HANDWRITING

The ability to produce legible handwriting depends on many factors, some of which may be:

• Fine motor skills
• Visual perception
• Visual motor integration (Eye-hand coordination)
• Motor coordination
• Postural control
• Muscle tone
• Upper limb stability, strength and endurance
• In-hand manipulation
• Isolation of movement
• Bilateral coordination
• Tactile discrimination

We need to have all these skills to be able to produce neat and clear handwriting.
Pre-writing skills are important as a pre-requisite to handwriting skills. Pre-writing skills may include:

• Drawing lines in all directions
• Colouring
• Tracing
• Connecting dots with lines accurately

In Occupational Therapy we try to understand what are the core reasons for illegible handwriting and through an assessment we can determine which of the above skills need to be targeted in therapy.

After the initial assessment the therapist is able to prepare a treatment plan that will target the areas of weakness to help improve the handwriting skills.