Handwriting Disasters – Part 5 of an Interview with Kate Gladstone

“You may not be able to read a doctor's handwriting and prescription, but you'll notice his bills are neatly typewritten.” – Earl Wilson

Today is the final installment of my interview with Kate Gladstone, the Handwriting Repairwoman. If you missed part of the interview or would like to review a section or read Kate's replies to comments, here are the links: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4.

In this day of technology, many people believe handwriting is no longer relevant, yet you have a site devoted to it. Why do you think it’s important not only to learn handwriting but to improve poor handwriting?

Kate: Well, for starters let's think back to Hurricane Katrina. Katrina hit right before the beginning of the school year – a lot of schoolchildren and teachers, who'd supposed that handwriting couldn't matter, got a scribal wake-up call when they had to go through most or all of the year without computers. And did you know that some of the Katrina survivors – at any age – found rescue only because they'd dropped handwritten messages into bottles? Imagine having an urgent reason to write something quickly; now imagine you cannot write legibly, decipherably, or at all, without an electric power supply that you don't have.

Still, it doesn't take hurricanes or other long-term disasters to make handwriting important. Let's look at the field of medicine. We all joke about doctors' bad handwriting, but you might think that it wouldn't matter in a world of electronic record-keeping and prescription systems. However, even in the most modern hospitals and pharmacies, handwriting legibility still matters. Hospitals that “computerized everything” two or five or ten years ago have called me to give classes, because a doctor given the latest computer will still have occasion to walk down the hall and slap a scribbled Post-It® onto a colleague's door or the wall of the nurses' station. And who usually sits in front of the computer, anyway? Not the doctor – usually a ward clerk or data entry specialist, trying to read three to six hours' worth of the doctor's hand-scribbled paperwork in order to type it all into the “paperless” entry system.

Even when doctors actually use their computers – think how many times a computer crashes, or the whole network goes down! When something can't wait for the computer and the network to restart, out come the pad of paper and the pen: two of the potentially deadliest medical instruments ever invented.

But it doesn't take disasters – or doctors – to make handwriting important. If you have kids or teenagers in school, you probably know that the SAT and other high-stakes exams have been relying more and more on timed handwritten essay questions.

Can you give us a few examples of disasters caused by bad handwriting?

Kate: Well, there are the medical disasters of course – in 1994, the AMA's summer conference revealed that 10% of Americans have suffered serious health hazards caused by illegible, incorrectly interpreted doctors' handwriting. Electronics haven't helped this as much as you might think: the electronic systems have a high failure rate, not all medical practices can afford to install them, and – even if the electronics are put in place and they actually work – practical considerations at most clinics and hospitals ensure that “computerization of records” normally turns out to mean that the doctor still writes the records by hand before sending them to the ward clerk or data entry specialist to enter into the computer. So any wrong guesses the ward clerk makes, trying to decipher 3 or 4 hours' worth of bad handwriting, get typed into the computer and immortalized erroneously until someone else eventually finds and corrects the mistake – if that ever happens, which often does not happen until the mistake has killed or seriously injured someone.

And of course, all the electronic medical recordkeeping in the world does not one bit of good when an emergency like Hurricane Katrina tears out the power lines. Doctors in emergency medicine situations – everything from civil disasters to battlefields – often have to work without an electrical power supply. No electrical connection means no electronics. At one hospital where I worked – in Florida right after Hurricane Katrina, the first week that this hospital got its generator back up – it turned out that they had computerized shortly before the disaster. Almost the first thing they had to do with their new computer system, right after they had it back on-line, was to go through the accumulated piles of not-quite-understandable emergency scribble and try to type this into the computer system: much of it defied decipherment. This may explain why a lot of the hospitals that use my handwriting instruction service make sure to have emergency medicine staffers attend the classes.

Of course, not all the handwriting disasters cause are medical. Bad handwriting caused an airline crash in December 1992 when a co-pilot scribbled a note to a pilot in such a way that certain letters and numerals looked like others. This caused the pilot to interpret a directional heading incorrectly, crashing the plane into a mountainside.

In 1965, a NASA satellite exploded during its launch because an engineer's hand-scribbled last-minute correction to a few lines of programming code left a semi-colon looking like a comma.

Because of an illegible address on a note to a fuel company staffer, at least one heating company pumped a full load of oil into a house that did not even use oil heat. By the time that homeowner returned from work, the “trivial” address error had flooded the basement with oil.

