Volume 4, 2003, Paper 4
Paper 4: Legibility and the rating of second language
writing
Annie Brown
Handwriting and neatness of presentation has long been seen as a
contaminating factor in the assessment of writing ability. In
particular it has been invoked as a possible reason why girls tend
to perform better in relation to boys on free-response writing
tests than they do in forced-choice formats in tests of first and
second language proficiency.
Over the years there have been a number of studies in the area
of first language writing assessment which have investigated the
impact of handwriting on overall judgements of writing
quality. Some of these have involved correlations of
teacher-assigned ratings of writing quality with independent
judgements of handwriting (e.g. Stewart and Grobe, 1979; Chou,
Kirkland and Smith, 1982). Others have involved experimental
designs where the same essays are presented to raters in different
presentation formats involving good handwriting, poor handwriting
and, in some case, typed scripts (Chase, 1968; Marshall and Powers,
1969; Briggs, 1970, Sloan and McGinnis, 1978. Bull and
Stevens, 1979, McGuire 1995). The findings indicate in
general that the quality of handwriting does have an impact on the
scores awarded to essays, and that increased legibility results in
higher ratings; in all the studies except that by McGuire (1995),
the essays with better handwriting or the typed scripts received
higher scores.
