Why use pen vs. pencil? What's the theory?

Pencil requires a lot of downward pressure with the hand at the same time as trying to make fine motions side to side. This is physically impossible for many young children with less-strong muscles, and is very tiring even for adults. Children who have to write in pencil develop weird coping skills to get enough force in there, often lying on top of the desk to get the weight into it; this makes the writing very hard to remediate. High school and college students who still write in pencil complain constantly because they can not keep up with the writing demands.

Also, pencil encourages the erasing trap — two minutes writing to five minutes erasing and at the end of the hour of hard work, nothing to show but a filthy piece of blank paper and a lot of frustration.

For those teachers who don’t like the indelible nature of pens, consider using erasble pens. They are definitely much easier to write with and tend to erase a bit more neatly than a pencil.

It’s also helpful to offer a variety of writing instruments to a student and ask them to find the one that feels “just right.” Often times this is a flair type pen that runs smoothly across the page with the right amount of proprioceptive feedback. When you find the one that your child prefers best, buy a lot of them because they may be difficult to find the next time you shop!
But each student is different - there are certain pencils that I prefer and I can feel the difference immediately. (They make me want to write!)

For the literacy council I volunteer with, I make everyone do their homework in pen and their one on one work in pencil. I figure that it is not good for someone to think anything indelible unless they have mad control over it. There are like ‘right at five folks who are trying to learn to read well enough to study for their GED’s who have a lot of letter reversal problems…and I have two of them right now.

One thing I wonder is if anyone still tries to teach youngsters how to actually hold their pencil/pen? Sometimes, a resource teacher can just be soo happy that a student can cypher their name that they do not pay attention to the far out manner in which they hold their pen/pencil. If a youngster does not learn how to cypher while holding his pen/pencil in a normal, relaxed position…it will hurt them later on down the road with their schooling. I truly believe that to be true because if something like a really poor writing posture and pen/pencil grip goes unchecked, then one will have to look into some “comfort grip” type writing pens/pencils down the road and those can sometimes make the handwriting you learned to do neatly a bloody mess.

I have not used an erasable pen in ages and I honestly did not think they were still around! Do they erase well? Way back in “the day” they were popular (in my grade school of all things, years ago) but they did not erase really well. Are they improved now?

The erasable pens that I have seen are terrible, combining the bad charactistics of both pen and pencil. The ink is too dry and requires a lot of effort to get on the page, exactly what we are trying to stop, and the erasability feeds the erasing addiction. I would definitely not recommend.

Merlin, try having your students write with superfine markers or something similar, and teach them to cross out errors and move on. At first they will react with absolute panic, and the fact that the emotion is so totally out of proportion with the question tells you that this is not a reasoned reaction but an embedded phobia and therefore something to try to lead them out of, not something to feed.
I had a student in college algebra once who simply could not do math without filing it in the wastepaper basket. She HAD to do all her work in pencil and erase and redo it, then recopy the finished copy and throw out the work. Well, obviously, she had not a hope of ever finishing even half a college exam, or of getting the credit generously offered for work shown — and then of course she blamed the “mean” teacher, ie me, for asking the impossible of her and “taking away her marks” (which she herself insisted on throwing away). When I tried to get her to stop this self-destructive fixation, to just do the work and hand it in, no marks for prettiness I promise, she threw a catfit and went to the department head to try to get me fired. Again the overreaction — and I was offering her something easier and faster!

The reversals are tied in with what you have noticed with poor pen grip, poor posture, and all the rest of it. Students are trying to copy a letter form purely visually without having any physical or kinesthetic “feel” for it. Well, visually, b, d, p, and q are very much the same, a ball and a stick with only direction changes. If you form them as a stick with a ball attached, you will have a 50-50 or less chance of getting the right one (I have three students right now doing just this.) Instead, you need to learn the directional and rhythmic organization of writing, that every letter is made left-to-right first and top-to-bottom second, and entry circles are made counterclockwise ie down the left and up the right. When you do this, the “feel” for b and d, p and q, is totally different; visually you can distinguish them by tracing the direction with your hand.

