Thankfully, the art of handwriting is not completely lost. I ran across several recent stories, mostly related to Zaner-Bloser’s handwriting contest sponsorship that remind us how handwriting is taught at a young age. What pleasantly surprised me in this age of emails, text messages and voice mail was that Zaner Bloser had 157,000 entrants from around the country.

The National Handwriting Contest is sponsored by Zaner-Bloser, a language arts and reading company. Each year, schools that use Zaner-Bloser handwriting as their handwriting text may select one student from each grade level for the contest.

This year, students in grades one and two submitted manuscript samples, while older students submitted cursive samples. Entry forms on the Zaner-Bloser Web site asked students to first write their full name and then write down a designated sentence.

The final portion of the entry form asked students to write why neat handwriting is important. Colleen’s response was simply, ‘‘so people can read it.”

Entry forms were grouped into the categories of grades one and two, grades two through four, and five through eight. The Zaner-Bloser Web site provides a legibility key to help entrants use the correct size, slant, spacing and shape in their entries. Entries are judged according to these four principles.

According to Zaner-Bloser, this year there were 157,000 entries; 6,500 from Maryland.

Winners are grouped into two categories based on their school, public or private⁄Catholic. Judges choose one winner from each grade level in each category at the state level.

From these, national grade level winners will be chosen in each grade in both categories. The 16 national winners will then compete against each other to be named the Grand National Champion.

You can read the whole article here.

UPDATE: More articles, here, here, and here. And a completely different handwriting contest here.