Fun (or maybe not-so-fun) fact: my 15-year-old nephew recently had to sign a document for some volunteer work, and he didn't know how. Apparently, schools no longer teach cursive, not even enough for kids to learn how to sign their own names for legal documents. The secretary was just like, "Yeah, we get that a lot; he can just print his name instead, that's fine."
I've always had shitty handwriting, and when I was in first grade, my teacher told my mom, "Don't worry about it; when he grows up, he'll probably be typing everything anyway." Turns out that was far more accurate and generalizable than we knew.
Given my age, I learned cursive in school, and spent my college years taking handwritten notes. My cursive was pretty terrible, much like my father's. However, he spent years working as a draftsman, and then as an estimator (before the days of personal computers), so his printing was very similar to the form described in the linked article. So, I taught myself to write in the same form. I still handwrite a lot (journalling, drafts of papers), because I find it easier to "think out loud" with a pencil in my hand.
Part of the reason I'm so cynical about the teaching profession is that I had a string of two or three elementary teachers who insisted that cursive was the only acceptable method of handwriting in educational settings. Immediately after—and for every single other teacher or professor—no one cared whether the letters were connected or block-printed so long as they were legible.
The other reason was the far-longer string of "you had better shape up now because if you don't get your act together, you'll never pass next year" and then continually passing next year with flying colors.
I think it would make me more cynical about teaching if teachers all agreed. Teachers have different opinions that evolve over time because they're trying to figure out the best way to teach. Static unanimity could would only happen if it was pursued for its own sake, to make the profession more comfortable and to avoid questions of skill and credibility.
I have ditched cursive for block printing, but it is an annoyance because I'm much slower that way. Even though I sit at a keyboard ten hours a day, better handwriting ability would be a noticeable asset for me. Still, I can't blame the teachers who taught me in elementary school, because none of them could make the individual choice to teach me a different cursive system, just like I can't make the individual choice to start writing code in a different language at my company.
It's funny how some people think their signature must be legible, or the wonder if they have to include their middle initial just because the printed version of their name on some document does. I believe a signature can be just about any symbol (although hopefully more complex than the "X" which is legally acceptable) which the signer can reliably re-create.
"The traditional function of a signature is to permanently affix to a document a person's uniquely personal, undeniable self-identification as physical evidence of that person's personal witness and certification of the content of all, or a specified part, of the document."[0]
> I've always had shitty handwriting, and when I was in first grade, my teacher told my mom, "Don't worry about it; when he grows up, he'll probably be typing everything anyway." Turns out that was far more accurate and generalizable than we knew.
My third grade teacher told my mom not to worry about my (awful) handwriting, "he'll have a secretary." Which probably makes me a bit older than you. I retroactively blame my 1st grade teacher who forbid me from writing my name in cursive; it was a 1/2/3 combo class, and she said she had a hard time figuring out if work was mine or the other person with my first name who was in second or third grade and expected to write in cursive. It might have been better for me to just write my last initial or full last name. Oh well.
It's weird that a signature is expected to be in cursive in so many places anyway. It's not like cursive is some unforgeable method whereas as printed writing looks exactly the same no matter who writes it.
Hell, nobody even cares what it says, so my "signature" is just a scribble that is somewhat consistent.
I just bought a house, and signing all the mortgage docs, they told me I had to sign my name exactly as it appears on the document: First Middle Last. My signature, the one that is most personal, recognizable, and ubiquitous to me, is a quick scribble that kind of includes the first letter of my first name, then some flairs of loops and things. Having to laboriously write out my full name in script was a giant pain in the ass. I could not repeat the same signature twice. In many cases I couldn't remember how to write the capital cursive letter for my middle and last name.
TL;DR: I am 38 and completely sympathize with your nephew. I can't sign my name either.
Covid 19 is going to have introduced a generation with the worst handwriting we've seen so far. By worst I mean both incorrect and illegible, and I'm basing this observations of my daughters who were in 1st and 4th grade during the first lockdown. Admittedly, they already had what I would call "poor" handwriting.
I have no problem with the idea that legible is the primary criterium for handwriting. Correctness as I and my parents and grandparents learned is really just a matter of self-respect, I think. Correctness was already on the way out by the time I came along anyway. There was a uniformity to my mother's and grandmothers' handwritings that was not present among my peers and me in school.
The only experience that I have that says someone must continue to learn cursive is that there are lots of historically important (or at least interesting) documents that are difficult to read even for me, and my kids would have a harder time still. Reading is not the same as writing of course, so merely practice reading these types of things is probably enough. I guess it's similar to Fraktur, which is difficult to read if you've never seen it, but not that bad with just a little practice.
> Correctness as I and my parents and grandparents learned is really just a matter of self-respect, I think.
Fucking weird angle on that imo. It's a skill with broad application but low impact for most people. The actual techniques for good handwriting aren't taught in school anymore, so people will have to decide to value it, seek it out, and practice it themselves. You might think they should, but if they disagree it doesn't indicate that they lack self-respect.
An almost infinite number of skills fit into this honestly. Kitchen knife work, drawing, whistle or sing a tune, phonetic alphabet, advanced mental arithmetic, basic carpentry, sewing, plant care, orienteering, bread baking, small engine repair, knot tying, etc etc etc etc.
Anyone can learn a bunch of these to varying degrees and they'll be frequently valuable through life, and potentially contribute significantly to identity and yes self respect. Which specific ones someone ends up with is pretty much meaningless though. I mean this kindly but there's nothing special about penmanship just because you value it.
Oddly enough I used to write my '0' like an 'O', until I started writing down a lot of chemical structures with numbered atoms. I had to distinguish between the 0 label and the 'O' of an oxygen. I've now adopted the 0 as the way to do it :)
edit: Ok, so HN font as displayed does not show the bar across the 0, even though the editor does ...
I’m not sure how good rendering support is, but you can try explicitly specifying in Unicode that you want a zero with a "combining long solidus overlay":
0̸
(May render as 0 ̸, but should look like a single slashed zero. Wikipedia seems to think this is the way to get a slashed zero in Unicode: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slashed_zero)
I picked up the wild ass french numeral 1 from living there in my youth. I still think it's more ambiguous than the english variants but I had so much trouble with people misinterpreting mine I switched and have never been able to shake it.