One of the reasons for using a writing tool with a light smooth motion, ie pen or marker, is to develop this kinesthetic sense, rhythm, and direction. A student, especially a small child with small hands, who is forcing his full weight onto the pencil [or cheap erasable pen] and lying on the desk to do so, and thus looking back and down at the pen, is not going to see or feel the letter forms. You can get great improvement in a reversal problem once you get the letters out and visible and being formed consistently left-to-right. This is a physical habit and the longer it has been practiced backwards the more effort it will tke to change, but like any physical habit it can be retrained; I myself changed several letter formations to more modern styles in my thirties and forties, and it just took a few days of concentrated practice and a few weeks of reminding myself.

[quote=”victoria”]The erasable pens that I have seen are terrible, combining the bad charactistics of both pen and pencil. The ink is too dry and requires a lot of effort to get on the page, exactly what we are trying to stop, and the erasability feeds the erasing addiction. I would definitely not recommend.

They work great for my kid, who is dysgraphic and has hand tremors that make regulating pressure when writing difficult He has used mechanical pencils, roller ball type pens, fat pens, pen grips, pens with grips built-in, and just about anything else you can think of and these are what work best for him. Of course, when it really counts, he types his work, especially when taking notes in school.

I’ve got to say Victoria that erasable pens are the greatest writing implement for doing crosswords. Not much fun for real writing though.

I am am a 40 year old dysgraphic college graduate and I hate pens. Hate may sound like a strong word but it’s actually an understatement for what I view as an instrument of torture. Pens are frustrating and result in an embarassing mess of mistakes. I make as many mistakes on the computer but at least they can be corrected. Without access to computers, I’d still be a high school drop out. Pencils are lovely things that allow me to jot notes and make lists without distracting mistakes all over the place.

While we’re on the subject of writing, can someone explain cursive to me? I think it’s about as important a skill as calligraphy. My 8 1/2 year old dysgraphic son’s teacher is making him learn cursive despite the fact that I told her his neuro-psych said he should dictate everything.

Richard Wanderman talks about mistake tolerant vs. mistake intolerant media for students with LDs. (His website is a great resource by the way - www.ldresources.org) A pen is mistake intolerant, computers for word processing are mistake tolerant. Once a student learns how to keyboard, you do want to recommend a mistake tolerant media for them to demonstrate what they know. They need a forgiving, flexible format and once, provided that option, they usually write much more than they ever did on paper.

KTJ- Thanks for the link. And thanks for passing along the idea of mistake tolerant vs. mistake intolerant. Love it! It’s so simple and obvious when it’s put that way. Why keep trying to write when it always ends in failure? Computers are life savers for some of us.

hypermommy — I am writing at length because this is an important issue that is going to be a problem for many years for your son so why not get it right as soon as possible —

Handwriting is a physical skill. As such it is better compared to a skilled sport, for example swimming or skiing, than to an academic subject such as arithmetic.

To develop a complex physical skill and become expert in it, you need step-by-step instruction in the subskills, guidance and correction so mistakes don’t become bad habits, and extensive carefully planned and guided practice until the skill is fluid and automatic. This is what I do NOT see happening with the teaching of writing, and I think a large explanation of so many writing problems and academic problems — students who can’t write hate and avoid academics because a lot of writing is required.

An analogy — true story: A young girl joined my daughter’s swimming class. She had never had any formal swimming lessons, but her mother had taught her and said she could swim two lengths of the pool just fine. Well, this girl had a fear of water up her nose. So she clamped her left hand forcefully over her nose and swam only with her right arm and her feet. Of course this one-handed crawl stroke pulled her to the side, so she arched her spine sharply sideways to make up for it. It was pretty weird seeing a kid arched in a sideways C doing a frantic one-armed crawl up the pool.
Well, the instructors tried to teach her a proper two-handed crawl, but she point-blank refused. She was quite satisfied with the way she did things and the instructors were just picky and wrong and wanted everything done their own way.
Of course the girl failed the swimming test and did not get on the swimming team, and it is lucky that she *didn’t* get to swim too much because in the long term this stress could have injured her back.

In skiing, I worked as a ski patroller for several years, and almost every (90%) injured person I picked up had never had formal lessons, but had been “taught” by friends who just left them on the skis to figure things out for themselves, which clearly they hadn’t.

