Some autistic children have a hard time with penmanship, finds new study. Credit: kpwerker, Flickr

Imagine being William Shakespeare. OK, you're a bit of an odd duck on the Elizabethan social scene, but you are arguably the most brilliant writer in the history of the English language.

There's just one problem: Putting pen to paper literally drives you mad.

The act of forming letters is, for some people, such a long and arduous process that it invariably leads to frustration, anger and despair.

Locked inside many intelligent and gifted autistic children might be the next Shakespeare or Hemingway. Many great writers -- including Lewis Carroll and George Orwell -- exhibited characteristics we now associate with autism.

Yet budding literary talents are sometimes stymied because children are expected to learn to form words with pens and pencils before moving to typewriters and computers. The latest edition of the journal Neurology examines this link between handwriting and autism.

Barbara Wagner enrolled her 14-year-old son Austin in the study conducted by by the Kennedy Krieger Institute in Baltimore. She said she knew there was something different about the way he wrote.

Homework assignments that involved writing sometimes took up to three hours to complete, she said on National Public Radio.

"He doesn't actually write they way you or I would write," she told NPR. "He draws his letters. It was almost painful to watch."

Researcher analyzed the handwriting skills of 14 autistic children, ages 8 to 14, with average IQs and a similar group of children without autism.

The study gives scientific confirmation what parents of autistic children have observed for years: Autistic children often have trouble with fine motor skills. The same trouble they have with handwriting is the same trouble they have holding a fork or buttoning a shirt.

It also may relate to the same trouble they have interacting with other people.

A popular theory is that mirror neurons that allow the brain to recognize another person's activity as if it was one's own are impaired in people with autism. That keeps them from picking up other people's nonverbal social cues.

It might also inhibit their ability to develop fine motor skills, Amy Bastian, the author of the study and director of the motion analysis lab at Kennedy Krieger, told ABC News. However, she stressed, that's only an interesting theory that has yet to be fully explored.

Some autistic children don't have any problem with handwriting. For those that do, Wagner said, the study provides a valuable tool. Parents sometimes find themselves in conflict with schools when they request keyboard writing and do not see penmanship as a priority.

When educators disagree, Wagner told ABC News, "I think it's important to have something to back you up."

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