If you look up examples online they seem fairly reasonable. But in actual daily handwriting they are very extreme. It looks more like a stylized capital A than a number honestly.
Oh I see, from looking at some examples it's the one without the bar on the bottom? I use the the more French/European '1' to distinguish from a lowercase 'l' (so that C1 does not look like Cl = chlorine).
Yeah the way I originally learned to do it is with no bottom bar and a short, 45º, straight serif. The french way has a lloooooong curving serif, at least as long as the downstroke. Or at least I think of it as french since that's where I ran into it. Maybe that's the norm in europe?
I (an American) picked up the European 1 and 7 in college but gave them up when I left school because they confuse people. I still use them when I'm doing math or doing anything where numbers and letters might be confused.
I also had to adapt my handwriting - halfway through my math degree, my inability to tell symbols apart genuinely started to become a problem. I ended up having to use a horizontal bar on 'z' to tell it apart from '2', and added a loop on the tail of my 'y's to keep them from looking like a wayward 'x', both of which persisted into my normal handwriting.
(And I still swear that my differential equations professor wrote problems that used mu, 'u', 'v', and nu at the same time as a prank on people with bad handwriting.)
I've been really leaning into handwriting - and good penmanship in general as a fun creative activity. I started writing all my notes/journal entries/etc in cursive during covid just for something to do and I've become very enamored of the process. Often I find myself wanting to write just to do it (I imagine if I was in to needlepoint, this is the time I'd do needlepoint). I end up writing a lot of journal entries and letters to friends (it usually starts with "I want to write" and my own thoughts and doings are an easy subject) which has a nice personal and social effect. I acquired some fancy pens and sewed myself a fancy leather journal that are a pleasure to write with and that have really accelerated and sustained the habit.
I wouldn't make any claims that writing has somehow made me magically smarter or better at anything else, I just find it fun to do (and I believe that pleasure is vastly more important than "productivity" so that's a win for me). It seems probable that my composition skills are better (or at least different in some hard-to-define way) due to the slower speed and non-editability of handwritten text. I rarely find myself at a loss for what sentence to write next when I'm handwriting because my thoughts are already buffered up since it takes them a bit longer to get onto the page.
Another angle for me is that I recently picked up a chronic disease which has changed my energy levels a lot and many old hobbies are no longer feasible as often as they used to be. I can write even when I feel like there's a mountain of tires on fire inside my head.
Every couple years, I'll adjust my doodling habits to a set of patterns based on a simplification of the Palmer method. This simple doodling practice has given me the best handwriting at just about every place I've worked in the past ten years.
Draw two horizontal lines about half an inch apart and in the space between them doodle one of:
+ continuous clockwise stream of overlapping circles (imagine you flattened a slinky)
+ continuous counterclockwise version of the above
+ continuous line mountains/valleys (draw an N that becomes an M that keeps going and has tons of peaks)
Repeat.
The first time trying it, most people will find it freakishly difficult to do smoothly and consistently. That's because your fine-motor eye/hand control circuits aren't tuned for these motions which are are the basis functions for all western language penmanship. If you start doodling these figures when you're bored on zoom, your penmanship will magically improve, not because you learned penmanship but because you enabled your fingers to do what your brain is telling them to do.
This will also help you have better penmanship on a whiteboard, but in-office whiteboard writing involves more large muscles as well, so it doesn't hurt to also doodle on a whiteboard this way once you have the fine-motor controls tuned up (the fine-motor remains the most important, even on a whiteboard, so starting with pen and paper doodling will get you where you want to go fastest for either format).
It is deliberate for most Latin cursive scripts. I believe it is common wisdom that ovals are easier to write consistently and quickly than circles. Though I suspect this perhaps has more to do with older pens and styluses than a universal.
Edit: come to think about it, it's probably a universal, since you see angling in Arabic and Chinese scripts' calligraphic styles as well.
Most English language handwriting has an up-and-to-the-right tilt. Architects will frequently adopt a precisely vertical style but it tends to feel cold and impersonal (or perhaps just unfamiliar as most writing does have a bit of slant to it). I suspect it's a bit like the serif vs sans serif debate. People generally prefer the look of sans serif fonts but they read farther into and retain contents better when the font has serifs (first measured in the 1950's and first discussed broadly in Ogilvy On Advertising, the book that most of Mad Men season one's plot points were based on). Straight up and down seems like it would be best, but for whatever reason hundreds of years of practice have retained that small angle as the preferred style.
It's due to the way penmanship was written. Consider the arm position [0] of proper penmanship. The page is at an angle to the left, such that it is similar to the angle of your forearm on the page. Pivoting at the elbow allows you to swing your arm from the left side of the page to the right. The forward slant allows you to always be moving "forwards" as you write across the page.
I hope that was clear. Please feel free to ask clarifying questions if not.
I agree that the slant is intentional, but it's not clear to me that the slant comes as a result of the preferred arm position (it seems equally likely the arm position was chosen because it results in the desired slant).
As you might be aware, arm position and use in serious calligraphy is a far more thoughtfully and intentionally designed process than I ever would have imagined. A major component of Spencerian technique involves resting the right forearm on the left palm (I think I have that right, I'm not actually one who does Spencerian writing) in order to use the flesh of the forearm as a linear bearing driven by the shoulder muscles and constrained by the left palm as a means of achieving a more repeatable and predictable translation motion than can be achieved with simple proprioception based motor control.
Qualifications: former professional penman, focusing specifically on American Penmanship from ~1860-1920. Spencerian script, and the Palmer method both fall into this time period.
> If you start doodling these figures when you're bored on zoom, your penmanship will magically improve
I find this sentiment common, particularly amongst people who learned penmanship "recently". It is incorrect.
A brief interlude--When I was in middle school I resisted learning cursive. My teachers would tell me that drawing little circles and lines would make my penmanship better. I asked why, but they didn't know. Their teachers told them it was true, so now they're telling me it's true.