And if you want a financial disaster to go with all these dangers to life and limb – did you know that, since the mid-1990s, the US Postal Service has had to set up several facilities just for deciphering the illegible handwriting on packages and envelopes? They're called “Remote Encoding Centers” – there's a big one in Cohoes, New York, just down the road from me. There are ten of them across the country, staffed 9 to 5, each with a full-time staff doing literally nothing else but trying to decipher handwriting that's too dysfunctional for the regular post office staff to untangle. When a letter or package is addressed too indecipherably for processing, a post office employee makes an electronic scan of the illegible address, sends the scan to the nearest Remote Encoding Center, and the staff there tries to read the address and process it into the system. Think of the one or two misdelivered letters or badly addressed packages you probably get in a year – multiply that by 300 million Americans sending and receiving illegibly addressed items – and you'll see why it's a disaster, when you consider how much time, money, and effort must go to paying people to spend their lives just trying to make sense out of other people's bad handwriting.

But it doesn't take disasters – or doctors – to make handwriting important. If you have kids or teenagers in school, you probably know that the SAT and other high-stakes exams have been relying more and more on timed handwritten essay questions. Ironically, the same schools and tutoring centers which claim they “teach to the test” ignore handwriting – or don't do much more than occasionally show the kids a chart of alphabet-letters and ask them to please try to write like that somehow: a bit like trying to prepare kids for a basketball tournament by just showing them photos of the Harlem Globetrotters and asking them to please make that happen on the big day.

Every so often, some school or school district thinks about getting rid of pens, pencils, and writing altogether – “going paperless,” as they say. As far as I know, no school district that has ever gone paperless has stayed that way for more than four months – and, in the one school district that stayed paperless for four months (Macon, Georgia), those were summer months. The school board voted in May 2004 to switch all schools entirely from handwriting to computers, but by September the paper and the pens and the pencils – and the handwriting books – were right back in the classrooms where they had always been: because, between May and September, the school board had figured out that we haven't yet invented a computer as small as a pen or pencil that needs no power supply, that is cheap enough to give out in ten-packs and to replace immediately at need, and that can survive recess or a drop (accidentally or otherwise) onto a tile floor.

Are there any sites, books or articles you’d recommend for people wanting to find out more on handwriting?

Kate: Well, there's my own site, of course: Handwriting that Works – and I have a colleague in Texas, Maureen Vickery, who shares other information on her similarly named web-site Handwriting Makeover.

Where can people find out more about you and your work?

Kate:Visit my web-site at HandwritingThatWorks. You'll find tips, tricks, surveys, and statistics on handwriting, links to the resource sites mentioned above and to many, many others, an Amazon ordering portal so that you can conveniently order the handwriting items I recommend, many more handwriting help pages including one designed specifically for left-handers – and, of course, a link to the Politician Legibility Act petition and the World Handwriting Contest information.

The site gets regular updates as I find new information, resources, and links to share. The most recent pieces of new information there, of course, are the Contest launch announcement for 2010, and the links to the Better Letters personal handwriting trainer software which Dr. Castro and I designed for the iPhone and the iPodTouch. You may also wish to go directly to the Better Letters application's own informational page – or see a video of the software in action at BetterLettersVideo.

On my site, you'll also find links to many of the other sites I recommend for handwriting information and improvement: The Society for Italic Handwriting, Handwriting Makeover , BFH Handwriting, Briem.net, Handwriting Success, and Christopher Jarman. The first of these sites is the web-site of the Society for Italic Handwriting – the others belong to various colleagues of mine: some of whom, like myself, are members of that society.

Thank you, Kate, for a very interesting look at a side of bad penmanship I had never considered before. It makes me want to double check a pilot or doctor’s penmanship before I put my life in their hands.

I hope you all have enjoyed Kate’s visits as much as I have. I had no idea that the subject of handwriting could turn into a week’s worth of blogs. I know I’ll never look at handwriting the same way again.

Thanks for stopping by.

Tags: Earl Wilson, Kate Gladstone, handwriting disasters, Hurricane Katrina, NASA,

Handwriting Contest and National Handwriting Day – Part 4 of an Interview with Kate Gladstone

"Here is a golden Rule.... Write legibly. The average temper of the human race would be perceptibly sweetened, if everybody obeyed this Rule!" - Lewis Carroll

I have learned a lot about handwriting from Kate over the past few days. Here are the links if you need to catch up: Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3.

Tell us about the World Handwriting Contest. When is it held, who enters and how is it judged?

