Hand Writing, a Reconsideration

How often do you think about handwriting?  Probably not nearly as much as you might have in grade school when you were expected to learn good penmenship.  Considering that so much work is done on computers nowadays it seems reasonable to assume that handwriting is slowly becoming a thing of the past.  Yet we cannot entirely write it off (haha clever) because there are still a good number of situations which demand that we pick up a pen or pencil and write letters down.

With that in mind allow me to state bluntly, “Fuck cursive!”  Well at least the overly confusing a loopy version that we were all probably taught back in the elementary school years.  I am pleased to know that I am not alone in this anti-Palmer method writing style as is demonstated in this short bit about italic handwriting.  Really it is a fantastic little piece.

The one thing I had never really thought about in regards to handwriting was that we do read the tops of the letters first.  Also, I think it is worth considering the natural aim of merging letters into one continuous script.  I have been doing just that with my handwriting for years now even though my lettering looks nothing like the curlicue Palmer method.  In fact I was delighted by the above article because it seems like my handwriting is kind of a “cursive” version of the italic scripting (with a few deviations here or there).

I wonder in our day and age of prodiminantly typed letters whether or not we are loosing something.  My grandmother still writes me letters by hand and I in turn have attempted several of my own (though I am teribly bad at writing as often as I should).  There is something about the handwriting which I like, it is something kind of like drawing, except that the symbols have distinct literal meanings.

Try it, sit and write something, see how it feels.  Hey it is Internation Literacy Day after all and writing is half the battle of literacy.

~ by Nathaniel on September 8, 2009.