Push pulls and oval drills will only improve your penmanship if:
1. You practice them "correctly"
2. Your write in a style that is applicable to the drills you've practiced
There's no magic. They are intended to specifically train a smoothness and control in arm movement writing. Those writing with their fingers will derive little benefit. In no way am I trying to discount progress you have made personally. My contention is that any person devoting sufficient time and intentionality to their handwriting practice will see some improvement, regardless of the methodology used. The crux of the issue is how much progress can/will you make.
Happy to answer any clarifying questions regarding cursive or penmanship.
Below are some of my favorite references in business penmanship.
It's a surprisingly big field. Largely divided into:
1. More artistic, commissioned works
2. Wedding calligraphy, envelope addressing
3. Teaching
I principally taught. Was too much of a perfectionist, and would devote more time than was economically viable to commissioned works. Though my art is on a couple wine labels in Napa.
Calligraphers/penman show up in surprising places. The White House employs 3 calligraphers for writing menus, invitations to formal events, etc.
I think this is something of a debate on "is it good to get some exercise?" vs "is walking or swimming or weight lifting a better exercise?"
The minimal set of doodles I mentioned is a simplification of the Palmer method, which can itself be thought of as a simplification of the Spencerian method. If one wants to get into penmanship seriously, there are many wonderful rabbit warrens to descend into.
If one is unable to form legible letters at all, in my experience that tends to be more of a fine motor eye-hand coordination thing than anything else, in which case almost any well-chosen set of doodle drills will help significantly.
[edit] also - welcome to HN! I just noticed the green font for your username. I suspect you'll have lots to contribute to this place.
> I think this is something of a debate on "is it good to get some exercise?" vs "is walking or swimming or weight lifting a better exercise?"
This is an astute comparison, and I think you're completely right. One who devotes time and effort into practice (nearly any practice) of handwriting will improve.
However I would liken it more to something such as: "will Olympic weightlifting make me a better soccer player than sprinting, ball control, and team coordination drills will?". It's not a generic A or B, as we're trying to achieve an intended result.
More aptly, "given I want to achieve C, is A or B a better approach".
We used to get homework of these in elementary school. I always thought it sucked, and did them poorly, and my penmanship now is awful unless I write very slowly. Fortunately very, very rarely I need to write by hand.
Cursive is still taught with ferocity in Dutch primary schools. When done well it's pretty, enables rapid writing and note taking, and at least part of learning to write that way is to learn how to read it. Since everyone older than you will still write that way, it's useful to be able to read it.
I only write by hand, when I need to quickly note down something for myself. For that purpose cursive is by *orders of magnitude* better than "typesetting by hand".
> In penmanship class, we learned a standard cursive font. I think it’s the standard cursive font, in fact.
He's wrong that there's a standard cursive. Different countries and different centuries have used a variety of different cursives. Most Americans who were taught cursive in school learned either Zaner-Bloser or D'Nealian, which both derive from Palmer. Both of them are terrible. They have indistinct letter shapes that degrade horribly when written quickly.
Cursive Italic handwriting is much more legible, if slightly slower. There are popular systems including Getty-Dubay Italic and Barchowsky Fluent Handwriting. Both of those are fine, and should be strongly preferred to 19th-20th century cursive.
A few years ago I made a conscious effort to improve my handwriting and got a few fountain pens, to me transitioning from D'Nealian to a Spencerian variant was pretty easy and I think the latter is faster, more legible, and more comfortable to write. Although the differences are more significant IMHO if using a fountain pen.
I'd toyed with fountain pens on and off for twenty years. In 2019, I dug an old Waterman Expert out of my closet, watched some videos for how to use bottled ink and converters and off I went into the hobby.
I still use traditional late 20th century American cursive (D'Nealian, I think), but all the practice with fountain pens has made my handwriting more legible than it's been in a long time.
Cursive came about because writing with quill and dip pens required you keep the nib on the paper for as long as possible, lest it dry out, or the ink drop to the page. Fountain pens aren't as bad in this regard, but still do better when the ink is flowing than just waving about in the air.
I happily take work notes all day long with fountain pens (today I have a Pilot Custom 74 inked up). I wouldn't want to give them up.
Likewise! And if you've yet to try a Vanishing Point or a Decimo, you've got a pleasant surprise in store, I think - I've found them nearly perfect for work notes in particular thanks to their speed and ease of one-handed operation.
(The Vanishing Point was admittedly a little too big and heavy for comfort, but a Decimo has the same nib and mechanism in a lighter, narrower body. Looks a lot more elegant, too, with the smoother rounding of the shoulder.)
The Decimo is a great form factor, it's also just about the most inconspicuous fountain pen possible so you won't get weird looks from people who've never seen a fountain pen before. That said I have one as well as a Custom 74, both in EF, and somehow I like the 74 a lot more in that size. The Decimo nib seems finer and is noticeably softer (18k vs 14k), and I'd prefer it with a medium nib for maximum smoothness. I think it also dries out a little bit, something that I've never had with the Custom 74.
On the other end of the spectrum I have to recommend the Lamy Safari and Kaweco Sport for their utilitarian design and timeless aesthetics.
The award for utilitarian and timeless has to go to the Lamy 2000.
The Safari is very good as a starter (though I'm partial to the Pilot Metropolitan or TWSBI Eco for starters). I don't have experience with the Kaweco Sport, though I hear only good things.
In re: different countries: students who study Russian (or, I assume, other languages that use a similar alphabet) typically learn to write Russian in cursive. The letter forms overlap with English/American cursive, but not perfectly, and of course there are OTHER letters, too, that we lack.
(Russian cursive is also notoriously hard to read for non-native speakers owing to a few idiosyncrasies: some letters are entirely different written vs. in print, and the letter forms can lead to ambiguity -- certain letter combinations are effectively identical.)
A near-universal phenomenon among people I've spoken with who took Russian in college is the unconscious blending of the two letter sets. Students, myself included, would routinely find themselves using Russian letters in English script while writing without realizing it, and sometimes even reading it later without realizing the presence of Russian letters.
I knew it was happening to me, but it wasn't until I loaned my political science notes -- ostensibly in English! -- to a non-Russian-student pal that the prevalence of the swaps were really clear. "Uh, I absolutely cannot read this."
