Handwriting issues, continued.

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My son uses the speech recognition built into Mac OS for written homework.

He dictates into any word or text processor and then checks it for errors, caps etc. (it will do caps if you tell it to, but that's easy to forget.)
I send it in to his teachers with my email.

He is really happy with this and his written work has changed dramatically. He always used to try to find the shortest possible sentences with the fewest possible characters. Now he discusses his ideas.

He has a keyboard at school and a scribe on tests. All three approaches really help.

My daughter has always had terrible handwriting. In Year 3 (the equivalent of third grade I think) she was given a lot of extra practice as they were supposed to get their "pen licence" that year. She tried really hard but never got hers and the following year got told off for writing in pencil (they either didn't believe her or thought she was being silly when she said she didn't have her licence). She has given up these days (now Year 6) and her writing is just about legible if she prints, although still very messy. She says that expecting her to write neatly is like expecting everyone else to write in copperplate (her words and, yes, she does know what it means but I have no idea where she gets some of her knowledge).

As she has no formal diagnosis of any kind and no SEN statement I am reluctant to push for her to be able to use a keyboard in class (her typing skills are excellent), as come exam time she will need to be able to write her answers. However, I have been encouraging her that once she gets out into the "real world" the need to write in the traditional sense will be very limited.

One of her teachers has been commenting on her presentation but she takes it in her stride - she tells me "she can either have 3 lines of neat work or the whole thing messy, what would she prefer?"

On the plus side I have been able to get some extra support for her as part of the transition planning scheme for her move up to secondary school next year. This was largely due to her having some bullying issues this year and being quite anxious about not being liked or getting lost in the new building (she was bordering on selective mutism at the beginning of the year but I have been doing a lot of work building her confidence which seems to have helped).

Keyboarding and voice recognition have been great for my son. For exams, they give him a scribe-a person who will write for him. He has to dictate everything, including punctuation and capitalization etc., so it really is his writing. Can your daughter not be given a similar accommodation? It would be better than going through a huge painful effort in order to not be able to write very well and the produce answers that don't reflect her knowledge.