It’s officially spring break at my school, which should be a lovely thing, but the week has been occupied with nastiness.
On Monday, I had the first of several meetings with school officials about what’s to be done with Ian for next year. Special school or regular education? I want him in regular ed and the school officials want him elsewhere. Nobody wants a boy who is easily distracted and still doesn’t have enough verbal skills to properly explain to a stranger what he did over the weekend. His impressive mental feats don’t impress them.
Later that day, there was a trip to the dentist, where the hygienist scraped my teeth with an ice pick for 45 minutes. The rest of the week has been devoted to the mountain of midterms.
To insure maximum fairness, I flip over the front cover of the midterm and then blind-grade. Otherwise, I get all sympathetic and give everyone A’s. Still, cover folding is not a foolproof system. The women have completely different handwriting from the men. The women aren’t necessarily neater, but their letters are bigger and rounder. Since there aren’t that many women in my class, I usually have some clue about the author of exam.
Why do women and men have such different handwriting styles?
Apt. 11d 
Girls have a head start on fine-motor skills, so perhaps both boys and girls continue writing as they did as children. The boys continue with their cramped chicken scratching, and the girls continue with their graceful looping script. There is a social component, of course (the feminine need to be pleasant and non-threatening), but biology has something to do with the difference.
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I was going to say what Amy P did.
Schools stop working seriously on handwriting just around the time boys are finally ready, fine-motor-wise, to pay good attention to it.
The social component is probably pretty huge, though. I think of all those junior-high notes: girls present themselves through their handwriting, and the impulse is generally florid.
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Does this handwriting gender split disappears as we get older? I definitely remember writing painfully cutesy notes in high school. (Remember the awful notes passed in Napoleon Dynamite, with all the smileys? Totally accurate.)
But these days things are very different. I spend so much time typing and so little time writing by hand that my handwriting has really deteriorated. My current handwriting is essentially appropriate only for grocery lists. It’s an artifact of being so busy … which now that I think about it, directly parallels lots of changes in my interpersonal style since high school, too. I’m just too busy; I care significantly less about what others think of me. I am usually polite — just like my handwriting is usually legible — but neither the writing nor the behavior are exactly my best effort.
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Why, when we note gender differences, must we always hark back to citing to biology? I’m reading a book on gender differences right now (and am a biologist), and the bottom line is that our ability to attribute gender difference in complex behaviors to biology is very very weak. That doesn’t mean that the differences aren’t biologically based, but just that the evidence linking them is so weak aso to be negligible.
The main reason for this lack of evidence is that that societal influences are so so huge; when you limit yourself to the subset of studies where social influences aren’t a plausible explanation, you are left with very few scattered studies with very small populations (sometimes anecdotal examples of case studies), or very small differences between gender (or both).
The large and consistent differences Laura cites, are always found in cases where the societal influence is huge. I’m not saying that there’s proof that difference in writing styles between college-aged men & women is _not_ the result of biology, merely that the evidence in favor of it is so weak that it makes no more sense to draw that causal connection than to attribute the difference to some other cause.
bj
PS: Can you tell I”m arguing about this in real life, too 🙂
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I have crappy handwriting–not quite “cramped chicken scratching,” but it’s pretty poor. So much so, that when I have to write something extensively in my own hand, I nearly always print. Part of the reason may be biology (though my wife’s handwriting is pretty hard to read too), but a lot of it must be that I inherited/stole a typewriter from my parents when I was around 12 or so, taught myself to type and used it almost exclusively thereafter.
Incidentally, over the past few years I have come to expect at any time the controversial news from some school district about how they’re completely getting rid of instruction in cursive handwriting. Teach them to read and print the basic letters by second grade, and then it’s on to text-messaging. On the basis of my students’ essays, most of them clearly never expect to rely upon handwriting for anything in their lives beyond printing a brief message on a Post-It note, and to be honest, I’m not sure I can come up with a counter argument.
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Boys’ fine-motor disadvantage is a real issue (my daughter’s teacher says that many of the boys in the pre-K class don’t even like to draw pictures), and ironically, treating boys and girls identically will cause them to be different. A more prudent approach might be to go easy with the handwriting on kids with fine-motor issues, perhaps letting them use a keyboard until their bodies catch up, and allowing their reading to progress beyond their handwriting ability. Imagine the frustration that a child experiences whose hands and brain just aren’t ready for writing, but who is expected to do so!