Ooops.
Anyway, it's tangential to this topic, but I thought it was interesting enough to share.
This is the first link I found with illustrations of the Russian cursive alphabet:
It’s very likely that English cursive is insufficient to really write the English words - since English pretends to only have 26 letters but so many do double or more duty - sometimes distinguished by diphthongs or other mechanisms but often just assumed you’ll know which pronunciation is right.
I wonder if the Russian cursive slips in because it has sounds that are closer.
What fascinated me when learning both Russian and English cursive is that Russian cursive makes writing in Russian much much faster, whereas English cursive (the one taught in school) just slows you down and is absolutely counterintuitive.. Also, I am yet to meet a person who is not confused by the cursive English G..
This is a good comment. I do have a contrary opinion however as I generally recommend a spencerian derivative over an italic one to new learners these days. One could say simple Spencerian derivatives are like Rust with a steep learning curve to inculcate the core shapes into muscle memory but have lesser overhead during runtime owing to their dependence on muscle memory. Italic derivatives otoh more like Go, easier to pick up initially, but relative to penmanship variants have a higher runtime overhead. This is a silly analogy, but drawing from my experience teaching penmanship and calligraphy to people of different age groups is what I’ve seen to be true, mostly in younger age ranges. Older people usually do better with italic variations. A good reason, I recommend spencerian/penmanship derivatives is that they let one write more efficiently with higher precision during flow moments as letting muscle memory do the work helps with learning the task at hand.
A small nitpick, Zanerbloser doesn’t derive from palmer script, but they both absolutely do belong to the same family.
Great point about muscle memory, I found it fascinating to learn Spencerian as it kind of distills the essence of writing to a surprisingly low number of forms (7 or 8 I think?), a kind of local optimum for Latin-based cursive. The hardest thing for me to learn about it, with which I still struggle, is keeping the arm posture correct and using the upper, rather than lower, part of the arm for control.
I also found it really interesting to discover that the prescribed 52 degree writing angle for Spencerian is almost exactly what you get matching the diagonal on an 8.5" by 11" piece of paper (I'm surprised that's not more widely known!). Thus, rather than a difficult and seemingly arbitrary requirement, it's a super easy way of attaining consistency by simply rotating the page so its diagonal goes straight away from the writer. (If you're using US Letter paper, anyway)
> The hardest thing for me to learn about it, with which I still struggle, is keeping the arm posture correct.
It’s great that you recognize this handicap as dealing with it sooner rather than later is a good; bad posture is indeed harder to correct later as we know. The first measure you can take is course correcting yourself over shorter intervals i.e.Move The Paper towards yourself with no shame, even during the length of a line, as often as need be. Even Louis Madarasz did it, so don’t hesitate. But I think your fix becomes a habit, it becomes a non-issue later.
> ... the proscribed 52 degree writing angle for Spencerian is almost exactly what you get matching the diagonal on an 8.5" by 11" piece of paper
If this is true, you just blew my mind, thanks for sharing the discovery.
Asking because I think I've got about as much benefit as I'm going to from having used a fountain pen exclusively for the last five or so years, so I'm looking at this point to learn a proper script. It sounds like you're considerably more familiar and may know some good places to start, and I'm hoping to get the benefit of your experience.
Not the OP, but I learned by reading and practicing alongside Spencerian Key to Practical Penmanship[0], by Platt and Henry Spencer themselves. It goes into an astonishing amount of detail; while there are probably newer adaptations I think you'd be hard-pressed to find a more comprehensive treatment.
This is good. Good penmanship and the pursuit of it is a very enjoyable and rewarding practice. Since you mentioned you experience with fountain pens and a desire to learn a spencerian derivative, I want to give you a heads up that fountain pen experience doesn't necessarily translate but you still have an edge of course.
As far as recommendation goes, I think you should see if you would be content with learning something like the afore-mentioned D'Nealian method, which involves a lot
of printing and shape reproduction, and stick to it. You can get far using a fountain with this.
However if you have the desire to reach for something more, I would recommend looking into a good "Business Writing" hand. There should a introductory book on a decent business hand produced by Ziller Inks on the Apple book store. I'd get that, it was pretty affordable last time I checked.
The business hand is a beginner friendly entry into the spencerian family and let's you carry your progress into more refined spencerian hands when you are ready for them later. Download a copy of the book "C.C.Canan - Collection of Penmanship" to see the kind of spencerian hands you could aspire towards.If you chose this path, it's a long journey so it depends on your personality like most hobbies.
Penmanship is a weird hobby, it looks both simple and intimidating at the same time. If you feel like you could use some personal advice, leave a comment and I'll reach out to contact info on your profile. I'm not an expert(I've seen what experts do and boy am I not one) but generally enjoy sharing penmanship learning advice so I don't mind a consultation or two.
This Spencerian example looks like what I learned in U.S. (Northern Utah) schools in the 80's. It doesn't say what it's called other than "Early American Spencerian".
That one is a little bit simplified, and as such is very close to something like D'Nealian which is what I learned in school. Technically in Spencerian the letters "d", "t", and "p" have the same basic stem height and are somewhat shorter than other full-height lower case characters. Basically instead of two heights for lower case letters, you get three.
But adapted into business script AFAIU the simplification into two heights, and the shrinking of the "p" stem, is pretty common. I'm definitely not used to making "p" taller than "q" and I am not always consistent about it.
> Zaner-Bloser or D'Nealian, which both derive from Palmer.
This is not accurate. Zaner predates Palmer.
> Both of them are terrible. They have indistinct letter shapes that degrade horribly when written quickly.
I would more attribute this to...
1. Unskilled modern penman
2. An eye that's unaccustomed to reading old script
... rather than something intrinsic to the style. Business penmanship was, after all, created to be fast & legible. Historical pieces of penmanship are most often legible, particularly when written by skilled penmen.
Source: was professional penman, specifically studying 1860-1920 American penmanship.
I'm almost certain I was taught Palmer in Christian school when I was a kid. I still hate how certain letters look but it's hard to change how I write now. 34 I've been at odds with the letter "r".