Kate: The World Handwriting Contest, which I direct, began in 2001 as the successor to an earlier USA-only contest, the Annual American Handwriting Competition which a colleague of mine (Chuck Lehman) had founded seven years earlier. (Hello, Chuck, if you're listening!) By 2000, when Chuck appointed me to succeed him as director of the earlier Contest, the rise of the Internet had led to the contest's becoming known worldwide, so that I had been receiving numerous requests for participation from people outside the USA. This made it logical to open the contest internationally, and to re-name it accordingly.

The World Handwriting Contest, as its name suggests, accepts entries from anyone, anywhere, who can write and who wishes to send in a writing sample consisting of one of the two required copy passages we provide. (We have a passage for children aged 12 and under, and a longer passage for people over 12.) For the convenience of our judges, the copy passages are in English because we simply do not have the resources to establish individual contests for each of the world's other several thousand languages. However, many of our entrants each year – and a great many of our winners – do come from non-English-speaking countries: particularly Asian nations, but over the years we have had entries from every continent except Antarctica.

The Contest accepts entries every year from January 1 through June 30, judges these entries during July and August, and ships prizes to the winners all around the world from late Aug through December. Typically, the prizes are pens or stationery sets for each year's highest-ranking winner, the World Pen-Champ as we call him or her, along with hand-produced certificates of achievement for all winners including the World Pen-Champ. (We have these certificates done for us by a professional calligrapher – currently we use one here in Albany, New York).

Our entrants are of all ages, so we do the judging in several groups based on age. The youngest entrant we ever had was aged five, and the youngest who ever actually won anything was aged six.

We accept all styles of handwriting for the Contest, and our winners have used a wide variety of styles. Irrespective of style, we judge the entries on the basis of legibility, signs of speed, and general attractiveness, in that order of priority.

To offset the fact that some writing styles, such as Italic, are much easier than other styles to perform well, our judges tend to award extra points when they see that a writer performs as well in a difficult style as someone else who used an easier style(For example: if two eleven-year-olds submit writing of equal quality, and one used Italic while the other used a typical “school-style” cursive, our judges will figure that the one who did this well in cursive must have had a harder time than the one who did only equally well within a much simpler style, Italic: so we will assume that the student who did this well with all the difficulties of cursive must have had more skill in order to do that well, compared with the student who did equally well by using a simpler and less accident-prone method of handwriting.) As I mentioned above, the judging takes place within a variety of age groups – children, pre-teens, teens, adults, and senior citizens – and within each age group we further assign a first and a second prize in each of several style categories. To find the absolute best writer of all, we then compare the quality of all the first-prize entries to select the very best one, taking age and writing style into account. (Some writing styles are, after all, more difficult than others to perform successfully.) The very best writer of all gets our top award, the title of World Pen-Champ for that year – we call this top level of our competition the World Champ-Pen-Ship.

Just to make the Champ-Pen-Ship level a little more demanding, when we select the World Pen-Champ we compare the samples not only against each other, but against first-prize samples we have seen from other handwriting contests – local or regional contests in the USA and elsewhere – that have given us permission to look at their own first-prize samples for that year. Very occasionally, it happens that one of those other samples will show better writing – allowing for age and style considerations – than any sample from our own contest: in that case, the World Pen-Champ prize goes to the winner of that other contest, instead of going to any of our own first-prize winners. We have this policy – judging our first-prize winners against their counterparts in other contests – in order to keep our own winners from becoming too complacent, and also to encourage the participants of those other contests to enter our own contest in following years if they think they have a good chance of winning.

The last time anyone from another contest became our World Pen-Champ happened in 2003, when our judges unanimously awarded the Champ-Pen-Ship title to the winner of the contest annually held by another handwriting improvement organization, the Society for Italic Handwriting. Every year since then, some members of that organization have competed within our contest as well as within their own organization's contest, and some of them have become winners or even World Pen-Champs from within our own contest.

I wish I could tell you a bit about our judges, but we have found that we must keep the judges' identities secret in order to minimize the risk of outside influence: to exert undue influence on one or more of our judges. So I can't tell you anything about the judging team except that its membership is not always the same every year, although I am the head of the judging team every year.

What is National Handwriting Day and when is it?