As to traditional cursive, I think kids should be taught to decipher it, but it seems ridiculously over-elaborate, too far from printed English, and hard to read. When was the last time you made a cursive Q? I can’t even remember how you do it, or most other capital cursive letters. There’s an alternative script available in some textbooks called “The Italic Handwriting Series,” available on Amazon. I’ve never used it, but parents seem to like it, and the cursive script is elegant, stream-lined, and very readable.
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“The large and consistent differences Laura cites, are always found in cases where the societal influence is huge. ”
bj, can you elaborate on this? Are you talking only about handwriting differences between the sexes, or about sex differences in general? I’m inclined to agree with you if you mean the former, but disagree if the latter.
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Rosalynde: I do mean the latter: that is, in situations where large differences in gender are reported, societal influences have simply not been controlled for adequately (that is, societal influences are present and huge).
But, I’m setting a really low bound for myself. I think that the societal influences are nearly impossible to control for (our lives are so influenced by gender). So, under my criteria, examination of an adult population in our gender-dominated world isn’t going to be able to show me that the gender differences were not the result of societal influences.
The kinds of studies at the edge that show directly address the role of societal influences are ones, that, for example, test preferences in newborn infants, or the story of the boy who was raised as a girl (fascinating report, though tragic).
That doesn’t negate the reasonably well documented differences between young girls & boys and the way they draw pictures (Incidentally, this difference can’t be attributed simply to fine motor skills — to draw on my n of 1 of each sex, my daughter was very early in developing the fine motor control required to draw — she was drawing recognizable faces at 2 1/2. My son is a scribbler at 3 1/4. But, he has great fine motor skills when it comes to using a screwdriver, or turning an allen wrench or opening a bottle). But, the difference in drawing, detected at 4, certainly isn’t developing in the _absence_ of societal differences in the way we treat boys and girls.
I’d be interested in hearing what data people do thinks shows “large differences between the genders that _cannot_ be explained by societal influences.”
bj
PS: Mind you, I am not saying that the fact that we can’t prove that the differences aren’t due to “nurture”/societal influence mean that the differences are due to nurture (that’s some kind of logical fallacy). That’s why my sentences are full of awkward negatives.
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Can you get Ian into some sort of intensive summer program, and get them to approve him for normal kindergarten on the strength of that?
Alternately, I wonder if there is some way he could do kindergarten in the AM and then hang out with a college kid (with instructions to talk a lot) in the afternoon? At least in pre-K, the afternoon is usually a much less productive, much less academic time of day. The half day would give his teacher a breather, and him the chance to interact one-on-one with an adult. Ideally, there would be some sort of pull-out special ed thing at school that would accomplish the same thing.
First priority is probably to contact the formidable Catherine Johnson of kitchentablemath.blogspot.com. She has two autistic boys and is a veteran of the special ed system. According to her, special ed families are the only ones with real rights in the educational system. She might be quite inspiring!
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n = 2 xys, here. My boys hate drawing and handwriting. The oldest one had to be forced to draw pictures up until a year ago. Didn’t know how to properly color in objects until kindergarten. Boxes of fantastic art supplies went unopened. Which was heart breaking for me, since I spent years going to art school in the evenings. I provided every opportunity and he refused. He’s getting more into it, now that he’s turning eight. Still, his hand writing is the worst in the class.
The youngest one is receiving therapy for his poor fine motor skills, but I suppose he shouldn’t be included in my limited sample. He’s not representative.
So, onto Amy’s third comment. Maybe a part time regular ed/part time special ed might be the right way to go. However, full time special ed is not going to happen. No way. He’ll be treated like he’s a moron and ignored.
I’m going to be able to keep him out of full time special ed next year, because I’m finally up on the laws. Also, now I have a report from a neurologist who says he’s reading at a first grade level and may have hyperlexia. She reported that he was very smart. He’s going to go through another battery of tests (poor kid). If the IQ tests show that his noggin is working okay, then we’re set.
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This brings back a memory.
I’m 14 years old, I’m in school in England for a year. The Maths teacher, a very posh woman without a trace of the northern accent most of my classmates are sporting, is handing back exercise books by flipping them across the room from her desk. She stops at mine.
