Script and Scribble

by Kitty Burns Florey

  The publishers of these systems attempt to make handwriting practice fun, using games, cartoons, finger painting, sidebars, and an occasional touch of wackiness that might have disconcerted Spencer, Palmer, and Sister Victorine, but that, theoretically at least, keep the kids interested. Fun seems like an excellent idea, especially when you think of those grim period photographs of rows of students doggedly churning out Palmer exercises. Today, the exercises are still there, in a series of workbooks, complete with dotted lines and repetitive letter-forming, but they’re child-friendly, peppered with colorful pictures of animals, birds, and happy kids.

  All these handwriting programs have value: a good teacher who presents the instruction in a flexible, non-dogmatic, non-judgmental way—and does manage to make it fun—can do enormous good in the classroom.

  But as I pondered the handwriting issue, the question came to me in a blinding flash: why teach two different handwritings at all? Why must children be burdened with printing and then, a year or two later, move on to the radically different cursive script, learning a whole new set of letters?

  With this in mind, the D’Nealian heart seems to be in the right place. They claim that children learn the script “on a continuum, without a serious break in the development process. eighty-seven percent of [printed] D’Nealian lower case letters are the same as their cursive version. Children easily move into cursive writing when ready.”

  Well, this may be true, but that other 13 percent seems to consist of those Palmerian squiggles and loops. The more I look at them, the more arbitrary and superfluous they seem, and they simply increase my bewilderment: why shouldn’t children learn only one good, plain, solid, simple, easy, basic, legible, attractive—and fast—way of writing, from day one?

  ITALIC WRITING

  Like most good ideas, mine is not original. Over the years, in pursuit of that goal, there have been several attempts to promote a simplified, everyday version of the Italic script of sixteenth-century masters of the art like Arrighi and Palatino, even for very young children.

  In 1899, as Palmermania was getting off the ground, an Englishwoman named Mary Monica Bridges (wife of the poet Robert Bridges), capitalizing on the interest in letter arts popularized by William Morris and the Arts and Crafts revival, published A New Handwriting for Teachers, which recommended teaching schoolchildren sixteenth-century Italic. A generation later, in 1929, a study by Arthur I. Gates and Helen Brown in the Journal of Educational Research concluded that, perhaps, “by selecting the best elements from cursive and print-scripts, a writing alphabet may be discovered which, by combining the merits of the various existing rivals, will be superior to any one and make the learning of two alphabets unnecessary.”

  Amazingly, the printing we all learned in school—known also as manuscript writing, and often called ball and stick from the way the b’s, d’s, and other letters are formed—has been around for less than a hundred years. Marjorie Wise, another Englishwoman, introduced it to the New York City public schools in the 1920s. Until then, only cursive had been taught, but Wise felt that simple, clear upright printing would be easier for young children.

  The author’s pursuit of the perfect J, grade 1

  Very quickly, the traditional pattern took hold: print-script in first grade, cursive in third. Even the Palmer Company endorsed early printing as a worthy overture to their famous Method. However, print-script has always had its detractors. The British educator Alec Hay, in his essay “Handwriting in Schools,” commented in the early 1960s, “The writing of single letters, isolated, without joins, gives the young child the idea that the individual letter is the most important shape he is required to make, whereas the whole purpose of this elementary training (parallel with the teaching of reading) is … an understanding and correct transcription of whole words.”

  Nan Barchowsky developed her Italic handwriting program, known as BFH (Barchowsky Fluent Handwriting), after two decades teaching handwriting in American elementary schools. Barchowsky says that, in print-script, “The characters are drawn slowly, rather than written freely. Rhythm suffers because most print-script models lack the design elements that allow them to flow. Many children confuse the placement of the lines that form letters. Reversals become a problem.”

