The Lost Art Of Writing

[beak]

Further: Beak, you're doubtless right about your own practices which you described in your points 1 and 3 -- and I think your practices are good ones -- my concern is that such practices (despite their known usefulness) are generally considered impermissible by those schoolteachers who still teach cursive. There are, in North America at least, teachers who would rather see an inept handwriting fully joined than see a rapid and legible cursive that even occasionally omitted or simplified a join. Such teachers and textbooks force cursive-learners to choose to sacrifice reasonableness (legibility and speed) to prescription on joining. (If they did not require such sacrifice, I'd have far fewer objections to cursive as it is taught ... When it is still taught in any fashion.)

I'm sorry that I overlooked this earlier; and like you I find it unpardonable! However - there is always one of those - cursive must not be buried because of inept and dogmatic teaching.

 

Again, I perceive an insistence on textbook forms being a beginner's goal, and that any who have been subject to such rigid teaching (as most older people probably were) will come to adapt to a more personal (quicker?) form before long. I would guess that there is a gap or grey area; teachers being unable or unwilling to allow or accept anything but a copybook correctness because they cannot be seen to teach anything else. At what point, age, or degree of competence does a teacher permit variation from a perfect pattern. What variations will be acceptable, and so on.

 

I should like to see some focus from experts on that point. Do you not think this has some mileage?

Edited June 5, 2011 by beak

[Chevalier]

It looks more and more like we touched a pretty difficult topic.

 

Progression, politics, personal taste, faulty school system, aso ... Everything plays its own part in this matter. If a script, that's naturally legible, easy to write (at highest speed), is the ideal form, then germany would still have its Kurrent. I guess it's not that easy. Often a following generation wants to make progress. It looks like it doesn't need to be neccessarily a change for the better.

 

I don't know about the school system in every European country, but in most, print is considered the print script, while cursiv is considered the writing script. They are taught completely separatedly (it's not simply a joined up print), from the first or second class on. I guess this causes a certain mindset, because you won't consider print to be something that's meant to be written.

 

My personal rebellion was forgetting about cursive and the fp (what a mistake), as soon as I was free to write like I pleased. Before I needed to master both, to be able to visit a good school. I think that's why I enjoyed the newly gained freedom that much. I used a semi-cursive style for many years, until I noticed that the bp isn't compatible with my passion for calligraphy, I think I would have sticked to my semi-cursive without it though.

 

I guess everybody has his own story regarding this matter. I just think that not teaching cursive in the first place is a problem. We have people in our courses, who need to learn to make a real signature, this is absolutely crazy.

 

Most school systems need to be reformed. It doesn't need to be hard to learn. Well, talking about the school system would go beyond the scope.

Edited June 5, 2011 by Chevalier

[KateGladstone]

The notebook illustrates a common phenomenon — that an efficiently evolved personal mix of joined and unjoined writing styles often comes close to re-inventing Italic: even in cases where the writer verifiably had never heard of Italic handwriting, the writing sometimes surprisingly approximates that style.

 

To me, this suggests that a simple semi-joined Italic could usefully be taught to beginners ... and then, options such as looping and further joining and other letter-shapes  could be introduced step-by-step: with all students taught to read those options, and students also permitted to write any of those options that they enjoyed and could handle well.

             Would other pen-folk support this as something to develop and advocate: maybe to have introduced to children and others at Pen Shows and elsewhere (rather than try to persuade schools which either opt for over-rigid methods or, increasingly, decide thar they shall no longer teach handwriting although they shall still complain when the students can't produce it ... ) ?

 

Beak's question is vital:

 

"[given] teachers being unable or unwilling to allow or accept anything but a copybook correctness because they cannot be seen to teach anything else[, a]t what point, age, or degree of competence does a teacher permit variation from a perfect pattern. What variations will be acceptable, and so on.<br /><br />I should like to see some focus from experts on that point.  Do you not think this has some mileage?"

 

One expert — Rosemary Sassoon — has many useful observations and recommendations on this point (as on others). From my own experiences and observation, I'd recommend that variation must be permitted (within limits defined by the need for unmistakable legibility of any letter) as soon as — and as long as — the student enjoys the variant and can write it with full legibility at least as fast as s/he can write the standard form of any letter or join. (Thus, a textbook should list permissible options in letter-forms and joins — a couple of textbooks already do this to a small extent — with the rule being: "Try these out, decide which one(s) you'll stick to, and practice those." This could be managed by charts — which I would prepare for anyone funding such a project — that were made of cards depicting alphabet-letters, with several cards for each letter. All the cards for "f" — for example — would be hinged together at the top, so that the desired "f" could be flipped into place. Even more easily — though more expensively — it could be done with software: I've made a small start on this with by BETTER LETTERS iPad application whose features include giving the user a choice between exit-serifs or their absence in practicing such letters as a/d/h/m/n ... and I would be willing to persuade my programmer to go further with this, if I thought that enough pen-folk would be interested in buying some new version of the app. Maybe some pen company or handwriting organization has people reading FPN, who would be prepared to back further development?)