Kate: National Handwriting Day is a day devoted to encouraging the art of handwriting. It falls each year on January 23, the birthday of John Hancock whose clear, bold signature famously led the list of those signing the Declaration of Independence. (Hancock, by the way, was very proud of his handwriting. Like many people of his day, he actually sat down to practice his handwriting every day, just as one would practice a musical instrument or a sport every day, or as people in our own times might go jogging every day. In fact, like many people who could afford it at the time, he actually had a writing master come to his house every week of his adult life to check his performance and give him a lesson so that he could maintain and improve his skills. This sounds a little strange to us today, but not if you think of it as having a personal trainer. We even know the name of John Hancock's personal handwriting trainer who helped him create that famous signature: Abiah Holbrook, who was one of the best-known handwriting textbook authors of his generation.

How do people celebrate National Handwriting Day? Well, two of my colleagues – Barbara Getty and Inga Dubay in Portland, Oregon, who have a web-site called Handwriting Success http://www.handwritingsuccess.com – celebrate it each year by giving a free handwriting class on the Saturday morning nearest the date. Typically, 200 to 400 people attend this three-hour class each year. If you ever think that people don't care about handwriting, think of 200 to 400 people getting up on a weekend to fight through early morning winter weather so they can spend three hours learning how to write more quickly and clearly.

Other ways to celebrate National Handwriting Day:
• Spend it working on your signature: how legible and fast can you make it without losing its character? (Keep in mind that, contrary to what you may have heard, the clearest and simplest signatures are the most difficult to forge.)

• Buy yourself and your loved ones a few books on handwriting – my site lists some good ones – or some copies of Better Letters.

• Declare National Handwriting Day the first day of your own, personal “Handwriting Revolution” Resolution. The first time you pick up a pen on National Handwriting Day, resolve that – every time you pick up a pen that day and that whole week – you will also pick just one alphabet letter to write well, that week. Resolve, for instance, to write the lower-case letter “n” beautifully at all times – then, when you see your “n” improving, next week expand your focus to an additional letter: perhaps a similarly formed letter such as lower-case “m” or lower-case “h,” so that now you have two letters you have resolved to be responsible for writing well. Start with the lower-case letters – they occur far more often, and most of them are easier than most upper-case letters. At one letter per week, it will take you 52 weeks to tackle all the letters, lower-case and then upper-case, before the next National Handwriting Day rolls around.

Thanks again, Kate. You certainly pack a lot of information into a blog. I love the little tidbit about John Hancock. Find out more about Kate and the contest by visiting Handwriting That Works.

Join us tomorrow when Kate will be talking about one of the more disturbing sides of bad penmanship – handwriting disasters.

Anyone reading this thinking about entering the handwriting contest? Have you ever celebrated National Handwriting Day? Please feel free to leave your comments and questions.

Thanks for stopping by.

Tags: Lewis Carroll, Kate Gladstone, National Handwriting Day, World handwriting contest, John Hancock,

Politician Legibility Act - Part 3 of an Interview with Kate Gladstone

“If your handwriting is barely legible, it makes them think that you are not really an organized person. That you are writing too fast, and your are not thinking about it.” – Adam Levinson

I would like to welcome back Kate Gladstone. If you’ve missed any of the interview, here is Part 1 and Part 2. Now we’ll get right down to business.

What is the Politician Legibility Act?

Kate: The Politician Legibility Act is an on-line petition to establish a law requiring government officials to create only legible records, notes, or other documentation while in office. In other words, if they pick up a pen to write so much as a single word, the Act would require them to write it legibly. If they can't write legibly when they enter office, the Act would require them to learn how (within a specified short time after election or appointment) if they wanted to produce handwritten paperwork, memos, or other documentation while in office.

The Act doesn't mean they have to write anything by hand whatsoever. They can keyboard, they can dictate to a typist, for all the Act cares they can text-message everything. But if they pick up a pen or pencil to write, the Act would require them to write it legibly or quit their office.

I created the Politician Legibility Act petition out of my frustration with events involving Scooter Libby, assistant to Vice-President Cheney during the Bush administration. You may remember that Mr. Libby had some legal trouble.

When the prosecution subpoenaed the abundant handwritten notes, memos, and other paperwork Mr. Libby had produced in office, they quickly found that Libby's handwriting resisted all efforts at decipherment. Literally nobody on the prosecution team could even guess what anything said: they couldn't find anyone anywhere who claimed to know how to decode Scooter Libby's handwriting, except for Scooter Libby himself.

This put the prosecution team in the ludicrous position of relying on the defendant for translations. The prosecution would display a document, would ask Mr. Libby what it said – and would then just have to take Mr. Libby's word for it that the document said whatever Mr. Libby said that the document said. Very few politicians or other people, I think, could resist certain opportunities that might arise if they found themselves in such an enviable position while defending themselves in a court of law.