  As the Scottish calligrapher, educator, and Italic buff Tom Gourdie wrote in his Guide to Better Handwriting (in which he calls print-script “staccato writing—all stop and start”), “As any number of teachers will testify, this is fraught with difficulties and upsets” and produces “calligraphically crippled children.”4

  Even Marjorie Wise eventually repudiated the teaching of printing and became a convert to the notion that children should be taught one beautiful, flowing script—namely, Italic. In 1952, she became a board member of the Society of Italic Handwriting, founded by the calligrapher Alfred Fairbank, himself a great advocate of Italic for children.

  In his delightful book Sweet Roman Hand: Four Hundred Years of Italic Cursive Script (1952), the Englishman Wilfrid Blunt made an eloquent case for its comeback, calling it one of the finest legacies of the Renaissance. Blunt (1901–1987) was the brother of Anthony Blunt, the famous spy who passed British state secrets to the KGB. Wilfrid was rather less colorful. He may even have been a bit stuffy (he considered Monet and Cézanne “pornographic”). But he was an unusual guy: an excellent singer, a passionate gardener, the author of a biography of Linnaeus, and an “out” homosexual in the ’30s. He was also mad about fine penmanship. As a senior drawing master at Eton for more than twenty years, he encouraged his students in the use of Italic cursive, and his book is full of remarkable examples of the script by young Etonians he had taught:

  David Usborne, age 12 (image credits 5.8)

  Anthony Bedford Russell, age 17

  If it had been up to Blunt, this is the kind of script we all would produce every time we wrote a post card or took a note in class.

  The movement toward teaching Italic in schools has flowered impressively in the city of Portland, Oregon. Lloyd Reynolds (1902–1978), an English professor at Reed College there, had, like countless handwriting devotees before him, been enamored of lettering all his life. (As he put it, “The letters would not leave me alone.”) He was also a lifelong disciple of “the three Bills: Blake, Morris, and Shakespeare.” Reynolds discovered calligraphy in 1934. He studied the work of Fairbank, Johnston, and other masters, immersed himself in the calligraphy of the Arts and Crafts Revival, and resolved to make “the promotion of Italic cursive script” his goal—especially, as he said in an autobiographical note, “after teachers reported that students who mastered the Italic handwriting did better in all of their studies. Having a script that acted as an aid rather than a hindrance made the schoolwork easier and more satisfying.”

  In Italic Calligraphy & Handwriting, Reynolds provides instructions for producing the lively and graceful script for which he was known. His recommendations are sometimes eccentric but refreshingly down-to-earth. When you’re practicing, he says, write big: “Smaller writing tends to look better than it is, for details are not clearly seen.” To keep a “flower-light touch,” you must “watch your forefinger—if it collapses, you are pressing too hard.” Above all, “Avoid rote practice. When you become tired or careless, drop it and do something else.” He also points out, helpfully, “A letter is mostly untouched paper. There is very little ink on a written or printed page”—so watch the spaces between letters and between lines: the blank areas are as important as the inked ones. He advises working to music—it will “teach you much about the possibilities of rhythm in pen touch and movement”—and finds Mozart’s Symphony No. 40 in G Minor particularly effective. And he says to try writing with your eyes closed, to see “whether you can trust your hand and wrist.” In summary:

  (image credits 5.10)

  Reynolds branched out at Reed and began teaching a class in calligraphy. He was a charismatic teacher, interested not only in hand-lettering but also in typefaces. Among his students were a
number of poets—Gary Snyder, Lew Welch (who, during his brief stint as an adman, supposedly wrote the deathless line “Raid kills bugs dead”), and Philip Whalen, who beautifully hand-lettered his own poetry and journals. Probably the most famous, however, was Steve Jobs, the founder of Apple, Inc. In a commencement address he gave at Stanford in 2005, Jobs recalled that, if he had never taken that course in college,5 “the Macintosh computer would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, it’s likely that no personal computer would have them.” Another student, Chuck Bigelow, now a Stanford professor and a type designer, recalled Reynolds’s ability to make Italic writing magical: “When you write in an Italic hand,” he used to remind his students, “you are making the same kinds of motions that Queen Elizabeth I made when she practiced Chancery Cursive as a teenager …, the same motions as Michelangelo.”