[Mickey]

Italic letter forms are pretty much unavoidable for us in the West, as they are the archetype for everything we read. Even venerable Times Roman and all the Helvetica variants either come from the same ancestors or can be directly traced to the Italic hands of Niccolo de' Noccoli and his contemporaries. It should then be no surprise that most Western writers will adopt Chancery type joins, since the print letters they learned (before learning cursive) were an upright form of Italic (i.e., sharing the proportions but not the slant). Combining the slant of cursive with printed letter forms almost guarantees the "reinvention" of a Chancery like script. Most of the ingredients were already embedded in the letter forms.

 

Kate and Chevalier (and Beak), I think, make important points about the dearth of quality instruction. A teacher who does not understand the rationale behind a hand's design, will not teach it well nor understand the difference in their students between personal variation and outright error. Even the greatest penman exhibited a fair amount of variation in their output.

 

Enforcing rigid adherence to copy book models ignores the reality of human physical, aesthetic, and visual variation and guarantees that most students will learn incorrectly and never gain either the legibility or speed the hand should produce. The result is a scrawl or a retreat at first opportunity to the first learned forms, i.e., printing. This, I believe, is the problem. An improperly taught (and consequently ill-learned) commercial cursive is neither as fast nor as legible as it should be, and the fact of this has led to all sorts of misconceptions and ultimately unsupportable conclusions.

 

As I learned a long time ago, misinformation is often as deeply held as facts are. Ronald Reagan supposedly said something along the lines that the people with whom he disagreed weren't ignorant, it was just that so much of what they knew was wrong. Whether you agreed with his politics or not, the observation is a canny one.

Edited June 5, 2011 by Mickey

[KateGladstone]

I'd add that even those who never learned any cursive (a growing number!) often end up slanting their writing — because increasing the speed of a vertical ABC style induces slant.A quotable thought on handwriting styles — from the late Stanley Morison: typographer, paleographer, and officer of the Society for Italic Handwriting — "To my mind handwriting must be 'natural' because it must be fast. I like to see an obviously speedy piece of script. I hate a letter which exhales the scent of some calligraphic cosmetic. Give me a true cursive, let it run as fast as one can make it and at the same time make it sufficiently regular. If keeping the pen on an uninterrupted line helps let us by all means make it a rule to write so; but it is my experience that it is -a- restful and -b- an assistance to speed to run on or to take off at will - that will which operates automatically as the result of experience."

[DAYoung]

In 'A Decade of Research in Handwriting', Askov, Otto & Askov (1970) reported on the manuscript/cursive debate (i.e. unjoined/joined). They divide the findings into errors, pressure/speed and legibility.

 

Errors

One study on German children found that fewer errors were made with unjoined, but no data existed for English. Another was inconclusive, with joined and unjoined each having distinctive errors. They conclude: there is no evidence that either style encourages less errors.

 

Pressure/Speed

A German study found children trained first in unjoined wrote more quickly. A Russian study factored in time, found the opposite (i.e. later on, children first trained in cursive wrote more quickly). There were no results for English.

 

Legibility

One study demonstrated that children trained in unjoined writing (i.e. 'manuscript') had more legible handwriting ten years after high school graduation. Those who first learned unjoined, then moved to cursive, had the worst legibility.

 

Askov, Otto and Askov conclude: "[T]here seems to be no need to change from manuscript to cursive writing if manuscript writing is introduced first. Yet definitive date, to show that the introduction of manuscript writing does indeed produce superior results, has not yet been reported." (p.108)

Edited June 5, 2011 by DAYoung

[Chevalier]

I think the main problem of today's "cursive teachers" is, that they don't need to master cursive, to be allowed to teach it. This is totally weird. My teacher in primary school had a nice cursive hand, but I've seen others, with an unbelievably bad hand.

Is such a person qualified to teach children how to write? Writing is taught during language classes in most countries, and it's enough to have a language university degree, to teach children how to write. In most cases, those "teachers" don't even know how to hold a pen correctly anymore. The school system was invented during a time, when every educated adult knew how to write, so nobody paid attention to this matter. Then, a dozen half baked reformations later, and voilá .. there's the mess we got.