“Sara!” she shouts. I raise my hand. “Sara, you know there are BOYS in this class with better handwriting than you!!!”
cue giant blush…
The other question is whether there is a genetic component to handwriting. My grandmother’s handwriting was an awful chickenscratch that most couldn’t read – but I always could. ANd my mother’s writing is getting more and more like her mothers, and mine looks an awful lot like my mothers. Genetic pressures on muscles controlling the hand and fingers?
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bj — “My son is a scribbler at 3 1/4. But, he has great fine motor skills when it comes to using a screwdriver, or turning an allen wrench or opening a bottle). ”
I’m not sure, but I think that those are different types of fine motor skills. Last year, I was mystified why Ian could operate a computer mouse and peel stickers like a pro, but couldn’t draw a circle. His OT said that they were different skills.
Even if the skills are there, sometimes the interest isn’t. Why is your son not interested in drawing? Why did my oldest boy hate it so much?
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I had a problem writing until I realized I was a lefty. We’re talking pencil triangles, extra teachers, etc.
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Perhaps laptops are moving into schools at a fast enough rate that this will be a moot point in a few years, but if I were a secondary school teacher lecturing to students who didn’t know cursive, I’d go apeshit. Unless those kids can print very quickly, it would take them an appallingly slow time to take down whatever they wanted to write.
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Good question
Why do men and women have such different handwriting styles?…
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I’d be interested in hearing what data people do thinks shows “large differences between the genders that _cannot_ be explained by societal influences.”
That strikes me as begging the question. I’d be interested in knowing why the seperation of the one from the other is desirable and meaningful — it’s not like scoietal influences spring up out of thin air.
On average, males have a thinner link between the brain hemispheres, brought on by a hormone release during fetal development. As a result, men often excel at tasks that dominate one hemisphere or the other at a time (e.g. complex maths or mental visualization), while women are often better at tasks that rely on input from both hemispheres (e.g. spacial placement or detecting an insincere expression of truth or emotion).
Possibly also related to the above, the intelligence curve for men is flatter with long tails (many men tend to stand out from the species average by being either really smart or really dumb), while the intelligence curve for women tends to be taller and narrower (women tend not to strongly deviate from the species average).
After sexual maturity, there is the issue of body composition and hormonal cycles. Males tend to develop in a muscular direction wih a broadening of the upper body, females have a higher percentage of body fat and broaden at the hips. Males maintain a stable production of testosterone, women maintain a menstrual cycle governed by a complex interaction of multiple hormones.
For vice, men typically prefer visual imagery (porn) while women tend to prefer an appeal to thoughts and feelings (the bodice-rippers from the supermarket checkout stand).
Place a baby in the presence of a group of adults, and although a few proud grandfathers may take their turn, the women will dominate the child’s attention.
The differences are likewise evident long before sexual maturity. Some have already noted the difference in development time for fine motor skills generally, and girls also tend to develop speech and writing skills sooner.
Put a group of even very young boys together, and give them no direction as to how they should occupy the time, and nine times out of ten they’ll come up with an aggressive, competitive game. Do the same thing with young girls and they tend to rapidly organize social constructs on the basis of common interests. Put these two groups together, and the outliers will then cross over: a couple of the girls will join the game and maybe one or two of the boys will enter the conversation.
Similarly, if even a young girl comes to an authority figure with a problem, most of the time the problem isn’t the issue, her feelings are: she was hurt by the problem, and now she wants a listening ear and calm reassurance. Boy, same situation: he came to you because he wants the problem solved, and believes you have the resources to do it.
A better question would be, how could one NOT expect differences as drastic as these, and so readily observable across the age spectrum, to have vast consequences including the very construction and application of societal influences?
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For anon above, I’d mention that I stopped using cursive in junior high school and did just fine all the way up through medical school and into the hospitals with just printing. I’ve filled pages of medical charts with neatly printed (and quite legible, according to the nurses) patient notes and it never seemed to take me any longer than the folks writing illegibly in cursive.
Point being, fast legible printing is a perfectly reasonable skill to substitute for obsolete cursive.
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Why, when we note gender differences, must we always hark back to citing to biology?
