Writing

When David was 12 years old it became apparent that he was having significant difficulty writing. He struggled on, but his writing did not improve and he was regularly having his work returned by teachers because it was illegible. If he tried to write painstakingly slowly he could produce work that was barely legible, but there was not enough time to do this during examinations. David was very intelligent, an avid reader, an excellent debater, and good at sports. He was well coordinated in every manual task except writing, and was physically healthy. No cause for his difficulty could be found. At high school and university, he was given permission to type his examination papers and obtained excellent results. He is now a professor of law. He still cannot write legibly, but has had many papers and a number of books published. He uses a combination of dictation and typing instead of writing. This chapter deals with the mechanics of handwriting, that is, the formation of letters and their arrangement on the page. In contrast with disorders of reading and spelling, such difficulties have received little attention. This is partly because writing is a skill that cannot be easily evaluated by standardized tests, and partly because significant impairment of writing skill seems to be relatively uncommon. Unfortunately, this lack of knowledge means that children with specific writing difficulty are often misunderstood and maligned. Assessment of writing should form part of a comprehensive assessment, as described in Chapter 2. It is impossible to score a sample of writing in a precise way. In practice, samples of writing are usually evaluated by an experienced tester. Three samples of writing are obtained: a passage of free composition on a particular topic, a piece of dictation, and a copy of some printed material. In the case of the free composition, the child is usually given a limited amount of time, such as five minutes. In the other two tests, he is timed to see how long he takes.