 

Imagine a penmanship teacher, in the days of Mr. Bickham, who's completely unable to lay a straight downstroke, or a nicely curved upstroke. The teachers during the copybook era knew, at least, how to copy the books. As I mentioned earlier, we need someone to copy from, in order to learn easily. This is the natural way of learning. We leaving our children, more or less, alone with the books, this system is broken by design.

Edited June 6, 2011 by Chevalier

[Mickey]

I'd add that even those who never learned any cursive (a growing number!) often end up slanting their writing —

 

What you are describing is the geometry of a joined hand (slant makes for short, thin joins, particularly with edged pens) but with the actual joins omitted. So, unless you believe lifting the pen, moving to a new point, then lowering pen again is faster than simply moving without lifting, the logical conclusion is inevitable. Joined (cursive) hands are faster than their unjoined equivalents. (Equivalence is a crucial requirement for making reasonable comparisons. For example, the speed of ornamental hands should only be compared to that of other ornamental hands. Formal printing, such as one might see in an illuminated manuscript or Torah, is at least as slow to write as Copperplate or the more elaborated forms of Spencerian.)

[tinta]

I have heard a discussion on the CBC (Radio Canada 1), where it was pointed out that different centers of the brain are used for typing & for cursive writing.

According to the expert on the air, hand writing (cursive in particular) needs a more direct concentration on the part of the writer, to keep the content, spelling, punctuation & proper grammar on course. The motor control to manipulate a pen is not on the same side of the brain as typing. Found this kind of intriguing.

 

I know that when I got back to making more hand written notes and letters, I had to mentally switch hats to keep my writing accurate. Had to slow down my thoughts, to keep pace with my lumbering, semi-cursive script. But, there seems to be less of a need for corrections. Cursive writing for me now is a form of relaxation.

On the computer, my mind often races ahead of my glacial typing speed,......but no worry, (there's always spell-check to correct at least some of the errors). It's easy to make corrections.

Don't know if the above is off topic, but here it is anyway....

 

Cheers: tinta

Edited June 22, 2011 by tinta

[Mickey]

Thanks for the heads up, tinta.

 

There is nothing earth shaking in the "expert's" observation. There is no need for a visual feed back loop in typing. Back when I learned to type, the teacher dinged you if you looked at your copy while typing. We are not taught to write without consulting the copy. This is at best an apples to orangutan comparison.

 

I likewise believe the further distinction regarding cursive is specious at best, ignorant, more likely. As I posted earlier, one can only legitimately compare things which are comparable: formal hands to formal hands, casual hands to casual handsl. I would be shocked if the visual feedback overhead differs in any significant amount between a cursive hand and a comparable unjoined hand. If anything, I would expect the cursive hand to accrue less overhead, since letter spacing is built into the joining geometry of cursive hands.

Edited June 22, 2011 by Mickey

[KateGladstone]

Re:

 

>1. I, and I doubt that I'm alone in this, don't join all the letters ... [and] either simplify

> a potentially complex joins (as might be given by pattern books of standard hands) or omit them.

 

Good for you -- this, of course, is called "wrong" by teachers (in North America, at least) and is punished (all too many teachers who don't teach cursive expect it nonetheless ... just as many teachers, including many of the same ones, will UNconsciously do the very good things that you do (simplifying the more difficult joins, even to the point of omitting them) and reprimand their students for doing the same.

(It is VERY common to see a teacher use a quite nice semi-joined cursive to write on a student's paper that it is unacceptable to lift the pen between letters ... the teachers find it hard to believe, even after I show them, that they have used pen-lifts which they believe that "no educated adult can possibly use." I have seen teachers cry when I enlarged their handwriting, circled all the pen-lifts, and pointed out that these in fact outnumbered the pen-lifts they had reprimanded some student for making.)

This should surprise no one -- in a world where illegibly scrawled teacherly comments often turn out, once finally somewhat deciphered, to read "Write legibly."

[KateGladstone]

I agree entirely with Chevalier's post. No style, of whatever excellent design, can be taught by one who has never learned the basics of producing any style whatsoever. (If the average school system taught arithmetic as it attempts to teach handwriting, most classes in arithmetic would be taught by people who had never learned to count to twenty with their shoes on.)

[KateGladstone]

To the statistics given on the roughly equal speed of joined and unjoined writing, I would like to add that such statistics as I've seen on joined vs. semi-joined writing (I will try to dig up the citation if anyone is interested) show a significant speed advantage for semi-joined writing.

