BENGALURU: Bhuma Vinod Gomatam, mother of 13-year-old Akhil Vinod Gomatam, is a worried
parent. The multiple lockdowns due to Covid-19 have impacted Akhil’s handwriting skills.
Online classes and excess screen time have resulted in children struggling to hold a pen/pencil the right way and form the right strokes. Speed, inconsistency, disproportionate spacing of words have taken a beating. City-based handwriting experts are seeing a surge in the number of enquiries from upset parents who want to enrol their children for handwriting classes. “It worries me that my son doesn’t form alphabets correctly and is unable to write even two lines. It has been over a year since he put pen to paper. Which is why I enrolled him for handwriting classes recently,” says Gomatam, a school teacher.
According to the founders of Handwriting House of India, a handwriting institute, there has been a 60 per cent increase in the number of enrolments since last year. Samanvitha Dilip, managing director of the institute, says, “A lot of students between the ages of 7 and 10 are finding it difficult to get the strokes of alphabets. They aren’t able to figure out how big the capital letter should be or how to maintain the same size for all the alphabets in a sentence. Students over 15 years of age have handwritings that lack legibility...they are unsure of spellings thanks to predictive text,” she says.
Shivananda Nayak, who runs handwriting improvement centre Handwriting House, points to an increase in the enrolments between July ’21and October ’21 “We conduct a one-hour class every day for those above seven. There is a lot of scratching and rewriting, and there is an incorrect slant of alphabets. During counselling sessions with students, we find that emotional issues like insecurity and anxiety owing to the pandemic have also impacted handwriting styles,” says Nayak.
Typing on smartphones has led to this peril, believes Prof K C Janardhan, calligraphy maestro. “Parents are worried about children losing the art of good handwriting. The lack of writing during the pandemic may have repercussions in the future. It can lead to cognitive issues, memory loss, and lack of vocabulary skills,” says Janardhan, adding that good handwriting requires years of practice.
Blurring lines
For good handwriting