lies within the packet of essays that we ranked in class a few weeks ago. Many of the lowest-scoring essays were also the least legible. Although in some cases this may seem like a coincidence, I fear that educators often attribute intelligence to legible handwriting.

I currently found myself making this same mistake. I was grading a multiple choice assignment the other day when I came across a very messy paper. The handwriting was very poor, and I struggled to decipher some letters. When I finished grading the assignment, I had expected there to several mistakes. However, the score on the sheet of paper was one of the best in that particular class. I found myself confused why I had expected the score to be low until I realized that I had simply expected the score to be low because the student had poor handwriting skills. Thus, I feel that we all need to overcome the idea that poor handwriting is the equivalent to poor intelligence.