I believe this is obviously appropriate in some cases and clearly inappropriate in others. BJ remarks that almost all studies can be explained by social factors. This is probably true, but not necessarily relevant (as BJ agrees in a later post). In the grand sweep of history, we have far more than just early 21st century cultures to survey. For many gender differences, we find the exact same differences being remarked on in society after society, no matter how radically they differ in other ways. Moreover, as Anony-mouse points out, some gender differences can be studied in infants, for whom socialization is not yet a plausible explanation.
There is no question that biological explanations are leaned on too heavily by some people. Here in the U.S., I can’t tell you how many times biology has been used to explain why women are more likely than men to be on the political left. These theories never show any recognition of the fact that, in most countries, women are more likely than men to be on the political right.
What I’ve never understood is the hostility to biological explanations for gender differences. Men and women are just radically different physically. Men are bigger, have more upper body strength, grow facial hair and more body hair generally, have voices that deepen at puberty, have thoraxes of a different construction, and, of course, the two genders have reproductive systems with almost nothing in common. And yet we’re supposed to believe that they have no biological differences in their brains? The only way I’m buying this theory is if I decide to believe in a genderless soul. I don’t think there’s an enormous amount of difference between the brains of men and women biologically. (In fact, it’s clear to me that there’s not, just as an alien with no concept of gender would still be able to tell that men and women are from the same species, despite their obvious physical differences.) But there are certainly differences.
I should point out, by the way, that we live in a world which is the least gender-dominated that it has ever been (in Western societies anyway), and BJ still believes that we live in a gender-dominated world (and I agree). If there were any actual examples of societies which were not dominated by gender, the idea that gender differences are almost entirely social rather than biological would carry more weight. There are no such societies, though, and never have been.
I think the reason why people (particularly women) bristle at mental gender differences is because it has been commonplace in the past for male intellectuals to assert that gender differences prove the superiority of men. This is balderdash, since natural facts cannot lead us to evaluative conclusions without an evaluative premise. The fact that men are almost certainly more aggressive than women by nature does not imply that men are better unless you smuggle in the premise “More aggressive by nature equals better.” Nor does the greater male propensity for violence say that men are worse than women unless one smuggles in the premise “More likely to commit violence equals worse.” I am not here questioning the validity of at least some evaluative premises. I am merely pointing out that these premises are rarely argued for; they’re just assumed.
I personally have always had the suspicion that a great many people who take huge offense at gender differences have internalized the societal lie that feminine equals bad and masculine equals good and thus want to show that women are every bit as good at things that have traditionally been considered masculine, since they believe those things are the important things. But a woman is never going to hold the world arm-wrestling championship and no amount of wishing will make it so. Nobody seems to believe that this implies the superiority of men in anything but strength. Why would we assume the superiority of men if it turns out that men have marginally better mathematical abilities by birth? (Men do appear to be significantly better on average at spatial rotation. I speak as a male mathematician by profession who is not particularly gifted at spatial rotation and has met many female mathematicians who outstrip me in that respect.) Why would we assume the superiority of women if it turns out they have marginally greater verbal abilities? (Women appear to have significantly larger working vocabularies on average, though receptive vocabulary is about equal. I speak as a man with a working vocabulary significantly larger than my wife’s or any of my female friends or coworkers.) The evaluative premise “smarter equals better,” despite its apparently widespread acceptance, is pretty clearly false. Why should we care if it turns out that women are smarter on average in every single way?
By the way, my older brother has the most beautiful handwriting I’ve ever seen. You can still tell it’s by a man, though.
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For anony-mouse, when I was doing my final high school exams, I made the effort to time myself doing cursive and print writing. My time on a given piece of text was exactly the same, and my print writing was more readable. I’ve never written cursive since.
More generally my (female) writing is excrable, so it’s probably not particularly “feminine”. I agree with bj; society’s influence is so pervasive that it is hard to distinguish underlying gender differences with society pressure. Certainly I think colour preferences are completely society determined, for example.
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A bit of anecdotal evidence for the fine-motor-skills explanation. My handwriting and my mother’s were very similar (i.e., equally awful), when both of us took the trouble to write carefully. I’m a guy. She was one of those people who, though left-handed, was forced as a child to write with her right hand.