One of the most spectacular examples of penmanship I ever saw was sitting in a meeting with a lady who could effortlessly write phrases and paragraphs in italics... cursive italics ! It was perfect in every possible measurement. (And no this wasn't decades ago, this is 21st century).
But I digress! I did also want to state that I disagree with the author's statement "Nobody writes it anymore".
Clearly the author has not met many doctors or lawyers or spent much time in Europe.
Cursive is very much still in use by all three of the above.
They taught millennials to write in cursive. I only stopped because some of my teachers couldn't read it. It took work to write in print as effortlessly.
It's not like there aren't American outcries about how schooling changing decade to decade. But like everything, it's just an outcry from people who worry about the most minor of things that change.
Just my experience, but as a millennial growing up in the US, when I was in say 3rd grade or so we had a short unit on cursive and then I never used it again. When it came time to start signing things as an adult I had forgotten almost all of it. Years later someone commented that I signed the first letter of my last name in lowercase, oops...
Another tidbit someone may find interesting, going through elementary school in the early 90s I was forced to write right handed, despite being a natural lefty. This was due to the teachers religious leanings. I grew up in a major metro area as well. I can write with both hands now, but prefer right handed writing so the spirals of notebooks don't push up against my hand. Anytime I pick up a new hobby I have a weird decision to make about what hand I want to use. Still haven't figured out if I bowl left or right handed!
Italicized cursive was what was taught in Swedish primary schools while it was still part of standard education (meaning at least through the whole 1980s), and I suspect it was the same in many other European countries.
Penmanship and calligraphy, I think, are important to develop manual dexterity and hand-eye coordination & give you a way to express your individuality. The author talks about the standard font in cursive, but I learned many ways to make the letters F, X, M and more, that I felt made my writing unique among others.
I also don't think we've totally moved away from wet signatures, so they do have practical use as well.
Most non-architectural hand-writers write the letter “P” with a single stroke: draw a small loop and extend the side downward to form the stem.
I've got no architectural training, but I make my p's in two strokes (and my n's, for that matter, too).
I do this too, but trying to change it. I learned as a figure-eight, then switched to two-circles in grad school (for some reason), but now learning Morse code and copying 8's takes too long if you don't write them as one motion.
Couple of my favorite handwriting activities are writing in architectural font letters, and some bastard "gothic" I made up. With architectural fonts, the shapes slant diagonally a bit, so letter like P the half-circle points about 20 degrees up which makes it easer to separate it from the next letter and hence more legible.
The gothic font (along the lines what you get image searching "fraktur" or "gothic font") is good for some cards or signs or something, it's a bit slow to write, but because of the corners being so discontinuous it has a very distinct look to it. It doesn't really need a calligraphy pen either.
"I never write cursive these days. Nobody writes it anymore. Nobody can read it, anyway. And I honestly couldn’t write it neatly anymore even if I tried. Cursive is obsolete."
This is a rediculous inference - I don't do it, therefore nobody does it and it's obsolete.
I for one, write in cursive every day, taking notes in a notebook/journal, and carry a fountain pen to do so. It's just such a nicer experience than writing in biro, which I refuse to do except when it's utterly unavoidable. I can appreciate I might be an outlier, but handwriting in fountain pen is a superior experience to even using an iPad, and this way I don't have to "print" my notes, they already exist in hard copy, and are resistant to bit-rot (save a deluge). I think writing by hand also engages a different part of me to the one that is engaged by typing on a computer. I'd recommend it to anyone.
“Nobody [does thing] anymore” is a common euphemism for “very few people [do thing] now, compared to in the past”. The author is correct about this with respect to cursive, at least in the US. I think you know this as well, as you acknowledge your outlier status.
I was taught cursive when all kids were still being taught it, and I also switched back to block letters when we all stopped using paper. The act of writing cursive is so fluid, like written parkour, that I think when we finally master it, it bonds with the flow of our thoughts. When I write in block letters I get impatient and frustrated; my thinking writing energy is scraped out in chunks. It's like violence against the wrists. I never feel like I'm writing down my thoughts, and I can almost sense my train of thought disappearing while I'm still capturing the earlies pieces of it. Cursive lets that energy flow continuously, guided into shapes rather than forced.
I have always written cursive (in Indian schools in the 70's, teachers yelled at you if you wrote block), and with a fountain pen, no less. One of my English teachers threw away my favorite ballpoint pen and gave me her fountain pen to write notes that day in school. My grandfather, who was a school teacher, insisted that we write copy of at least 1 page everyday in a 4-line ruled handwriting practice notebook.
I still write all my notes in cursive with a fountain pen. According to graphology, handwriting is brain-writing and improves as you write more.
I have essentially abandoned normalized cursive in writing. My letters often connect but it's nothing a elementary martinet would recognize as Palmer or whatever.
That said, I do write by hand (with a fountain pen! it's more fun, and slows me down a little which improves legibility) every day. I plan my day and take notes longhand, and often journal in the evening. I've done this all my working life, because writing seems to connect to my brain in a way that just typing doesn't, and I've increased in the pandemic because the more years I spend at the keyboard (I'm 52) the worse my handwriting seems to get. Doing it more seems like a good way to try and reverse that trend.
"Nobody writes it anymore. Nobody can read it, anyway."
I think the author is mistaking their self for everyone.
I have rows of my bookshelf dedicated to all my journals. Written by hand. In cursive (for the most part, some technical journals I used standard print for diagrams and annotations).
I use a reMarkable2 as well for ephemeral notes, bullet journalling, and reading/sharing documents from my computer. I like being able to hand-write a note and email it as plain text to myself. Process it with a script and boom, new draft post. While I sit at my desk, no computer in sight. Bonus, character recognition of my cursive writing is pretty accurate.
It’s poetic license - like saying that nobody reads or writes Latin anymore; there are small groups that still can and do; but it is no longer assumed that every college graduate can.
I studied architectural engineering and hand to take a handwriting course. It is the exact opposite of cursive, youre never supposed to let your pen(cil) connect letters, not even parts of the letter (as the post describes how to write a P). you always lift up the pen and start a new point of connection because it gives you more control of the output. it was an interesting class and changed the way that I write (all caps that basically look like the image in that book) and also anyone I teach to write.