  Lloyd Reynolds’s Mercedes (image credits 5.11)

  Reynolds created a series of twenty half-hour programs on Italic writing for Oregon Educational Television and was Oregon’s first (and so far only) Calligrapher Laureate.

  Portland became the unofficial Italic Handwriting Capital of the U.S. Reynolds’s passion for letters was in the air, like the mist off the river. In 1979, two handwriting teachers there, Barbara Getty and Inga Dubay, got together and devised a rapid, streamlined Italic script—a simplified Renaissance-influenced style that’s a hybrid of printing and cursive:

  (image credits 5.12)

  Teaching traditional cursive to third-graders, Getty had seen it go badly. Boys, in particular, she says, felt silly executing all the Palmerish curlicues, but in fact none of the children took to it easily. And she observes that, even if it is mastered in school, cursive doesn’t hold up well in later life: America is a “please print” nation because most people’s cursive is illegible, or close to it. At best, many letters are ambiguous, easy to mess up when you’re in a hurry:

  (image credits 5.13)

  Working with Portland State University, the two women published a series of lucid and attractive books—the Getty-Dubay Italic Handwriting Series—designed for teaching their handwriting to schoolchildren from kindergarten to sixth grade. Intended as an alternative to “looped cursive,” their term for any standard cursive program, the Getty-Dubay system is loop-and-curl-free, and it joins letters only where joining them seems sensible and comfortable.

  Both Getty and Dubay had been students of Lloyd Reynolds, and both are accomplished calligraphers; their books were initially handwritten by the two of them—an appealing gimmick that helped to popularize the system:

  Getty-Dubay has been used in the Portland Public Schools for twenty-four years. A Portland teacher and Italic fan, Deziré Clarke, comments that learning Italic gives her third- and fourth-graders “the opportunity to slow down in this computer/video game world,” and that their final product “shines with excellence.” It has been adopted by other public schools, as well as private and charter schools, and is used widely among home schoolers in the United States and in Canada, valued not only because it teaches clear, simple handwriting but because, as Time magazine put it in a 1983 article, Getty-Dubay demonstrates that “the teaching of proper handwriting evokes children’s innate sense of visual order and beauty. It gives children an eye for good design.”

  Obviously, children aren’t the only ones who can be taught to write legibly and like it. Getty and Dubay have also put together a book for adults, called Write Now, which is especially popular among doctors6 and businessmen—and among computer technicians, who find an immersion in beautiful handwriting a breath of fresh air, a welcome respite from the mechanical cyberworld.

  Doctors’ scripts, before and after (image credits 5.15)

  It will come as no surprise to anyone that physicians are prime customers for handwriting therapy. Medical cacography has become a staple of popular culture. The TV drama Grey’s Anatomy often tackles the issue: in one 2007 episode, Dr. Izzie Stevens tells the interns she’s supervising, “Penmanship saves lives! Is that a 7, or is that a 9? If I have to ask myself that in the middle of an emergency, your patient is dead. You killed him. With your handwriting. Think about that!” In a 2007 episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm, Larry David is dating a doctor who writes him an illegible mash note; the joke is that he has to take it to a pharmacist to decipher.

