Hefty handwriting

Calligraphers have a distinctive style of penmanship, and apparently, so do people with autism. A new study, published 28 June in Research in Developmental Disabilities, shows that children with autism tend to write overly tall and wide cursive letters, suggesting difficulties with fine motor control.

Overall, these children’s handwriting is of variable size and slant. Perhaps that’s because they also seem to write faster than their peers do, and use more energy when they write.

About 80 percent of children with autism have trouble with gross motor skills, such as running or throwing a ball. Many of them also have difficulty with finer tasks, such as cutting with scissors or writing legibly, a complex skill that involves the visual, motor and memory systems.

Large handwriting, or macrographia, is not unique to people with autism. Adults who have lesions in the cerebellum or have Parkinson’s disease or Huntington’s disease — conditions that affect the brain’s motor-planning areas — also write in large letters.

In the new study, the researchers asked 26 high-functioning children with autism and 17 controls, ages 8 to 13 years, to write the cursive lowercase letter “l” four times on an electronic tablet.

They found that the “l”s written by the children with autism are on average 1 centimeter wider and 4 centimeters taller than those written by controls. The children with autism also have trouble throwing and catching a ball, and have poor hand dexterity and balance.

This suggests that macrographia is linked to problems with other motor skills and hand-eye coordination but not to age or intelligence, confirming results from other studies.

The children with autism also made more noise than the controls did as they wrote, indicating that they expend more energy on the muscle movement in their fingers and wrists.

The researchers mention two methods that may improve handwriting in children with autism: showing them a visual writing guide and improving their posture.