I see exactly this same pattern of ineffective, inefficient, and sometimes even damaging methods in many areas, not only in handwriting, but this is a notable example. In writing, I am finding every single kid I have worked with over the past couple of years has invented their own posture to get more force onto a user-unfriendly tool, and these postures (usually lying on the table and driving the body weight into the pencil) not only lead to terrible writing, but also cause intense fatigue and eyestrain from peering at the pencil upside down under the chest and too close to the point. Kids get arm aches, backaches, and headaches, and no wonder they hate writing. But, as with any long-term habit, they resist changing because this “feels right” no matter how much pain it causes them — they think it is supposed to be painful and difficult, and they mistrust easier ways.

As far as pens, two things.
First, there are pens and there are pens. Most people buy kids the cheapest things they can find, disposable stick pens, on the assumption they are going to be lost and damaged anyway (and the same theory for cheap yellow pencils). This is an example of a false economy, or as the old saying goes “penny wise pound foolish”. If you are going to use a tool for several hours every day, it is a good idea to get a good quality of tool. With bad tools, either the student gets fatigued and frustrated and refuses to do the work (shades of your own history?) or the school cuts back on the demands and expectations — and then they wonder why they are having trouble teaching students to write and do advanced work in other subjects — one of my great difficulties in teaching kids math is to get them to actualy put something on paper, because they hate and resist writing, and this prevents them going beyond elementary level math.

Then, the issue of errors. Somewhere in the past a lot of elementary teachers, with good intentions and the usual end of such intentions, developed an unreachable standard of perfection for written work. Everything had to be written in pencil perfect to the millimeter and every little line one hair out of place had to be erased and re-done, and then a good copy had to be done over in pen with not a single line a hair out of place; and anything less than this standard had to be written over and over again fifty times. As a way to teach someone to hate and fear writing, nothing can be better.
But this is NOT native to the act of writing or to the pen, it is a bad school policy. Honest, there is no twelfth commandment that guarantees you eternal flames if you leave an error in pen on a page.
I write in pen all the time, have to search out a pencil if I want one for drawing (I draw in pen too, but use pencil occasionally, when I find it, when I want to paint over and not have the lines show). I do very serious math (up to second year of grad school), all in pen — and math does not type easily. (Honest, there is no eleventh commandment requiring all numbers in pencil, I promise, you can look it up). ** I make mistakes all the time, too.** Little mistakes I just write over, still in pen. Medium-sized mistakes I cross out and re-write. Big mistakes, total rewrites, I pitch out the paper and start again.

Whether or not a pen is tolerant or intolerant has to do partly with the quality of the tool — you buy a $200 keyboard adn a 25 cent pencil, and you wonder why one is better? — and partly with the intolerance absorbed from punitive teachers in the past; it isn’t in the pen itself.

If you were taught as a child in the old style that the final pen copy was some kind of extreme test of perfection, designed for failure and punishment, then it is quite reasonable that you feel stressed even thinking of it. But if you can break out of that very counterproductive framework, let yourself be human and make a mistake now and then, it is very liberating. Write your notes in pen, cross out when you feel like it, and thumb your nose at the ghosts telling you that is evil.

Keyboards are OK and I use mine a lot, but they have many serious limitations:
- People like me and my daughter with coordination difficulties find the keyboard more stressful, not less. Keyboarding drove me to tears as a child. I couldn’t type effectively until my forties and still can’t use all my fingers, still do an awful lot of correcting.
- You often in real life have to write notes and memos and you often don’t have a printer attached to your hand, so it is a valuable life skill to be able to run off a few paragraphs fluently without it being a big deal.
- Math is extremely difficult to type; the symbol set and the arrangement of items on the page make it a trial at best. If you want to get beyond grade school in technical fields, you need to be able to make effective notes. They do NOT have to be works of art for the Grade 3 wall, but they do have to be readable by yourself and others (including the technical typist — and believe me, he/she wants pen).

