Bad handwriting causing confusion

Press, 4 February 1980, Page 10

Bad handwriting causing confusion

By

JUDSON BENNETT

When a leading mailorder firm recently offered bargain-price garden furniture, orders poured in by every post. The problem was that only around 80 per cent of them could be accepted. The other 20 per cent had to be returned .. . clerical staff simply couldn’t read the customers’ instructions! All of which confirms the current belief that more confusion is being caused by bad handwriting than by any other form of communication.

And it’s getting worse, according to Dr Frederick Sayle, expert in human communication at America’s University of Southern California, who declares:

“Despite the torrents of typed media, the majority of written communication is still through the' me-

dium of handwriting. According to our researchers, only one in 20 adults writes clearly and only one in a thousand still uses the clasic copperplate hand.” So what are the chances of anyone reading what you have written? Pretty remote it seems.

A leading London workstudy consultant, Sean Thornton, said: “There’s no doubt, our handwriting is getting worse every year. For a lot of us, penmanship has become as obsolete as smoke signals or beating the drum.” The increasing serious concern over our handwriting is shared, not surprisingly,- by the Post Office. In Britain alone. 5M letters and parcels end up in “dead letter” sections each year becuase of poorly-written addresses. And recently, a British

Leyland punch-card operator misread a poorly writtten card and made over IM wrong invoices!. Researchers say that the world’s worst writers are executives, insurance men, engineers, and doctors. Recently, for instance, a London firm of pharmacists was given a pre-

scription for a narcotic. Telling the applicant to wait a moment, the alert assistant telephoned the police. The applicant was a drug addict. He’d stolen a prescription pad from a surgery and forged the doctor’s signature.

But the alert assistant knew the prescription was

too clearly written to be written by a legitimate doctor!

Today, many firms regard good handwriting as a vital factor in applicant appraisal. Experts claim that most common causes of bad handwriting are haste and carelessness. Then the sloppy, can’t-be-bothered style of handwriting becomes a persistent habit. Most sloppy writers fail to close the letter “o”, fail to dot “i’s” or cross “t’s”. And most poor writers don’t form ptoperly the letters e, n, m, d, r, a, h, and b, and make loops on letters that shouldn’t have loops such as “t” and “i”.

And letters most frequently confused are “o,” “a”, “u”. and “v”. Auditors find that most mistakes with numerals occur with T and 7, followed by 3, 5 and 8.

“Part of the background to bad handwriting starts with children who are frequently asked to do too much writing before they’ve mastered the manual dexterity,” says one leading authority.' “For writing requires fine muscular control — in fact, the precise co-or-dination of nearly 500 muscles is involved, so children tend to get tired and tense in the process.” One prominent German chemical firm, fed up with poor handwriting, sent an executive to the guilty department with a fistful of incomprehensible sales slips. As the slips were circulated among the clerks, they were asked: “What do you think they mean?” After the red faces, there was a noticeable improvement.

Because they never learned to write properly, many employees these days are being taught to print.