Studio8 - Uniting the Arts

Interesting article here ( below).

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/15213845/

Look at the "black and white jam" for handwriting samples by Panta and me.

Do you write by hand?

I compose everything with a pencil on paper, I think I have said here before. Everything except posts on StudioEight, that is:

Poems, letters, fiction, journals, sketches ( for both prose and comix) and all other forms are written on paper with a pencil-- a highschool clipboard made of masonite is balanced on my knees for a table.

No wonder I have back problems!



--Z

Hey Zlatko!

I didn't see your handwritten post... gotta go back and look. I posted a page from my journal, too. (I know you saw it because you replied so kindly )

I heard this story about cursive on Washington Post Radio yesterday (a new radio station around here. I don't know if the station is local or national).

Interesting take on it. They were saying it's possible that our kids (or grandkids) may not be able to write with a pen or pencil at ALL some time in the near future because of computers. Names of fonts. That's all they'll know.

Ha! I sorta doubt that! That's exaggerating a bit, I'd say.

Thank you for the link to the story!

I keep a journal (as you know) and write in it with pen and pencil but usually when I write poetry, I type.

Why? Because my handwriting is atrocious! It's scribble scrabble! I should have been a doctor! I can't read half the poems I wrote pre-typewriter days. But I still have them... piled up in a box. *smile*

When I go out of town... (the only time I'm away from the computer and thank god for that!) ... I write on anything. Hotel paper. Brown paper bags. Napkins. You name it. Whatever's handy when the inspiration hits (and in my journal, of course). Some of it gets typed up. Some of it gets tossed because I can't read it.

i'm already noticing that with myself -- i've gotten a lot less fluent in handwriting than i still was about ten years ago.

it's frightening; i've always been writing a lot, and i have always been a fast and smooth writer, enjoying the flow of words right from my hand through pen onto paper... a sensuous, almost sensual act full of the rapture of speed and movement.

i'm still writing by hand, but a lot less since i am using a computer.
and i have found that my handwriting has become more clumsy, more awkward - maybe not in appearance, but i can feel it in the act of writing.
i stumble. i hang. i skip and struggle. something that has never happened to me before since i learned how to write.
it's like a river that was partly frozen already by a winter about to turn the flow into ice....

i don't like it.

one of the tools i use for working with dysgraphic students is teaching them cursive.

It's a lovely exercise in freedom of movement and it inspires a hit of adrenalin to make 'it' right.

I always apologize for the old fashioned 'Q' and allow for a printed sort with a flourish of a line. But I unabashedly go for it with 'L', 'G' and 'F' and 'T'.
Those whose name starts with 'M' can feel magnificent. All letters are dramatic and the use of cursive can be a game.

Here, English is learned as a foreign language, and knowing cursive is like being initiated into a secret cult.

Ssssh! Elite ceremonial sect. No printers allowed.

Perhaps when all the younger generation forgets any language other than text messaged english, re-learning cursive will be utterly cool.

It also helps me to teach it, for i have no choice but to make my own impossible scrawl readable.

Dear Ladies:

I think the pressure to produce some readable ( and not terribly ugly) calligraphy for my comix helps me be aware of how clumsy my writing often is. As for "cursive composition"-- it's a thing of the past. I'm talking about the junior-high vintage comps I turned in ( that would have been around 1957-58) routinely for my English classes.

When I first began teaching Freshman Composition at the university level ( 1968), I required my students to write in ink. And no one-- I mean--NO ONE wrote in capital letters. In a set of 25 papers, one or two would be typewritten.

When I retired from teaching in 2000, all the compositions turned in to me were typewritten.

And today ( my wife is still teaching-- but Math, so she doesn't see many compositions with many words . . .), because of universal plagiarism, and I mean UNIVERSAL in American schools-- cut-and-pasting all composition assignments from the Internet-- there is, of course, no handwriting because of the need to rely on theft and cheating. Only in-class comps, and there are very few of those, are handwritten in any form.