Finally, the question of cursive. Cursive has been re-invented independently at least four times in history that I know of — Egyptian demotic writing, Roman/Greek bureaucratic office work, Irish uncials, and modern cursive evolving since the sixteenth century or so. A fifth form of cursive was adopted in Russia from the Cyrillic alphabet, adapted from European writing.
Anything that four or five different groups of people invent separately must be reappearing because it fulfills a real need; each of these cultures had a print form, but they preferred to invent a cursive — why? Well, **IF** you learn how to do it right, cursive is far more efficient than printing. Writing each word in one fluid motion without pen lifts and replacements is faster and far less fatiguing. You can write a lot more a lot faster and be a more efficient writer in all ways. Of course the big trick is that one fluid motion — a complex skill that takes a lot of teaching and practice. If teachers just hand the kid a pen and let him figure it out, he is going to be in the same state as the skiers we scraped up, failing before he has a chance to learn; and if the teaching falls into the trap of over-perfectionism on appearance, losing sight of the goal of speed and efficiency, then no, it will be a failure.
Doctors and even neuropsychologists know a lot about the brain, but they don’t always know everything about other fields, notably teaching methods and reading-writing skills. When a doctor gives educational advice, he is far too often reading off from a canned list and not from his own knowledge. Ask deeper questions as to why and how.

Since you yourself have some difficulties with writing, you can give your son comfort and moral support and sympathy, but you may not be the best person to teach him — you may unintentionally be teaching him some counterproductive approaches. Try to get a tutor who will help him learn and who will be patient and go over the skills with him from the ground up, and then leave the tutor to do the job, no contradictions.

Victoria- Obviously we both have strong opinions about this subject. I’m not against teaching children how to print. I fought to have hand writing without tears in my autistic son’s IEP back before they thought he needed it (the teacher ended up ignoring the IEP). But when a disability is serious enough to make writing in any form a obstacle that the student can’t get around, then forcing the student to keep practicing with mistake intolerant tools is like taking a wheelchair from someone who can’t walk and telling them they just need to try harder to run the track. the The article about mistake tolerant vs. mistake intolerant tools that was mentioned was written by someone with dyslexia and dysgraphia. Perhaps it takes someone who has a serious enough disability to understand that sometimes trying harder just isn’t worth the effort. I’m not saying we should quit trying altogether if we can’t aspire to perfection. I’m just saying that for those of us who are doomed to failure without our mistake tolerant tools, it’s unfair to keep us from developing skills using tools that will allow us enough success bother trying at all.

The reason I am homeschooling is because I long ago decided that I understand my children’s needs better than any other teacher will. If I get a tutor it will be because my autistic son’s math skills become greater than my own (he was doing square roots in kindergarten).

Guest — yes I do have strong opinions and tend to state them quite forcefully. I also apologize readily when I get something wrong; you’ll many examples here on these boards.

But I do get concerned when somebody puts words into my mouth. WHERE in my post do you see a single instance of my saying “just try harder”?
And the whole thing about writing in any form being an obstacle — well, first of all I experienced this myself in quite a severe form, second I got my daughter through it over ten years or more of hard work, and thirdly I have taught a number of students to get *past* this obstacle, which is what I was talking about.

You may have heard the “just try harder” bit far too many times from far too many people — I know I heard it, and there are still some folks rude enough to come out to it even now that I’m old enough to be their mother — but please, you didn’t hear it from me, and I would appreciate your looking at the other options I was outlining.

I was suggesting NOT yelling at the kid, NOT demanding perfection, but teaching in effective ways: small steps, teaching individual subskills, planned progression from simple to complex, reducing strain, tools that work easily from a physical standpoint (let the appearance wait), short spaced practices, and acceptance of errors as part of a real learning process. Also being open to learning a new different skill which may look difficult at the beginning but which may open up many doors once you get into it in an effective way. (I have had this experience myself, in handwriting and even in math) And also finding a knowledgeable person if possible to teach a complex skill, rather than sharing errors.

Those sound like good steps to me, Victoria, and I applaud you for advocating them. I agree that a dysgraphic child needs to at least try to learn to write legibly—not that he already isn’t, of course (and he needs to be given proven, successful steps for accomplishing that goal, lest it simply become an exercise in frustration and failure). The reason is there will be some things that will [i]have[/i] to be handwritten (a computer won’t always be handy). At the same time, he needs to be given the accommodations he needs, while he’s learning and practicing his writing skills, so that handwriting and/or printing won’t become an obstacle to learning, as it too often is for the child with a spelling/handwriting disability. He may always have to use a computer for any major writing requirements such as term papers, etc., but if he can at least write his name, make out a grocery list, fill out an application, etc., he’ll have the writing skills he needs to get through life.

