Are reading and writing (penmanship, not creative writing) two separate disciplines?

Perks said:

I'm very confused. I just finished a novel where the main character can read - as in Shakespeare and the Brontë sisters and volumes in French - but much is made of the fact that she never learned to write. It's a plot point in fact. A Dear John letter that is purported to be from her is proved a fraud because she doesn't know how to write.

Is this weird? It seems to me that if you can read complicated passages, in fact devour the classics over years and years of study, you'd be able to train your hand to imitate the marks, even without classroom instruction of penmanship.

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Perks said:

I'm very confused. I just finished a novel where the main character can read - as in Shakespeare and the Brontë sisters and volumes in French - but much is made of the fact that she never learned to write. It's a plot point in fact. A Dear John letter that is purported to be from her is proved a fraud because she doesn't know how to write.

Is this weird? It seems to me that if you can read complicated passages, in fact devour the classics over years and years of study, you'd be able to train your hand to imitate the marks, even without classroom instruction of penmanship.

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Perks said:

If you know what the word "house" looks like on the page, enough to recognize it anywhere, it just seems that you'd be able to at least approximate the markings on a blank page.

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Perks said:

Early 1900s. The character's father insists that she read and read and read. It's quite important to the character. In fact, she obsesses over Jane Eyre. It just seems very strange to me that someone with oodles of time on her hands and both the proclivity and instruction to read copiously, would not be able to write once taught to read. If you know what the word "house" looks like on the page, enough to recognize it anywhere, it just seems that you'd be able to at least approximate the markings on a blank page.

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kuwisdelu said:

Although related, they are definitely different skills.

This is probably most apparent in Asian countries with complicated scripts like hanzi and kanji.

In Japan, with modern technologies making writing by hand more rare, it's becoming more and more common to be able to read a kanji but not be able to write it.

I can certainly read much more Japanese than I can write.

If you try to learn a language with a completely different script, it quickly becomes apparent how reading and writing are separate skills.

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Osulagh said:

Yes, but it's all encompassed by the language.

If someone has never practiced writing, then it'll be extremely difficult for them to do so. This is just a part of application and practice. Someone can certainly write if they can read--if they don't have some kind of disorder the debilitates them.

Have you ever learned another language? It might seem odd in English, but if you read and write in another language, like with logographic characters like kanji, you might be able to read that language with no problem but writing can be a problem. Phonetic alphabets work really well in this case. For example, I could spell anything out in the English language within a certain margin or error. But when I try spelling a word I heard in Chinese, or Japanese kanji, or the Korean hanja, I might have no idea how to spell it--even though I've read it a thousand times.

You could also say, being aspiring writers, even though we read classics and fully understand the language, we can't apply it the same.

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Hapax Legomenon said:

When a westerner unfamiliar with Chinese characters tries to write one, they do not approach it the same way a Chinese person approaches writing something that they learned to write since elementary school. They approach it like drawing a picture and ignore things like stroke order and may leave out necessary bits or not understand where things are supposed to line up. However the end result may be readable.

Someone who has been looking at letters all her life and can recognize misspellings as a reader is going to know enough words to write a letter. She's probably going to approach each of these words as writing a picture as well. Because Roman characters are so much simpler than Chinese characters, she's unlikely to "leave stuff out" and may add in extraneous stuff that you don't usually see in handwriting that you see in printed copies (eg. "a" and "g" are often very different in standard fonts than in handwriting). Also, things like written grammar have peculiar rules that spoken grammar doesn't share, and if she never learned that her sentences would be very messy. She might be able to write a letter... it would probably look like a four year old did it, but it'd still probably make sense.

If the letter is supposed to look like an adult wrote it by hand then yes that's plenty of reason why she would not have been able to do it. Also, in previous eras penmanship was very important in ways it is not today so if she had not been taught how to write then, she may very well be unable to write. However, be able to generally string together a sentence in horrible handwriting? She'd probably be capable of doing that.

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Perks said:

But could you reproduce a stick figure?

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Perks said:

Early 1900s. The character's father insists that she read and read and read. It's quite important to the character. In fact, she obsesses over Jane Eyre. It just seems very strange to me that someone with oodles of time on her hands and both the proclivity and instruction to read copiously, would not be able to write once taught to read. If you know what the word "house" looks like on the page, enough to recognize it anywhere, it just seems that you'd be able to at least approximate the markings on a blank page.

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Perks said:

In their experience, they said that typically kids will quite naturally start to copy the characters on their own. Especially enthusiastic readers. According to them, most children wouldn't wait to be shown, but would improve faster (obviously) with guidance.

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Hapax Legomenon said:

Ah, see, this is where it gets tricksy. At that point everyone's handwriting was still very cursivey and looks very different than letters printed on the page, and a letter would likely be written by hand. You might be able to copy printing by reading tons of books, but you wouldn't be able to learn cursive.

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Hapax Legomenon said:

It would seem like such a thing would have to be very integral to the story because it's such an odd thing.

Like I was thinking about this and the availability of pens and pencils. These days ballpoint pens literally cost cents and are given, abandoned, and stolen freely without much thought, and it was definitely not always like this with writing and drawing materials. If the father was a total nut and literally did not have any writing materials in the house at all, it may be that she's never really had the chance to pick one up and try... but yeah, you can write in other things, too, like in dust or condensation on windows with your finger...

But it's also possible that she had tried to write print as in books but had never learned how to "write" properly, so she wouldn't have been able to write a letter competently enough for whatever she supposedly did.

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