I "practiced" penmanship every day for 9 years in primary school, but my handwriting is still the sad squiggly sort stereotypically associated with doctors. It really didn't change much from age 12 and onwards.
Semi related aside - it was a good post day today.
I've been after a book called "Flip The Script" for ~10 years, but being out of print the prices are crazy. It's recently been reprinted, arrived today, and it's absolutely wonderful - https://www.handselecta.com/handselecta-flipthescript
As it says on the back "Graffiti is one of the last strongholds of highly refined penmanship." Anyway, beautiful book, highly recommended.
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[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 177 ms ] threadPracticing speed-writing unlocks fast handwriting....
I wonder how long it takes to learn and be productive with one of the systems.
I've always had shitty handwriting, and when I was in first grade, my teacher told my mom, "Don't worry about it; when he grows up, he'll probably be typing everything anyway." Turns out that was far more accurate and generalizable than we knew.
The other reason was the far-longer string of "you had better shape up now because if you don't get your act together, you'll never pass next year" and then continually passing next year with flying colors.
I have ditched cursive for block printing, but it is an annoyance because I'm much slower that way. Even though I sit at a keyboard ten hours a day, better handwriting ability would be a noticeable asset for me. Still, I can't blame the teachers who taught me in elementary school, because none of them could make the individual choice to teach me a different cursive system, just like I can't make the individual choice to start writing code in a different language at my company.
"The traditional function of a signature is to permanently affix to a document a person's uniquely personal, undeniable self-identification as physical evidence of that person's personal witness and certification of the content of all, or a specified part, of the document."[0]
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signature
My third grade teacher told my mom not to worry about my (awful) handwriting, "he'll have a secretary." Which probably makes me a bit older than you. I retroactively blame my 1st grade teacher who forbid me from writing my name in cursive; it was a 1/2/3 combo class, and she said she had a hard time figuring out if work was mine or the other person with my first name who was in second or third grade and expected to write in cursive. It might have been better for me to just write my last initial or full last name. Oh well.
Hell, nobody even cares what it says, so my "signature" is just a scribble that is somewhat consistent.
TL;DR: I am 38 and completely sympathize with your nephew. I can't sign my name either.
I have no problem with the idea that legible is the primary criterium for handwriting. Correctness as I and my parents and grandparents learned is really just a matter of self-respect, I think. Correctness was already on the way out by the time I came along anyway. There was a uniformity to my mother's and grandmothers' handwritings that was not present among my peers and me in school.
The only experience that I have that says someone must continue to learn cursive is that there are lots of historically important (or at least interesting) documents that are difficult to read even for me, and my kids would have a harder time still. Reading is not the same as writing of course, so merely practice reading these types of things is probably enough. I guess it's similar to Fraktur, which is difficult to read if you've never seen it, but not that bad with just a little practice.
Fucking weird angle on that imo. It's a skill with broad application but low impact for most people. The actual techniques for good handwriting aren't taught in school anymore, so people will have to decide to value it, seek it out, and practice it themselves. You might think they should, but if they disagree it doesn't indicate that they lack self-respect.
An almost infinite number of skills fit into this honestly. Kitchen knife work, drawing, whistle or sing a tune, phonetic alphabet, advanced mental arithmetic, basic carpentry, sewing, plant care, orienteering, bread baking, small engine repair, knot tying, etc etc etc etc.
Anyone can learn a bunch of these to varying degrees and they'll be frequently valuable through life, and potentially contribute significantly to identity and yes self respect. Which specific ones someone ends up with is pretty much meaningless though. I mean this kindly but there's nothing special about penmanship just because you value it.
edit: Ok, so HN font as displayed does not show the bar across the 0, even though the editor does ...
0̸
(May render as 0 ̸, but should look like a single slashed zero. Wikipedia seems to think this is the way to get a slashed zero in Unicode: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slashed_zero)
If you look up examples online they seem fairly reasonable. But in actual daily handwriting they are very extreme. It looks more like a stylized capital A than a number honestly.
(And I still swear that my differential equations professor wrote problems that used mu, 'u', 'v', and nu at the same time as a prank on people with bad handwriting.)
I wouldn't make any claims that writing has somehow made me magically smarter or better at anything else, I just find it fun to do (and I believe that pleasure is vastly more important than "productivity" so that's a win for me). It seems probable that my composition skills are better (or at least different in some hard-to-define way) due to the slower speed and non-editability of handwritten text. I rarely find myself at a loss for what sentence to write next when I'm handwriting because my thoughts are already buffered up since it takes them a bit longer to get onto the page.
Another angle for me is that I recently picked up a chronic disease which has changed my energy levels a lot and many old hobbies are no longer feasible as often as they used to be. I can write even when I feel like there's a mountain of tires on fire inside my head.
Draw two horizontal lines about half an inch apart and in the space between them doodle one of:
+ continuous clockwise stream of overlapping circles (imagine you flattened a slinky)
+ continuous counterclockwise version of the above
+ continuous line mountains/valleys (draw an N that becomes an M that keeps going and has tons of peaks)
Repeat.
The first time trying it, most people will find it freakishly difficult to do smoothly and consistently. That's because your fine-motor eye/hand control circuits aren't tuned for these motions which are are the basis functions for all western language penmanship. If you start doodling these figures when you're bored on zoom, your penmanship will magically improve, not because you learned penmanship but because you enabled your fingers to do what your brain is telling them to do.
This will also help you have better penmanship on a whiteboard, but in-office whiteboard writing involves more large muscles as well, so it doesn't hurt to also doodle on a whiteboard this way once you have the fine-motor controls tuned up (the fine-motor remains the most important, even on a whiteboard, so starting with pen and paper doodling will get you where you want to go fastest for either format).
[0]https://fcmdsc.files.wordpress.com/2010/06/exercises.jpg
Edit: come to think about it, it's probably a universal, since you see angling in Arabic and Chinese scripts' calligraphic styles as well.