Whether the fine-motor-skills difference is itself biological or cultural is a different question. (Maybe little boys are encouraged to spend their time on things that don’t develop these skills.)
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I got a load of the it’s-all-social-conditioning stuff back in a grad school women’s studies seminar. The instructor (a brilliant woman) was adamant that every sex difference (including size and strength) was the product of social convention. It sounded wrong to me, but I didn’t have any solid counter-arguments.
I left grad school after 2.5 years with my MA and immediately experienced a feeling of immense intellectual freedom. It was like just having left a cult, and various things (like it’s-all-social) suddenly seemed ridiculous.
A few points:
As any mother can tell you (when the guys are at a safe distance), female hormones do make a huge difference to one’s emotional state. Until I had experienced the hormonal rollercoaster twice, I didn’t really believe in PMS. By the time I had my second child, I was a bit more self-aware and suddenly noticing such things as that I was prone to sudden berserker rages while pregnant and mamabearish in my attitude to anyone who tried to get between me and my babies. This was very noticeable, since I’m normally about half Vulcan. (By the way, Vicky Iovine’s Girlfriend’s Guide to Pregnancy has a fine chapter on craziness while pregnant–she’s excellent in dealing with the mental side of motherhood.) I don’t think one really steps off that rollercoaster until one is done breastfeeding. We are animals, and we are affected by our hormones just as much as other mammals are.
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When you’re done cracking this conundrum, how about figuring out why there is a consistent family resemblance in handwriting styles? My terrible scratching resembles that of my brothers, one son (but not the other), and my daughter (neater, but recognizable). Even my lefty brother could sign my checks if he were so inclined.
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In spite of having better than average but not great motor skills (as exhibited in both sports and small object manipulative ability), my cursive script was absolutely atrocious. It improved dramatically somewhere around the age of 45, for no apparent reason. (Still not great). How to explain that? But, yes, it’s pretty well recognized girls have better handwriting than boys, and maintain that edge for the rest of their lives. Perhaps, along with the earlier motor-skill development, they just like things to be prettier. That’s definitely not something boys focus on.
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Please cite your sources anony-mouse (not just a rhetorical question). I’m currently reading the primary literature on many of the general statements you make, and find the primary data underwhelming. To cite a particular instance — the gender differences that are cited in the orienting of newborn girls and boys to female faces v mobiles (Connellan et al 2001). The study finds barely dietectable differences between boys and girls (just barely statistically significant, at levels only acceptable in psychology). This would otherwise be a nice study (it tested newborns, where societal influence was likely to be minimal, and the scoring of preference was done by people who were blind to the gender of the child. There is a possible confound in that the person who was the “face” wasn’t blind to gender). But, it’s an example of study where the differences are tiny, and the distributions for each gender huge. My initial statement was that when the studies are done properly, that’s what I always see — small, even tiny differences, with huge overlaps.
And, on the handwriting issue, I asked my favorite elementary school teacher, and was told that she can’t tell the difference between boys & girls handwriting on a handwriting assignment, in the third grade. She said that perhaps one could tell the differences in earlier grades, and furthermore that in the third grade, she can tell the difference between boys and girls, when handwriting isn’t the subject being tested. Sounds to me like societal influence playing a pretty big role, at least by the third grade.
bj
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PS: I didn’t say that the differences in cognition between genders are societal, merely that I am ultimately unconvinced by every study that says that they are not.
bj
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I’m a guy, and my writing actually isn’t that bad. It’s certainly not fit for writing fancy documents on parchment, but people have no difficulty reading it. And it’s actually gotten somewhat better over time, mostly since I’ve gone from writing virtually never to actually writing sometimes.
Re printing vs cursive, I think that cursive is excessively ornate and prone to useless fanciness, and pure printing is too slow for most applications(not that cursive is that much faster if you’re doing everything properly, but it’s a bit better). The best version for most purposes is printing with a cursive attitude – don’t lift the pen too often, make things flow together, but still form each letter based on the actual letter and not some bizarre abstraction of it known only to banners in elementary classrooms.
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Where I live, all the kids are educated together. I have a friend who has a son who is speech delayed. He’s going to regular public school.
Do you have a choice in the matter? If you do, do what you think is best for your child! Don’t put him in a “special” school because that’s what the administrators want.