  But none of this means that handwriting is no longer useful. As Newsweek pointed out in a 2007 article, “Predictions of handwriting’s demise didn’t begin with the computer; they date back to the introduction of the Remington typewriter in 1873.… No one has suggested that the invention of the calculator means we don’t have to teach kids how to add, and spelling is still a prized skill in the era of spell check.” Kate Gladstone, a professional “handwriting repairwoman” in Albany, New York, has worked with doctors7 at hospitals all over the country that have, out of desperation, brought her in to help their medical staff get the hang of handwriting. (Attending such a course provides Continuing Medical Education credits, under the “patient safety” umbrella.) The conventional wisdom, of course, is that doctors produce more slovenly scribbles than members of any other profession. Medication errors, it is said, result in thousands of deaths annually. It’s uncertain how many are caused by illegible handwriting, but in 1999 a cardiologist was fined $225,000 by a jury in Texas because a prescription he had written for Isordil, a drug for heart pain, was misread by the pharmacist as Plendil, used for high blood pressure. The patient died.8 The pharmacist who filled the prescription was fined an equal amount. Medical regulations require a pharmacist to check with the physician if there is any question regarding a prescription.

  It’s not just doctors. Nearly everyone writes badly: dentists, nurses, poets, psychiatrists, hairdressers, zookeepers, chemists, schoolteachers, electricians. You name it. When we put pen to paper, most of us—especially those born too late to have had Palmer Method whaled into them at an impressionable age—squeeze out hideous and barely legible scribbles, and the handwriting even of some Palmer Methodists has deteriorated with age, lack of use, endless keyboarding, and the rigors of multitasking.

  Kate Gladstone is also an advocate of Italic writing and, according to her, no adult is too far gone to learn it. She offers to wreak dramatic improvements in the script of anyone who will send her a sample and pay her fee—no matter what their age. (She points out that plenty of monks in the Middle Ages started out as “illiterate fifteen-year-olds” who had to be trained to write.) Gladstone is horrified that her service is necessary, that schools haven’t ensured that all students can produce a neat hand by the time they graduate, and that the handwriting of some teachers—themselves the products of years of no handwriting instruction in schools—is sometimes so bad that the kids can’t read it. The Steve Graham study I cited earlier found that, while 81 percent of schools include some kind of handwriting instruction in the first three grades, only 12 percent of teachers feel that the education courses they took in college prepared them for the task of teaching it.

  “If people who can’t count were found to be teaching math,” Gladstone says, “there’d be a report on 60 Minutes, it would be on the cover of Time, and there would be several congressional investigations.” As it is, “Nobody says boo.” She’s also indignant that children must learn ball-and-stick printing for a year or two, and then switch to the radically different cursive most schools teach: “We’d call it ridiculous to try to teach math entirely in Roman numerals up to second or third grade, then suddenly drop it all and start over again with modern Arabic numerals.”

  I sent Kate Gladstone my own increasingly awful scrawl, providing the alphabets, casual samples, and pangrams9 she requested:

  She emailed me six pages of suggestions, along with some handy visuals.

  (image credits 5.17)

  She allowed as how my slant is good, my lower-case h isn’t bad, and my numerals are passable. Except for a caution to “keep away from conventional cursive forms
” when I write capitals, her suggestions were for lower-case fixups only, since they comprise 98 percent of our writing. Otherwise—well, as I said, it was six pages’ worth of ideas. Single-spaced.

  I printed it out, grabbed my copy of Getty-Dubay’s Write Now, sat down for an hour with some paper and my favorite gel pen—and watched my handwriting begin a metamorphosis from embarrassingly clumsy to terminally cool.

  Some of Gladstone’s suggestions were simple, some a bit more challenging, and they were slow to execute until I got used to them. I particularly liked her proposal that I make my lower-case t smaller and cross it lower. As she put it, “If you can accustom yourself to making the t-bar at the height of the shortest lower-case letters—and also making the t less tall than, say, an l or an h, so that it doesn’t look top-heavy with the bar placed at the short-letter height—you will find that words containing both a t and some tall letters suddenly become much easier to read.”

  She also had some very good tips for making a prettier and more legible lower-case e. Nearly everyone could profit from this: e is the most used and the most-often indecipherable letter in the alphabet. “A quick fix that has helped many,” Gladstone says, “is simply not to attach any letter onto the e—write the e, then lift the pen and start over.” For me, the most important thing to remember was to start the e with a straight line pointing up in a northeast direction, then curve back in a C shape: