Excerpt from A Scale for Measuring the Quality of Handwriting of School Children

The method by which the present scale has been produced, and the criterion on which it rests as a basis, differ radically from those adopted by Professor Thorndike. The difference in the bases is that in the present case legibility has been adopted as a criterion for rating the different samples in place of general merit used as the basis of Thorndike's scale. This change substitutes function for appearance as a criterion for judging handwriting.

There are two arguments for adopting the new criterion. In the first place the prime purpose of writing is to be read, and hence it has seemed worth while to adopt readability as the basis for rating samples of handwriting. In the second place legibility possesses the advantage of being measurable in definite quantitative units through finding the amount of time required to read with a given degree of accuracy a given amount of matter written in the handwriting being studied. The criterion of general merit is not susceptible of any such exact evaluation.

The method whereby the new scale has been produced differs from the method employed in producing the previous scale in that it is based on the distribution of the recorded times re quired on the average by a number of readers to read the samples of writing, rather than on the average of their judgments con cerning what they considered equal steps in general merit.

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