If you never reach automaticity with handwriting it will never benefit your learning to hand write... My children were all able, with years of therapy, to attain quite neat handwriting. But not automaticity and not neat handwriting plus speed, or volume, or original work (let alone all of those at once). They achieved neat handwriting in a handwriting book/lesson: 100% attention on holding the pencil and forming the letters.
What I am quite sure of, is that if difficulty with handwriting overwhelms all other factors, then you aren't learning much at all...
Thank you MoT for so nicely laying out this caveat! I have struggled many times trying to explain this distinction. (Not to mention some of the weaknesses in the "handwriting helps you learn" research.)
I'd also like to add that "I know he can do it if he
wanted to, because I have seen him do it a few times so he's just not trying the rest of the time" is textbook LD stuff. And even worse in 2E kids. Because as MoT lays out so neatly, sure they can do that thing IFF all their compensatory stars align, and they are not trying to do anything else whatsoever. Like read, think, analyze, calculate, problem solve....
But the mechanics of handwriting (or whatever non-automated deficit(s) the kid is dealing with) suck up all their available brain resources, leaving nothing for all the other higher-level thought processes the child is
also supposed to be simultaneously engaging.
So I have found it helpful to distinguish between physical writing problems, where muscles (or sometimes motor-visual coordination) can be strengthened and readability improved, vs cognitive deficits like dysgraphia where automaticity is missing and for many, cannot be achieved in any lasting way, no matter how much the child practices.
That said, I totally agree with aeh that at a certain age the student needs to own the problem of their own illegibility. But depending on cause, their effort to solve it may be better targeted to learning typing or appropriate apps rather than handwriting. It's tricky, trying to tease out the cost of handwriting, as it varies so much among kids, even just between my own.