[KateGladstone]

Re research on cursive handwriting -- such brain-research as I've seen quoted in support of cursive writing has turned out (on examination) to be merely research on handwriting vs. typing (not on cursive vs. other styles of handwriting). Does anyone have an actual citation for a study finding cursive to excel, in any way, any other form of handwriting?Re European CVs requiring cursive -- if the application procedure required wearing a powdered wig to the interview, would this prove the inherent superiority of powdered wigs to other ways of dressing the hair? Employers who insist on a particular style of handwriting -- who are not content with legibility and speed -- risk turning away some desirable employees while accepting those whose cursive handwriting is the most desirable thing about them.I am reliably informed (by people who have worked in the personnel field in various European countries) that the major reason nowadays for a handwritten CV (oarticularly in France and the Netherlands) is that the personnel office will submit this to a graphologist, and the graphologists are trained to regard any other way of writing (other than the nationally approved variant of cursive) as evidence of poor character and/or low capacity. If so, they are again deterring some able employees and accepting some whose greatest merit is that their handwriting possesses features which the examiner has been trained to accept as proof of excellence.

[Columba Livia]

I am reliably informed (by people who have worked in the personnel field in various European countries) that the major reason nowadays for a handwritten CV (oarticularly in France and the Netherlands) is that the personnel office will submit this to a graphologist

 

Interestingly, a 2009 case study from the international journal of selection and assessment found that it is a myth that graphology is widely used in personal selection in Europe and also that handwritten letters are rarely used for graphological analysis:

 

http://doc.rero.ch/lm.php?url=1000,43,4,20101122144128-QQ/Bangerter_Adrian_-_How_Widespread_is_Graphology_in_Personnel_Selection_20101122.pdf

 

Indeed, in French speaking Switzerland, of just over 10,000 job adverts they looked at, only 2.4% required a handwritten letter. Handwritten letters seem to have become less and less popular over time in fact.

 

So I suspect it isn't too big an issue when it comes to continuously joined handwriting.

 

 

In "The Acquisition of a second writing system", I note that Rosemary Sassoon refers to continuously joined handwriting (i.e handwriting here all letters in a word are joined together) as "commercial cursive", presumably because of its descent from the mercantile hands of the 18th and 19th centuries.

Edited June 23, 2011 by Columba Livia

[Chevalier]

I've been in charge for the HRM at the last company I worked for. Nobody believed in graphology, at least not enough to send the CVs in. We did expect however that the CV is written in cursive. It's nice to see something the applicant has written in his very own cursive hand. A document written in cursive always tells you something about the person who wrote it. I think we are able to read a hand's features subconciously, besides the obvious features that give a nice overview already.

[beak]

...........

 

Re hand-written job applications and 'graphology'. Thanks for the link to that study - instructive in many ways.

 

I for one would be horrified to think that any hand-written application of mine would be sent to a graphologist for any form of personal analysis relevent to my application, and I would share the view that any company doing so was to be suspected of highly unprofessional selection procedures. However this is not the only reason that a hand-written application may be called for, as pointed out in the study.

 

For all this, I cannot but imagine that some reaction to the handwriting on such an application will happen; a personal like or dislike of it would be natural, but, failing an illietate and / or illegible untidy scrawl, I should think that any experienced professional selectors would not give much weight to personal preferences.

 

Well worth the read.

[Chevalier]

 

For all this, I cannot but imagine that some reaction to the handwriting on such an application will happen; a personal like or dislike of it would be natural, but, failing an illietate and / or illegible untidy scrawl, I should think that any experienced professional selectors would not give much weight to personal preferences.

 

 

You'd sometimes have a couple of applications with similar qualifications on the table. You don't have the time to do 10 full interviews, just to fill a single post. At least my former boss would have gone really mad. Everything that helps with the decision comes in handy then. I always tried to be fair, trying to hire the best (wo)man for the job.

 

It's not fair, but many selections are made by personal preference. I read a study about this a couple of months ago (still searching for it). Even those guys that had the worse qualifications have been hired (in Europe), because certain other factors were given (for example: male, closer ethnic background). This isn't only unfair, it's utter discrimination. I don't think they'd feel bad to discriminate someone because of their handwriting.

[rosey]

I heard on the news tonight that Indiana is joining 40 states in deciding to eliminate cursive handwriting as a requirement in public schools. They feel it is more important to emphasize keyboard proficiency use. Incredible! Will cursive writing become a lost art in our society?

[The Good Captain]

I heard on the news tonight that Indiana is joining 40 states in deciding to eliminate cursive handwriting as a requirement in public schools. They feel it is more important to emphasize keyboard proficiency use. Incredible! Will cursive writing become a lost art in our society?

It would be a shame if this were to happen. I don't know what the situation is here in the UK or what the Government guidelines have decided should be taught in the schools. I'll try to find out but I suspect that cursive is still a requirement. We'll see.