Letter Formation: Why the "a" in Most Learning Apps Is the Wrong Shape

Open almost any alphabet app and look carefully at the lowercase "a". You will almost certainly see this one: a, a curved bowl with a hook arching over the top. It is called a two-storey or double-storey "a", and it is what nearly every typeface uses.

Now look at what your child is taught to write at school. It is this one: a plain circle with a single straight line down its right-hand side. One storey. No hook.

The same thing happens with "g". Books and screens show a two-storey "g" with a closed loop underneath. Schools teach a single-storey "g": a circle with a tail that hooks left.

Why the mismatch happens

Nobody chose this. It is an accident of how software is built. A developer writes the letter "a" into the page, the browser renders it in whatever font the app uses, and the font (designed for reading paragraphs, not for teaching handwriting) supplies the printing form. Nobody involved ever decided that a four-year-old should copy it.

For reading this is harmless; children cope with both forms early and need to, since every book they will ever open uses the printing one. For writing it is not harmless. A child tracing a two-storey "a" is practising a shape their teacher will then ask them to stop making.

Letters are movements, not pictures

The deeper issue is that a letter is not really a shape at all. It is a sequence of movements that happens to leave a shape behind.

This is not a stylistic opinion. Neuroscience research on pre-literate children has found that the physical production of letters activates reading circuitry in a way that passive viewing does not, brain imaging studies by Karin James and colleagues compared children who produced letter forms themselves against children who only observed them, and found different activation patterns. Related work by Longcamp, Zerbato-Poudou and Velay (2005) trained thirty-eight three- to five-year-olds to copy letters either by hand or by typing them. After three weeks, the older children in the handwriting group recognised letters better than those in the typing group.

The mechanism people propose is that handwriting gives continuous feedback about the shape being made, vision, motor command and the felt sense of the movement all arriving together and building an internal model of the letter. A shape you have only looked at has no motor trace attached to it.

Which means stroke order and direction are not pedantry. They are half of what is being learned.

The rules that actually matter

Standard manuscript handwriting, the scheme used in most English-medium schools, comes down to a few principles:

• Start at the top. Nearly every letter begins at its highest point. This single rule prevents most of the bad habits that are painful to fix later.
• Top to bottom, left to right. Vertical strokes go down, not up. Horizontal strokes go left to right.
• Circles go anticlockwise. The round part of a, c, d, g, o, q starts at about the two-o'clock position and travels left. A clockwise "o" looks identical and joins terribly.
• The exceptions are few. In most schemes d starts with its round part and e starts with the horizontal bar. Everything else starts at the top.

What we did about it

This problem is the reason the letters in the QuizByt tracing activity are not typed at all. Every letter is drawn from stored stroke data (a list of points describing the actual path a hand takes) rather than rendered in the app's font. The single-storey "a" and "g" a child traces on screen are the forms they are taught to write, the arrows show the direction each stroke travels, and the numbered order matches standard manuscript formation.

The same stroke data generates the printable worksheets, so the letter on paper is identical to the letter on screen. That sounds obvious. It is surprisingly rare, because generating a worksheet from a font is much less work.

What to check in any app

Three quick tests before you let a child trace anything:

• Is the lowercase a single-storey? Is the g?
• Does it show where each stroke starts and which way it goes, rather than an outline to fill in?
• Does it insist on stroke order, or will it accept a letter drawn backwards as long as the pixels end up in the right place?

An app that fails all three is a colouring book with letters on it. That is not worthless, but it is not teaching handwriting.

Worth reading next: what the brain research says about screen tracing versus a pencil, and how to use printable tracing sheets so they actually work.