But, if they had to handwrite their essays, students would perform writing beyond the capability of ChatGPT, says the health and science writer, Mark Heid. The proponents of instruction in handwriting are out of the closet once again to insist that students become calligraphers in order to write (Post-Dispatch, 1/1/2023).
Once handwriting was the only writing taught in schools, because writing was valued for its neatness, rather than its content. Today writing is valued as evidence of deeper thinking and as a means of personal expression, so beating the fraud of ChatGPw has become a major pedagogical hurdle to save the performance of writing in schools.
Making penmanship integral to writing will only compromise the ability of anyone challenged by fine motor skills. Boys are notoriously clumsy with handwriting, but many a student has been diagnosed as a poor writer because he or she could not produce a readable draft by hand. As a former high school writing teacher, I can testify to the frustrations of reading the scrawl of students who usually have something brilliant to say, but lack the dexterity to show it.
Most in my Boomer generation were taught penmanship to make our ideas look brighter, but the tedious work of handwriting frustrated the rapid movement of our brains and made our writing look attractive, but simple-minded. It is only common sense that a brain focused on producing well-formed letters is not focusing on well-formed ideas. Penmanship becomes automatic for some, but for many professionals, like doctors, lawyers and business executives, careful handwriting is abandoned early in their careers.
Penmanship is not the solution to the deepfakery of ChaGPT. Process writing is. Writing has always been a process, but we have continued to look at first drafts as only drafts, so we practice writing in a single swipe of the pen or keyboard. Yet writing has never been, and is not now, a single-step process.
Until the ChapGPT evolves into a writer of multiple drafts, I would propose that school writing include a handwritten and a typewritten draft, at the minimum. The handwritten draft would be for the writer’s composing, but the keyboard-produced draft would be for public consumption. Some teachers suggest at least one draft be composed in class. Two or more drafts would attest to the work of a human mind, until AI figures out how to produce rough drafts in the handwriting of a school-age writer.
Handwriting is never going to be a preferred means of expression for many in Generation Z, the present school generation. It may be a necessary evil, as it would initially connect the brain to external production of writing in a multi-step process. Discovering that the first thoughts are not always the best thoughts is key to understanding how we write. Scrawls on a page reflect a kind of scrawled thinking that demonstrates how we typically write–first crude, then refined.
Two or more steps gives any of us a chance to succeed in school writing. Handwriting will never be the evidence of quality thinking and first drafts will never suffice as evidence that we have carefully considered our topic or question. Writers should perform what many visual artists also perform in their paintings or sculpture– sketches or under-layers of paint, then the refined product that demonstrates what they can finally accomplish. The authentic writing process will not be easily duplicated by AI, because it is one of the most complex of cognitive processes– writing, then revising a second or third or fourth draft for a specific audience.
Perhaps we are just buying time in the race against computer deep-fakery, but anything that alerts writers to the writing process cannot not be bad for education. In writing with multiple drafts, we are proving we still have the edge on our AI rivals in intelligence. We also enact one of the best-documented facts of writing– that writing is a process, a series of meaning-making actions that produce mostly what we wanted to say.