The body that writes
Personal writing style in preadolescence
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.4454/graphos.158Keywords:
writing phenomenology, lower secondary school, embodied cognition, developmental dysgraphiaAbstract
This paper addresses the lack of phenomenological analyses of the lived experience
of handwriting in lower secondary school students. While neuroscientific research documents
cognitive differences between writing modalities (James & Engelhardt, 2012; Malpique et al.,
2024), how preadolescents corporally experience the graphic gesture during pubertal and identity
transformations remains unexplored. Drawing on the Merleau-Pontian phenomenological
framework (Merleau-Ponty, 1945/2003), this theoretical contribution identifies three constitutive
dimensions. The first concerns the body schema, a sensorimotor sedimentation that destabilises
and reorganises during preadolescence. The second concerns the temporality of the gesture,
a rhythm integrating automatism and deliberation that affects compositional quality (Kim &Park, 2019). The third concerns calligraphic expressiveness, a manifestation of subjectivity that
may become a formative resource or a source of stigmatisation (Rosenblum, 2018). On these
grounds the category of personal writing style is developed, integrating universal invariants and
individual variations and overcoming both normalising technicality and expressive spontaneity.
The category dialogues with the 2025 Italian National Curriculum Guidelines (Ministerial
Decree 221/2025), which relaunch handwriting and cursive and foreground the personalisation
of learning, and it is translated into didactic proposals addressing the three dimensions, into a
multi-professional teacher-training model and into a reflection on qualitative and idiographic
assessment tools able to open the way to an empirical continuation of the research.
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