Not only doctors write poorly … here’s a nurse reprimanded for illegible handwriting.
And then there is another kind of bad writing.
This blog deals with “writing as handwriting,” not “writing as composition” … but every so often, very bad prose is written to defend cursive handwriting: prose so bad that its badness actually makes it more interesting than it would otherwise have been. Here’s an example — comments?
The above is the longest example of this genre — Bad Writing Which Claims That Cursive Writing Is Good (BWWCTCWIG). Essay-length specimens are rare; most BWWCTCWIG appears as blog-comments or Letters to the Editor.
The phenomenon wouldn’t be noteworthy, except that many such pieces (including the essay at the above link) include claims that writing in cursive will make you more intelligent, more logical, and/or better at English grammar and spelling. (I could give numerous examples, but I don’t know if anyone would want to read these.)
Why is there so much BWWCTCWIG? I think it happens because people who do better at cursive writing than at other aspects of written composition (such as logic, organization, and mastery of standartd grammar and spelling) benefited from the fact that teachers and exam-graders often unconsciously inflate grades on attractively handwritten papers by as much as one letter grade — even when the teachers/graders have been instructed to ignore the students’ handwriting, and even when they believe that they are following those instructions.
Therefore, someone who writes “C”-quality prose in textbook-perfect pretty cursive may easily receive “B” grades. An actually “B-” essay may likewise receive an “A-” … in this way, the producers of poor-but-pretty written work may grow up with an inflated estimate of their actual abilities (and a similarly inflated estimate of the actual abilities of others like themselves).
Could this be one reason that so many pieces of BWWCTCWIG also denounce the very idea of teaching (or allowing) schoolchildren to keyboard? Most BWWCTCWIG, these days, is of course produced by keyboard — and its producers may have some inkling that this keeps their words from looking pretty enough for undeserved high marks.
