A kid who has his own illegible handwriting may face some obstacles later on...Bias against poor penmanship can push a score by two standard deviations."People form opinions about the quality of ideas based on the handwriting," he says.
In that case, we should definitely kill standardized cursive. Then everyone will have bad handwriting and graders will be obligated to grade based on content.
As someone who has dysgraphia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dysgraphia), I have faced this problem so many time in school. Luckily in India esp. in my state, if you have Dysgraphia, you could use a scribe and dictate your answers at least for major examinations.
I am happy that even though I am in a grad school, I now rarely have to write anything.
Oh weird, my handwriting looks almost exactly like the "motor dysgraphia" sample and I seem to have a good number of the symptoms of motor dysgraphia (pretty much everything except the spelling mistakes and talking to myself while writing). I never realized it might a "thing" before.
I wonder if it has to do with the fact that I was born left-handed and retrained to be right-handed as a kid?
Interestingly I don't see anything wrong with the 2nd half of the motor dysgraphia sample. I have tons of friends who write like that. Here's an example of George Carlin's handwriting:
Yeah, I definitely get the pain part. Actually, I should be pretty thankful because it's my aversion to handwriting that made me spend a lot of time on the computer, leading to my entire career. :)
FYI, writing caused me pain if I did it for more than a line or two, and was always a slow and laborious process. It turned out I'm predisposed to RSI -- a load of vitamin B6 plus learning to write cursive italic, plus switching to fountain pens really improved my writing and eliminated the pain.
In that case, we should definitely kill standardized cursive. Then everyone will have bad handwriting and graders will be obligated to grade based on content.