“I really dislike the word ‘neat’,” says Rosemary Sassoon. “We say to children - the work must be neat. But what is ‘neat’? It is a frightening word when you are a child.”
Sassoon knows a lot about handwriting: until her retirement, she was one of the world’s leading researchers into how and when a child should be writing. And she knows a lot about typefaces, too: she created one that is used in most classrooms - Sassoon Primary.
On handwriting, she tells the Tes Podagogy podcast (which you can listen to below) that we have become too keen to impose models on children about the “right” way to write.
“It is too didactic - and harmful - to dictate a traditional grip,” Sassoon explains. “What I found is that children who were constantly criticised, it affected them very badly and it affected their ability and desire to write.
“Many unconventional pen holds work perfectly well. The only reason to change a grip is if the pen hold causes them pain - then you have to help them find another way. But if it is working well for them, and they can write as fast as they need to, then they should be left alone.
“Writing is the way you present yourself to the world on paper, it’s the way your body works. For many years, we have been far too didactic about ‘copying the model’.”
No ‘ideal’ grip for handwriting
Sassoon explains that the idea of an “ideal” grip is problematic because grip depends on the tool being used. She believes the shift in young children starting to make marks using felt tip pens rather than coloured pencils has prompted a change in how children learn to hold a pen - and grip that comes quite naturally because of the tool. Unfortunately, this grip then gets criticised.
“Children no longer start with coloured pencils. They start with felt tips,” she says. “In order to get a felt tip, or a biro, or most modern tools, to work, you have to have it upright. You also have to put a degree of pressure on the tip.
“Children, therefore, develop quite an unconventional grip as they cannot keep a pen upright and press hard with the tripod grip very easily. They get criticised for it - but it is the tool that is making them adopt that grip.
“Writing is all about muscles. If your muscles get used to writing with a felt tip, it is very difficult to change.”
Getting handwriting right
She adds that people seem to be overly preoccupied with pen grip, and that other elements crucial to handwriting get lost as a result.
“If we’re going to have handwriting continuing for the next generation, we really do need to think about how we make it easier for the writer,” she stresses. “Teachers have got to think more about the practical issues - the type of tool, the angle and type of paper, the seating, the height of the table. And - most of all - not dictating a model to every child.”
That includes not dictating cursive writing, she says: “The idea of having continuous cursive for young children is absolutely ridiculous. It makes life so much more difficult for them when learning and it is very unusual to see an adult writing completely joined-up writing. As you get older, you need those rests as the words get longer.“
Spacing and dyslexic learners
Sassoon is perhaps best known for the typeface she (reluctantly) gave her name to - Sassoon Primary. It arose by accident - Sassoon was a successful designer but was approached by a local special school headteacher with a question about the readability of text.
Sassoon was drawn in by the fact that pupils liked fonts with a particular level of spacing between words, and then between the letters of the word - something that recent research has found is crucial for dyslexic learners (see this recent article about Comic Sans).
“I started to look at optimum spacing for children for reading,” she says. “I went to a school for dyslexic children and quite a lot of the children there liked Times Italic. I would not think Times Italic was very legible.
“So I got together four different types of font, and I sent out an assessment to schools and the children said they liked the one with the ‘flick up’ at the end of each letter - it made the text look like words rather than separate letters.”
In short, spacing mattered. So when she developed her own typeface, she focused on spacing and put exit strokes in to create the effect the pupils had seemed to find more readable.
Ban the ‘neatness’
In the rest of the podcast, she talks at length about everything from typeface design to the lack of rigorous research in children’s typefaces and handwriting. And she also makes it clear that our obsession with “neatness” needs to stop.
“The one thing I said to the national curriculum council was that children should have two levels of handwriting,” she says. “They should have a very legible handwriting for important work, and a less legible writing when they wrote things for themselves.”
You can listen to the podcast below, or type “Tes - the education podcast” into your podcast platform.
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