The Hammock Papers: In Defense of Penmanship

28 January 2009

In Defense of Penmanship

For many pro-keyboarding anti-handwriters, the real bugaboo is cursive writing--the Palmer Method and its offspring. When the computer crashes or the electricity fails, when repetitive stress syndrome threatens or they’re on a mountaintop in Colorado with the urge to write a poem and only a notebook at hand--what, they ask, is wrong with printing?

The only sensible answer is: nothing. An even more sensible answer is that it’s possible to learn a writing system that combines the clarity and simplicity of printing with the speed of cursive. Many of us have, informally, devised such a script for ourselves out of desperation.

Although I haven't written in cursive since junior high, I LOVE to print. Colleagues often compliment the marks I make, and there isn't a one that goes by that I don't chuckle and remember my institutional training in what Dr. Wallschlaeger called "Lettering." As a sophomore design student, each night we were charged with the task of completing the alphabet and numbers, for a height of 3/16" to 1 1/2". All the letter forms were to be of the same "personality," as Doc called it -- all letters made with the same stroke weight, design, and style. I loved it. I felt as though I were a scribe during the renaissance, cloistered away to practice my craft. After ten weeks of this, or when The Doctor deemed you worthy, it was thought that your technique was ingrained.

I have been told numerous times that I should make my lettering a font. Never. It just doesn't seem like the thing a scribe would allow.

Read the rest here.

Explore Barchowsky Fluent Handwriting here.

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WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART

"When I am, as it were, completely myself, entirely alone and of good cheer – say travelling in a carriage or walking after a good meal, or during the night when I cannot sleep – it is on such occasions that my ideas flow best and most abundantly. Whence, and how, they come I know not ; nor can I force them. Those ideas that please me I retain in memory and am accustomed, as I have been told, to hum them to myself. If I continue in this way, it soon occurs to me how I may turn this dainty morsel to account, so as to make a good dish of it. That is to say, agreeable to the rules of counterpoint, to the peculiarities of various instruments etc. All this fires my soul, and, provided I am not disturbed, my subject enlarges itself, becomes methodised, and defined, and the whole, though it be long, stands almost complete and finished in my mind, so that I can survey it like a fine picture or a beautiful statue at a glance. Nor do I hear in my imagination the parts successively, but I hear them, as it were, all at once. What a delight this is, I cannot tell."

MARCUS AURELIUS

"Is your cucumber bitter? Throw it away. Are there briars in your path? Turn aside. That is enough. Do not go on and say, 'Why were things of this sort ever brought into this world?' neither intolerable nor everlasting - if thou bearest in mind that it has its limits, and if thou addest nothing to it in imagination. Pain is either an evil to the body (then let the body say what it thinks of it!)-or to the soul. But it is in the power of the soul to maintain its own serenity and tranquility."

VINCENT van GOGH

"What am I in the eyes of most people? A nonentity or an oddity or a disagreeable person — someone who has and will have no position in society, in short a little lower than the lowest. Very well — assuming that everything is indeed like that, then through my work I’d like to show what there is in the heart of such an oddity, such a nobody. This is my ambition, which is based less on resentment than on love in spite of everything, based more on a feeling of serenity than on passion. Even though I’m often in a mess, inside me there’s still a calm, pure harmony and music. In the poorest little house, in the filthiest corner, I see paintings or drawings. And my mind turns in that direction as if with an irresistible urge. As time passes, other things are increasingly excluded, and the more they are the faster my eyes see the picturesque. Art demands persistent work, work in spite of everything, and unceasing observation."

DAN CAMPBELL