Some of my non-education-savvy friends think some of the above statements about student plagiarism are too harsh. But I maintain constant contact with many college-level teachers and rely on their reports, as well as my own observations, and of course, first-hand experience during my alleged "career" ( full-time teaching of composition for thirty-three years).

The illiteracy level of college graduates in this country is truly appalling, and the reason is that they have never had to tread the difficult path of learning to rely on themselves when they compose.

I blame management-- not faculty or students. In American colleges, few college deans or presidents will back the faculty on the plagiarism issue. At my wife's 12,000 student college, her president even wrote and circulated some articles forgiving plagiarism by students and professional writers-- calling it "patch writing."

While I recognize there is a debate about older definitions of plagiarism in the "larger world", and intellectual property rights in general ( viz-- Doreen's latest remarks on photo permissions . . .)

(good article on intellectual property rights and plagiarism--URL below)


http://www.caslon.com.au/ipguide16.htm

, students, allegedly "practicing" to improve their skills in composition within college composition classes ( and high school also, of course), need to learn to form their own sentences.

Today, many assignments are clipped from Internet articles, or simply purchased from online "term paper mills":

( Schoolsucks.com is just one of the more celebrated ones):

http://www.schoolsucks.com/


Here's a lengthy discussion of plagiarism in schools today ( 2002):

http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_q ... i_n9310598

with many of the aspects of academic stuggle with the issue discussed. I am not in agreement with much of this article, and wrote a lengthy article myself published in COLLEGE ENGLISH refuting Howard's thesis about "patchwriting."

The outcome was for my English department to sign on to Turnitin.com:

http://www.turnitin.com/static/home.html

Which prompted a student protest and Washington Post article:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/co ... 01800.html

in which the students protested the violation of the intellectual property rights.

The question most analysts asked was:

Does using Internet material in your school essays violate IP rights? Are students vitally concerned about that?

Here's a link to a good Slate.com article on professional plagiarism and all the "furore" over ( famous, successful history writer) Stephen Ambrose:


http://www.slate.com/?id=2060618




Anyway, you may wish to ignore much of this material on plagiarism, or you may find it informative. I hope so.

My point about handwriting was this:

When I asked students to perform on essays in class and write during a given hour in their own words without reference material, I sidestepped the plagiarism problem, at least for those rather short, limited assignments.

On longer, term-paper assignments, I constructed many "tutorial" sessions one-on-one with me, so we were able to avoid plagiarism before they turned their papers in. Needless to say, this was a hell of a lot of work.

If handwriting disappears, no one can do use my Internet-clipping avoidance strategy any more.

Nice talking to you,


Zlatko

( caution-- humor and irony ahead . . .)


Again, dear ladies:

Just in case you wonder what all those plagiarized papers and the madness of dealing with the problem could lead to. I offer the picture below.

Just like me, Barbara ( now a quite dramatically changed, but still attractive lady in her late fifties) has had ( over about twenty years of teaching English at the same school where I used to work) to read thousands of those bogus compositions.

The strain recently led her to publish this book ( which is perfectly real, I guarantee).

I like Barbara a lot, though I think her book is pretty silly and illustrates what some people will do to pursue fame and money.

She and I have known each other about 25 years. Yet I doubt she'll pose with me, wearing a bikini, on the beach for the cover of a book of memoirs.

Also, I can't vouch for her handwriting.

Or Arnold's.

Laughing,

Zlatko

I love handwriting. I also noticed that most of the kids don't like to write in cursiva and that my own cursiva had changed a lot with the years. Now I write most of the time in a mix of cursive and imprenta minuscula... it's the way I feel I write faster.
I can't write that way in school and it's a great effort sometimes to write something legible in the kid's works in cursiva... and is very common that from time to time someone of them ask me what I wanted to write in their papers...!! (that is supposed to be said by me!!).

All my poems and stories are written down in cursive before I type them up. I like it that way helps me get it the way I want it to be.
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