Brief History of SignWriting
SignWriting was developed by Valerie Sutton, and had its roots in an early form of movement writing called DanceWriting (for graphically making notations of ballet steps) because she was training to be a ballet dancer. As word of DanceWriting's success spread, it got the attention of sign langauge researchers in Denmark. Working with the researchers, Sutton developed SignWriting. She never went back to the ballet.After she moved to the United States, SignWriting continued to grow. Sutton was involved in the publication of manuals using SignWriting, participated in workshops, presented papers, and perhaps most importantly, discovered how SignWriting could help deaf children learning to read and write. SignWriting is now used in more than ten countries to aid literacy.
In the early 1980s, the center started a newspaper, the SignWriter Newspaper, now a newsletter, the SignWriter Newsletter. Also in the '80s, textbooks and other SignWriting materials were published. By the end of the decade, a SignWriting computer program had been developed so that SignWriting could be typed. After the computer program became available, more textbooks, dictionaries, and videos were published in the 1990s.
SignWriting Website
The SignWriting.org website, is a website rich with content that will be of interest to anyone, whether they are using SignWriting or not. Following are highlights of the Signwriting.org website (You may need to use the search engine to locate these highlights):- Children's Stories - Written in both English and SignWriting, with color illustrations and simplified English.
- Cinderella
- Goldilocks
- Humpty Dumpty
- If You Give a Mouse a Cookie
- Downloadable lessons (textbook, reading, writing, and even video transcription)
- SignBank, a SignWriting Dictionary (downloadable)
- SignWriter software (downloadable)
- SignWriting Catalog - purchase workbooks/textbooks, cards, videos, dictionaries, and t-shirts among other items.
- SignWriting Fonts (downloadable)
- SignWriting internationally - The website has articles on the use of SignWriting globally. This information is on the "Who Uses SignWriting?" page. Some of the individual countries provide reports and photographs on their progress in the educational use of SignWriting.
- SignWriting List, an e-mail discussion list, with publicly available archives.
- SignWriting Literacy Project for Deaf Students - a program to help deaf children use signwriting for literacy
- SignWriting Markup Language (XML-based) for developing documents for the web.
- SignWriting research that demonstrates the educational benefits of SignWriting
- SW-edit, a SignWriting graphics program
Related on About.com: Signing With Children - Video with transcript on page