Yours truly,
Kathy G.

[quote:167ea778ba=”kgreen20”]Those sound like good steps to me, Victoria, and I applaud you for advocating them. I agree that a dysgraphic child needs to at least try to learn to write legibly—not that he already isn’t, of course (and he needs to be given proven, successful steps for accomplishing that goal, lest it simply become an exercise in frustration and failure). The reason is there will be some things that will [i]have[/i] to be handwritten (a computer won’t always be handy). At the same time, he needs to be given the accommodations he needs, while he’s learning and practicing his writing skills, so that handwriting and/or printing won’t become an obstacle to learning, as it too often is for the child with a spelling/handwriting disability. He may always have to use a computer for any major writing requirements such as term papers, etc., but if he can at least write his name, make out a grocery list, fill out an application, etc., he’ll have the writing skills he needs to get through life.Yours truly,
Kathy G.[/quote]

YES! This is a very sensible post. Handwriting is a physical skill that needs to be properly taught. Every child needs to become at least minimally competent at that skill so that he or she can handwrite when it is necessary. The reality is that handwriting problems are among the most resistant to intervention. The reality is that some people will never get really good at it, even if they receive the very best instruction. My child can write, although it took quite a long time to learn. It will never be the most efficient way for him to work and it will never be the best way to display his knowledge, because he has a coordination disorder and hand tremors that make handwriting physically difficult. He can fill out a form, take a handwritten short answer test, or write a note to himself. What he can’t do, and should not be made to do, is learn how to express hs thoughts in writing, or fully demonstrate his knowledge with a pen or pencil. Had his teachers insisted that he learn how to write a sentence or a paragraph with a pencil, I highly doubt he would have learned those skills very well. Because he was taught handwriting separately from written expression and used a computer or alphasmart to learn the art of the written word versus the skill of handwriting, his written expression is on a par with, or better than his peers. We began typing instruction when he was in first grade and insisted that typing goals be incorporated into his IEP. Teach handwriting, but be reasonable. If we started instructing LD kids in typing AND handwriting, they will have a better shot at learning the substantive information school is meant to convey.

One more time, as a person who lives daily with a cordination problem, I can tell you that keyboarding is NOT a magic bullet. If your child can move all ten fingers and time them — if his coordination difficulty is substantialy *less* than mine and my daughter’s — then keyboarding may work for him.
If a person cannot direct and time their hand motions, keyboarding can often be a lot worse than handwriting.
Of course if handwriting is taught badly or as in many cases not taught at all, and keyboarding is actually taught effectively, that may make it look better, but that’s an issue of the teaching and not of the actual skill. ‘
I speak as a person who both handwrites ten to twenty pages of math notes at a sitting and who types at length several pages at a time — I still make a lot fewer errors in writing because there are fewer fingers to try to aim. (This post took a couple of minutes to type and twice as long to correct, as usual.)

I think what is being pointed out here is that there is not one magic method that works for all students. For some cursive is the way to go, for others printing with a particular writing instrument, for others keyboarding is an effective way to demonstrate what they know and for others the use of voice recognition is truly freeing. I still think that in all things, we want to keep in mind the idea of a mistake tolerant tool.

(For me, the thought of handwriting anything beyond a paragraph would impact what I actually put down on paper.)

[quote:013e344093=”KTJ”]I think what is being pointed out here is that there is not one magic method that works for all students. [/quote]

Again, yes. Good point. Some people can’t learn to type well. Some people can’t use handwriting efficiently. Some can’t do either and need to dictate or use voice-activated software. If you only teach one thing, you’ll never find out what is best.

Dysgraphia isn’t alway a motor issue. Sometimes it’s a visual processing issue. Sometimes it’s a disconnect between a thought and one of the many skills needed to get a thought from the brain to the page. All forms of written communication, including use of a computer can be affected by these things. Fortunately, as was pointed out above, there are different options out there. None of the options are an easy fix but people can look for what works best for them.