Just my $.02
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My cursive always lacked. In high school (in Ireland no less), I’d get into trouble, because my attempts at the Palmer Method (you did know that was the name for what we call “cursive” here in the US, didn’t you?) lacked. Lackingly lacked.
Later, I attended a police academy, where everything was required to be in block letters. And black ink. It seems that blue ink fades over time. So my handwriting was fine for a decade plus. Until…
Then, I took Japanese. And had to learn to write the 3 different writing systems that are used in Japanese. Which also made my English writing devolve into chicken scratch. Now I can write badly in 4 different ways: hiragana, katakana, kanji and romaji (roman letters).
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Actually the real difference between genders is very minor it’s almost solely based on how the individual perceives them self and feels more comfortable with being associated as. Regardless of hormones in puberty and physical gender there is a mental gender which both are set in the first trimester of pregnancy that will remain unaffected by hormones later in life. This mental gender tells the individual what they truly are if they don’t live by what society wants them to be given their physical gender or how much much they let the puberty hormones control them. How ever as life rolls on the effects at puberty subside and the true gender if they suppressed it will start to eat at them. Some people are physical born both gendered “Intersexed” but still usually remain single gender with mental. The mental gender is usually too hard too tell until mid-puberty unless they child is very open or the extent is very extreme.
Effects of society and education: Intelligence, vocabulary, hand writing, posture, emotions.
Effects of puberty hormones-but changeable by some means: voice, hair, minor bone shaping, muscle growth.
Effects of mental gender-can be voluntarily hidden at any age after 5yr: Basic instincts regarding interaction of environment, preferred social role in a relationship, preferred voice pitch range, what one sees their body having “phantom limb syndrome” or mental self roadmap, sexual aerosol type.
Ever see a guy that was not around monks or too deep in education not interested in porn. Ever see a guy speaking in a higher pitch then natural or a girl in a lower pitch? A guy not like to talk about his package and try to hide it or a girl that wrapped or reduced her breasts?
Ones whose mental gender does not match their physical gender and are not aloud to express their true self go through most of the life til at least collage age or older having to live as much as they can stand of their physical gender. This would be akin of being in prison for 20yrs only seeing life happen but not able to join it they way they wanted if they couldn’t stand even acting like their physical gender.
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A research piece in the May/June 1998 issue of the JOURNAL OF EDUCATIONAL RESEARCH showed that the fastest and most legible handwriters don’t do “pure” cursive or “pure” printing – high-speed high-legibility handwriters use print-like shapes joined some, NOT all, of the time (making the easiest joins and skipping the rest) – very much the “printing with a cursive attitude” that another poster mentioned, and also much like the Italic handwriting method which stands in-between “pure” printing and “pure” cursive. For more on the matter, visit my Handwriting Repair website at http://www.learn.to/handwrite
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A research piece in the May/June 1998 issue of the JOURNAL OF EDUCATIONAL RESEARCH showed that the fastest and most legible handwriters don’t do “pure” cursive or “pure” printing – high-speed high-legibility handwriters use print-like shapes joined some, NOT all, of the time (making the easiest joins and skipping the rest) – very much the “printing with a cursive attitude” that another poster mentioned, and also much like the Italic handwriting method which stands in-between “pure” printing and “pure” cursive. For more on the matter, visit my Handwriting Repair website at http://www.learn.to/handwrite
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A research piece in the May/June 1998 issue of the JOURNAL OF EDUCATIONAL RESEARCH showed that the fastest and most legible handwriters don’t do “pure” cursive or “pure” printing – high-speed high-legibility handwriters use print-like shapes joined some, NOT all, of the time (making the easiest joins and skipping the rest) – very much the “printing with a cursive attitude” that another poster mentioned, and also much like the Italic handwriting method which stands in-between “pure” printing and “pure” cursive. For more on the matter, visit my Handwriting Repair website at http://www.learn.to/handwrite
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As always, a routine cleaning and sealing schedule every couple months is recommended.
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Well for me, it really depends on the person whether he or she has good handwriting or not. We have our own handwriting styles, and that’s one of our unique features. Wait; did you just say that the dentist scrapped your teeth with ice pick? HAHA! So funny! Well, good luck on your midterms!
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