It's due to the way penmanship was written. Consider the arm position [0] of proper penmanship. The page is at an angle to the left, such that it is similar to the angle of your forearm on the page. Pivoting at the elbow allows you to swing your arm from the left side of the page to the right. The forward slant allows you to always be moving "forwards" as you write across the page.
I hope that was clear. Please feel free to ask clarifying questions if not.
[0] https://archive.org/details/armmovementmetho00zane/page/12/m...
As you might be aware, arm position and use in serious calligraphy is a far more thoughtfully and intentionally designed process than I ever would have imagined. A major component of Spencerian technique involves resting the right forearm on the left palm (I think I have that right, I'm not actually one who does Spencerian writing) in order to use the flesh of the forearm as a linear bearing driven by the shoulder muscles and constrained by the left palm as a means of achieving a more repeatable and predictable translation motion than can be achieved with simple proprioception based motor control.
> If you start doodling these figures when you're bored on zoom, your penmanship will magically improve
I find this sentiment common, particularly amongst people who learned penmanship "recently". It is incorrect.
A brief interlude--When I was in middle school I resisted learning cursive. My teachers would tell me that drawing little circles and lines would make my penmanship better. I asked why, but they didn't know. Their teachers told them it was true, so now they're telling me it's true.
Push pulls and oval drills will only improve your penmanship if:
There's no magic. They are intended to specifically train a smoothness and control in arm movement writing. Those writing with their fingers will derive little benefit. In no way am I trying to discount progress you have made personally. My contention is that any person devoting sufficient time and intentionality to their handwriting practice will see some improvement, regardless of the methodology used. The crux of the issue is how much progress can/will you make.Happy to answer any clarifying questions regarding cursive or penmanship.
Below are some of my favorite references in business penmanship.
[0] https://archive.org/details/ChampionMethodOfPracticalBusines...
[1] https://archive.org/details/armmovementmetho00zane
[2] https://archive.org/details/MillsModernBusinessPenmanship
Calligraphers/penman show up in surprising places. The White House employs 3 calligraphers for writing menus, invitations to formal events, etc.
The minimal set of doodles I mentioned is a simplification of the Palmer method, which can itself be thought of as a simplification of the Spencerian method. If one wants to get into penmanship seriously, there are many wonderful rabbit warrens to descend into.
If one is unable to form legible letters at all, in my experience that tends to be more of a fine motor eye-hand coordination thing than anything else, in which case almost any well-chosen set of doodle drills will help significantly.
[edit] also - welcome to HN! I just noticed the green font for your username. I suspect you'll have lots to contribute to this place.
This is an astute comparison, and I think you're completely right. One who devotes time and effort into practice (nearly any practice) of handwriting will improve.
However I would liken it more to something such as: "will Olympic weightlifting make me a better soccer player than sprinting, ball control, and team coordination drills will?". It's not a generic A or B, as we're trying to achieve an intended result.
More aptly, "given I want to achieve C, is A or B a better approach".
He's wrong that there's a standard cursive. Different countries and different centuries have used a variety of different cursives. Most Americans who were taught cursive in school learned either Zaner-Bloser or D'Nealian, which both derive from Palmer. Both of them are terrible. They have indistinct letter shapes that degrade horribly when written quickly.
Cursive Italic handwriting is much more legible, if slightly slower. There are popular systems including Getty-Dubay Italic and Barchowsky Fluent Handwriting. Both of those are fine, and should be strongly preferred to 19th-20th century cursive.
I still use traditional late 20th century American cursive (D'Nealian, I think), but all the practice with fountain pens has made my handwriting more legible than it's been in a long time.
Cursive came about because writing with quill and dip pens required you keep the nib on the paper for as long as possible, lest it dry out, or the ink drop to the page. Fountain pens aren't as bad in this regard, but still do better when the ink is flowing than just waving about in the air.
I happily take work notes all day long with fountain pens (today I have a Pilot Custom 74 inked up). I wouldn't want to give them up.
(The Vanishing Point was admittedly a little too big and heavy for comfort, but a Decimo has the same nib and mechanism in a lighter, narrower body. Looks a lot more elegant, too, with the smoother rounding of the shoulder.)
On the other end of the spectrum I have to recommend the Lamy Safari and Kaweco Sport for their utilitarian design and timeless aesthetics.
The Safari is very good as a starter (though I'm partial to the Pilot Metropolitan or TWSBI Eco for starters). I don't have experience with the Kaweco Sport, though I hear only good things.
(Russian cursive is also notoriously hard to read for non-native speakers owing to a few idiosyncrasies: some letters are entirely different written vs. in print, and the letter forms can lead to ambiguity -- certain letter combinations are effectively identical.)
A near-universal phenomenon among people I've spoken with who took Russian in college is the unconscious blending of the two letter sets. Students, myself included, would routinely find themselves using Russian letters in English script while writing without realizing it, and sometimes even reading it later without realizing the presence of Russian letters.
I knew it was happening to me, but it wasn't until I loaned my political science notes -- ostensibly in English! -- to a non-Russian-student pal that the prevalence of the swaps were really clear. "Uh, I absolutely cannot read this."
Ooops.
Anyway, it's tangential to this topic, but I thought it was interesting enough to share.
This is the first link I found with illustrations of the Russian cursive alphabet:
https://golearnrussian.com/russian-cursive/
I wonder if the Russian cursive slips in because it has sounds that are closer.
That is a very, very weird assertion.
In any case, the letters that would get swapped in were 1-for-1 replacements for the English ones, though, so I don't think that's the factor.
A small nitpick, Zanerbloser doesn’t derive from palmer script, but they both absolutely do belong to the same family.
I also found it really interesting to discover that the prescribed 52 degree writing angle for Spencerian is almost exactly what you get matching the diagonal on an 8.5" by 11" piece of paper (I'm surprised that's not more widely known!). Thus, rather than a difficult and seemingly arbitrary requirement, it's a super easy way of attaining consistency by simply rotating the page so its diagonal goes straight away from the writer. (If you're using US Letter paper, anyway)
It’s great that you recognize this handicap as dealing with it sooner rather than later is a good; bad posture is indeed harder to correct later as we know. The first measure you can take is course correcting yourself over shorter intervals i.e.Move The Paper towards yourself with no shame, even during the length of a line, as often as need be. Even Louis Madarasz did it, so don’t hesitate. But I think your fix becomes a habit, it becomes a non-issue later.
