This will be a hard post.

It’s not because I’m going to write about an emotionally riveting topic. I have no additional medical diagnoses, and I haven’t gotten any new pets today.

I’m just trying to write this post based on my own chicken-scratch notes.

My second grade teacher would give me a C- on my handwriting grade.

I used to have an easily readable, neat script. One of my high school teachers paid me to address the invitations for her daughter’s wedding. I was no calligrapher, but I was way above average.

Still, I had to improve. My kindergarten teacher and my mother rode me like Seabiscuit over the letter “r.” Mine looked more like the letter “v.” I was in too much of a hurry to get to the next letter to spend the time it took to make my pencil go straight back up the downstroke and then curve beautifully to the right to make a perfect “r.”

Don’t mock me if I didn’t use the correct terminology to describe the action of creating the letter “r.” I don’t know all the technical verbiage for handwriting, but elementary public school teachers in Alabama do. They are mandated to teach cursive writing by the end of the third grade.

Lexi’s Law went into effect on August 1, 2016, so this is not a new law. It was named after Alabama State Representative Dickie Drake’s granddaughter, after Mr. Drake was concerned that his granddaughter, her peers, and all public school students were not receiving consistent instruction in cursive writing.

Lexi’s Law received ample bipartisan support, an easy one for them to agree upon and push through. I can’t say it isn’t a good cause. 

The Alabama Reading Initiative’s Handwriting Guidance provides an excellent explanation for why teaching handwriting is important, and it’s worthy of a word-for-word citation:

“According to Moats and Tolman (2019), young and struggling writers tend to devote most of their attention to letter formation, sustaining the effort of the physical act of writing, and managing spelling, spacing, and punctuation. In the beginning, this is a lot of work, and the simple act of getting words on the page takes all the cognitive resources available.”

I could adjust that slightly and make it apply to all writing:

“According to Marla (forever and for all time), all writers struggle to maintain attention due to the cat or the dog trying to sit in their laps, so we stare out the window until we think of something else we need (or want) to do, which doesn’t take long. We try our best to keep our butts in our seats until we get to at least 500 words, and maybe by then we’ll be cooking with gas. This is always a lot of work, whether you’re a beginner or a bestseller. The simple act of getting words on the page takes all the cognitive resources available.”

I’m working on this as I watch TV, so I’m expending some of my cognitive resources on keeping up with the Men’s Final Four. Go Auburn. Boo Florida.

But I’d still like to set my computer and my notebook aside and pick up my phone and start looking at the cheap stuff on Shein and order some $5.55 blouses before more tariffs go into effect. 

I’d like to fix myself a bowl of Cinnamon Toast Crunch.

I’d like to get up and work on a puzzle that has been going for almost two months.

But I don’t.

Writing is just hard. We are always trying to think of the best word or phrase to communicate our message, which takes tremendous brain power and sometimes a quick Google search. There are lots of us who think we are never good enough and never will be. But we keep chipping away, one day at a time, until our work begins to take shape and we find our identity in the act of creating it.

So thank you, Mr. Drake, for pushing this law through. I truly do understand your reasoning behind sponsoring it. But maybe next time, you all could find a way to fund school resource officers and work on strengthening school safety. 

Schools are sitting ducks in more ways than one, I guess. Easy prey for overly ambitious legislators who want to make a difference.

Maybe our students will need to address wedding invitations one day.

One final thought, Mr. Drake. Your granddaughter is named Lexi, which is ironic, given that a law mandating handwriting instruction is named for her. Most of us word people will get it without an explanation.

The prefix “lexi-” comes from the Latin “lexis”, which came from ancient Greek, and means “of or pertaining to words.” 

Handwritten or typed, it makes no difference.

Beautiful words. Ugly words. Long words. Short words. Misspelled words.

This was a hard post, but I hope I found the right words.