You write like a girl...
Exterior - Suburban Home - Evening
We open to an early 20th century home in the suburbs. Leaves from an old oak blow across the frosted ground. A warm light welcomes the viewer in through the front window. An impressive figure sits contently in a bergère-style chair.
A dainty hand reaches for an envelope and tears it open. It pulls out a picture of a “handsome” family, a man chuckles to himself, and flips the card over. Exquisite penmanship is revealed.
Honey, how do we know the Williams family again? They sent us a Christmas card. <shudders and thinks to himself> Those kiddos certainly take after their pops.
END SCENE
Ok, I know what you are thinking - Oscar caliber movie script starring Billy Zane, right? <crickets> Shit. I was really hoping to spice up our next topic, handwriting.
Of course most of us don’t use it very often, outside of scribbling your John Hancock on one of those electronic pads at check-out, that almost certainly never has the damned pen attached, so you are forced to use your finger, but what ends up being actually scribbled makes you wonder if you even have the faculty to write your name, and more importantly, why the fuck are we still doing this in 2024?
Ok maybe not all us us, but I think we can all agree there is a stark difference between a man and a women’s handwriting. But why?
According to a study from the National Library of Medicine,
Males and females were shown to have different utilization of a writing‐specific brain region, namely Exner's area, and this has a plausible link to behavioral sex differences in handwriting.
Ok, but in layman’s terms please.
According to a reddit user,
There is an accurate perception that boys develop the fine motor skills necessary to hold a pen or pencil as much as six years later than girls. And then for boys to make correctly shaped symbols in specific horizontal alignment is even more difficult. It seems that boys develop the larger muscle mass for upper body strength before their brains can precisely control the movements of the smaller muscles in the wrists and fingers. There is also scientific analysis demonstrating that a boy’s brain develops many of the abilities for handwriting much later than a girl’s brain. A group that promotes separate schools for boys and girls, National Assoc. for Single Sex Public Education cites research by Harriet Hanlon, Robert Thatcher and Marvin Cline that details the differences in boy and girl brain development. Clearly, then, there are some measurable differences in muscle growth and brain development that result in the broad, general perception that a large percentage of boys are not capable of even average handwriting skills until a few years later than the early grades at school.
So after consulting with our credentialed experts above, It appears it is simply the case that boys are clumsier than girls.
So next time, gentlemen, (ladies - you are fortunate you don’t HAVE to worry about this) you jot down some notes, and when you revisit them days later you now question your overall intelligence for how poorly you have mastered penmanship, don’t you fret, don’t you stew. It’s just millions of years of evolution working against you. Rest easy.