> ... the proscribed 52 degree writing angle for Spencerian is almost exactly what you get matching the diagonal on an 8.5" by 11" piece of paper
If this is true, you just blew my mind, thanks for sharing the discovery.
Asking because I think I've got about as much benefit as I'm going to from having used a fountain pen exclusively for the last five or so years, so I'm looking at this point to learn a proper script. It sounds like you're considerably more familiar and may know some good places to start, and I'm hoping to get the benefit of your experience.
[0]https://archive.org/details/cu31924029485467/page/n47/mode/2...
As far as recommendation goes, I think you should see if you would be content with learning something like the afore-mentioned D'Nealian method, which involves a lot of printing and shape reproduction, and stick to it. You can get far using a fountain with this.
However if you have the desire to reach for something more, I would recommend looking into a good "Business Writing" hand. There should a introductory book on a decent business hand produced by Ziller Inks on the Apple book store. I'd get that, it was pretty affordable last time I checked.
The business hand is a beginner friendly entry into the spencerian family and let's you carry your progress into more refined spencerian hands when you are ready for them later. Download a copy of the book "C.C.Canan - Collection of Penmanship" to see the kind of spencerian hands you could aspire towards.If you chose this path, it's a long journey so it depends on your personality like most hobbies.
Penmanship is a weird hobby, it looks both simple and intimidating at the same time. If you feel like you could use some personal advice, leave a comment and I'll reach out to contact info on your profile. I'm not an expert(I've seen what experts do and boy am I not one) but generally enjoy sharing penmanship learning advice so I don't mind a consultation or two.
http://www.richimages.net/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/spencer...
But adapted into business script AFAIU the simplification into two heights, and the shrinking of the "p" stem, is pretty common. I'm definitely not used to making "p" taller than "q" and I am not always consistent about it.
http://www.calligraphy-union.ru/EditorFiles/image/news/66315...
This is not accurate. Zaner predates Palmer.
> Both of them are terrible. They have indistinct letter shapes that degrade horribly when written quickly.
I would more attribute this to...
... rather than something intrinsic to the style. Business penmanship was, after all, created to be fast & legible. Historical pieces of penmanship are most often legible, particularly when written by skilled penmen.Source: was professional penman, specifically studying 1860-1920 American penmanship.
+ beautiful; consistent letter forms between printing and cursive
- better with chisel vs. round tips; joins are still somewhat complicated
But I digress! I did also want to state that I disagree with the author's statement "Nobody writes it anymore".
Clearly the author has not met many doctors or lawyers or spent much time in Europe.
Cursive is very much still in use by all three of the above.
Unlikely you'd get away with that in a European school, irrespective of how bad your writing is !
Here's a French newspaper article from 2012 bemoaning the fact that Calefornians are barely taught cursive. ;-) [1]
https://www.lefigaro.fr/international/2012/11/28/01003-20121...
Another tidbit someone may find interesting, going through elementary school in the early 90s I was forced to write right handed, despite being a natural lefty. This was due to the teachers religious leanings. I grew up in a major metro area as well. I can write with both hands now, but prefer right handed writing so the spirals of notebooks don't push up against my hand. Anytime I pick up a new hobby I have a weird decision to make about what hand I want to use. Still haven't figured out if I bowl left or right handed!
I also don't think we've totally moved away from wet signatures, so they do have practical use as well.
Most non-architectural hand-writers write the letter “P” with a single stroke: draw a small loop and extend the side downward to form the stem.
I've got no architectural training, but I make my p's in two strokes (and my n's, for that matter, too).
The gothic font (along the lines what you get image searching "fraktur" or "gothic font") is good for some cards or signs or something, it's a bit slow to write, but because of the corners being so discontinuous it has a very distinct look to it. It doesn't really need a calligraphy pen either.
This is a rediculous inference - I don't do it, therefore nobody does it and it's obsolete.
I for one, write in cursive every day, taking notes in a notebook/journal, and carry a fountain pen to do so. It's just such a nicer experience than writing in biro, which I refuse to do except when it's utterly unavoidable. I can appreciate I might be an outlier, but handwriting in fountain pen is a superior experience to even using an iPad, and this way I don't have to "print" my notes, they already exist in hard copy, and are resistant to bit-rot (save a deluge). I think writing by hand also engages a different part of me to the one that is engaged by typing on a computer. I'd recommend it to anyone.
I still write all my notes in cursive with a fountain pen. According to graphology, handwriting is brain-writing and improves as you write more.
That said, I do write by hand (with a fountain pen! it's more fun, and slows me down a little which improves legibility) every day. I plan my day and take notes longhand, and often journal in the evening. I've done this all my working life, because writing seems to connect to my brain in a way that just typing doesn't, and I've increased in the pandemic because the more years I spend at the keyboard (I'm 52) the worse my handwriting seems to get. Doing it more seems like a good way to try and reverse that trend.
I think the author is mistaking their self for everyone.
I have rows of my bookshelf dedicated to all my journals. Written by hand. In cursive (for the most part, some technical journals I used standard print for diagrams and annotations).
I use a reMarkable2 as well for ephemeral notes, bullet journalling, and reading/sharing documents from my computer. I like being able to hand-write a note and email it as plain text to myself. Process it with a script and boom, new draft post. While I sit at my desk, no computer in sight. Bonus, character recognition of my cursive writing is pretty accurate.
https://bigthink.com/the-present/handwriting-memory/
I wonder if there is a way to produce a “keyboard” with the same effect on the mind?
Where I come from, writing cursive is taught in the first few grades.
I've been after a book called "Flip The Script" for ~10 years, but being out of print the prices are crazy. It's recently been reprinted, arrived today, and it's absolutely wonderful - https://www.handselecta.com/handselecta-flipthescript
As it says on the back "Graffiti is one of the last strongholds of highly refined penmanship." Anyway, beautiful book, highly recommended.