by Dean Traylor

Created on: July 11, 2011   Last Updated: July 26, 2011

In kindergarten, a girl who read well for her age had one major weakness: her writing was sloppy. Despite being given a sentence at the top of her paper to transpose onto a three-line graph, she failed to make a legible copy of it. The letters were either written backwards, made unusually large, or used inappropriate spaces.  On top of that, she copied the word “The” as “Teh”.

The results were staggering and had a consequence. After a school conference, her parents, the teacher and administrators at the school agreed to hold her back one year.

The following scenario happened in the mid-seventies during a time when the disorder at work – dysgraphia – was barely understood by parents and teachers.  Often the solution then was to hold students back a year in order for them to relearn the ability to write letters.  What wasn’t known was that the condition was usually a sign that something else was affecting the student’s ability to accomplish this skill.

Dysgraphia is a neurological disorder that affects the way somebody writes by hand. Its causes in children are unknown; however, the condition has appeared in adults after injuries to the parietal lobe of the brain (ninds.nih.gov, 2011). Also, children with this condition have been diagnosed with other learning disorders.  

This condition affects fine motor skills, and there are cases in which students with dysgraphia will have problems doing other hand-eye coordinated activities (one such activity mentioned in Wikipedia was tying a shoe). 

It is often characterized by poor handwriting. Also, according to the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke’s website, “NINDS Dysgraphia Information Page”, a person with this condition will have unusual spelling or use incorrect word choices when writing (an example NINDS gave was using “boy” for “child”).

Other symptoms of this condition may include poor use of grammar – in particular, punctuation, spelling, phonic rules, syntax, and sequencing. Also students with dysgraphia may have inconsistent use of print and cursive writing in a written activity; have incomplete or omitted words or letters; and have poor use of position and spacing of words or letters in respect to lines and margins on a paper.

Even the students’ postures can be an indicator of this condition. Many will have unusual grips or hold the writing instrument oddly.

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