View From a Height

The Instaprof notes that cursive may be joining shorthand in the Bourne From Which No Penmanship Returns. Most answers in bluebooks now tend to be block printed rather than written. Shorthand is long-gone, a victim of the boss's abillity to type his own memos now, and I suspect that even long written answers will be passe soon. The Palm Grafiti was a clever intermediate step, but you'll notice that manufacturers started attaching keyboards to their PDAs as soon as they could figure out how to.

Reynolds notes that beautiful script is a small loss, but in fact, penmanship has been deteriorating for well over a century. If you can dig up a hand-written letter from, say, 1900, look at the writing, and you'll see that the script is so elegant it's almost unreadable by the modern eye. Losing script altogether is the next step in functionality.

In fact, I still write cursive most of the time, a decision that dates back to college. My own handwriting used to be unreadable to the modern eye, too, or any eye for that matter. Growing up I probably had the worst penmanship withing 50 miles of DC. The only reason it wasn't a greater radius is that I'm sure there was some senile nonegenarian in Baltimore who could barely scratch out his request that the soup be smoother next time. I write left-handed, but I throw, kick, and bat right-handed, so maybe that has something to do with it.

My handwriting was so bad (how bad was it?) it was so bad, that my 8th-grade Geometry teach, Mr. Allison, used to grade down my homework assignments because he claimed he had to work too hard to read all those right answers. Didn't help when I started spending an hour lettering them. Didn't help when I switched to ink. B. B-. 100%. B+. In the long run, the grade wasn't that important, but these were high school grades now, and if I wanted to get into Virginia, A's were going to have to be the order of the day. I wasn't going to let some frustrated calligrapher stand between me and Cavalierdom.

The only thing that helped was when I started typing - yes, with an Underwood electric typewriter, typing, my assignments. I typed out the proofs (you know, rule you're using on the left, logical result on the right, like an accounting T-chart). I used an underlined ! for "perpendicular," and an underlined / for "angle," and went back and drew in the "T". Not being a complete idiot, I penciled the solid-geometry drawings, then traced them over in ink. Finally, "A's."

My handwriting was pretty much the same through the first couple of years in college. Third year, I read a column by George Will about the virtues of fountain pens (I suspect another one is forthcoming on the heels of this article), and went out and got a cheap $10 model at Rose's. I liked it, so I got myself a more expensive Schaeffer model a few months later.

So I had the dream-to-write-with pen, one you couldn't really print with, and I decided to slow down and upgrade my handwriting to match. Write slowly, and everything falls into line. The first time a checkout girl complemented me on my handwriting I almost asked her out. I was 25, and I can honestly say it was the first time in my life I had heard the words, "wow, that's really nice handwriting." The only reason I knew she wasn't making fun of my was that I asked if she were.

So, another buggy-whip skill mastered just in time.