So, yes, I started the petition as a bit of a joke, but I take it seriously enough that I signed it – and other people are signing too. Our government – our elected and appointed officials – must ultimately answer to us. When government officials in any administration avoid communicating clearly, they show that they do not hold themselves answerable to or accountable to others.

Besides working with schools, I understand you also work with physicians. How receptive are they to improving their penmanship? Are there any other groups you work with?

Kate: Doctors provide 70% to 80% of my income. Most of them know that poor handwriting has caused medical errors – injuries or even deaths – so they generally have the motivation to improve. Those who don't come to class with the motivation generally find motivation pretty soon – because I open my class for MDs with some horror stories from my files. For example, I'll display a prescription from an actual death-by-handwriting malpractice case, and ask them to read it. Most of them can't – and most of the ones who think they can, read it wrong.

Some physicians do wonder if they can improve their handwriting at all – because of our cultural stereotype about doctors' writing, or because they have tried unsuccessfully all their lives to change their bad handwriting or at least to keep it from getting worse. Learning that their handwriting problems result from something they can change – their handwriting technique – brings them new confidence and makes them willing, even eager to progress.

In fact, doctors tend to progress faster than other professionals I work with. Anyone who makes it through medical school has spent so much of adulthood learning so many new techniques for doing even familiar everyday things – washing, cutting, stitching – that learning new techniques for the everyday skill of handwriting doesn't seem such a big deal once you see the techniques in action.

It shouldn't surprise you, then, that one of the biggest boosts to better handwriting in our own time has come from a doctor: an emergency medicine physician near Dallas, named Harvey Castro – Hi, Harvey! -- who has become fed up with the handwriting of his colleagues and others. (Harvey is also a father, so naturally he has a concern with children's writing too.) That's why Harvey and I have been working – through his medical software company Deep Pocket Series – to develop an iPhone/iPodTouch application that teaches Italic handwriting. The app is called Better Letters – we released it on November 10, and eight days later it featured in the December 2009 issue of GQ magazine, in one of that issue's three articles on handwriting. (You'll find Better Letters profiled – along with other handwriting resources for the information technology age – in the right sidebar on page 128 of the December 2009 GQ.)

If you want to learn a bit more about Better Letters before downloading it from the App Store, I suggest out demonstration video at BetterLettersVideo and the product information page at BetterLetters – also, my own web-site links to both of these.

Doctors, of course, aren't the only people with bad handwriting: like quite a few other people, these days, I worry about the poor handwriting of teachers. And I admit that I giggle when I see the illegible signatures of community figures – politicians, for instance – who are trying to raise money for educational projects. I have a rule that, when I get an illegibly signed letter from a politician or other public figure looking for financial or other support, I ignore the letter.

Thanks again, Kate. During my recent hospital stay, I actually had one of the many doctors on my case tell me how difficult it was to read other doctors’ reports, which didn’t exactly instill confidence in me for my care. I think maybe I should forward a copy of this blog to them.

I hope you will all come back tomorrow when Kate talks about National Handwriting Day and a world handwriting contest.

Thanks for stopping by.

Tags: Adam Levinson, Kate Gladstone, Politician Legibility Act, handwriting,

Why Kids Hate Cursive – Part 2 of an interview with Kate Gladstone

“Cursive writing does not mean what I think it does.” – Bart Simpson

Welcome back to my interview with Kate Gladstone. If you missed the first part you can read it here. Now without further ado, I'll jump right into our interview.

I thought the poll in which 90% of first graders voted yes for cursive while 96% of eighth graders voted no, was interesting. Why do you think older kids end up hating cursive?

Kate: They end up hating cursive because they've had to use it! Before they learned cursive, they probably looked forward to it as something that the “big kids” learned. Supposedly, this new way of writing, called cursive, would take less time than printing – but they soon found out it really didn't. If you look at the research on how people actually write – as opposed to the way that people think they write, or think that they should write – it turns out that the fastest and clearest handwriters avoid cursive and break about half its rules. The most legible and most rapid writers tend to join only some of the letters – making the easiest joins, skipping the rest – and tend to avoid using the cursive shapes of letters whose printed and cursive formations disagree. Once the kids have tried to write cursive for a while, especially in the older grades where you need to write more and to write faster, a lot of the consciously or unconsciously figure out that cursive doesn't give you the fastest legible writing after all. Once you realize that – well, it has to affect how much you like and use cursive.

If cursive really provided the best choice for fast, mature handwriting – wouldn't the older students like it more and use it more, not less, than the ones who don't actually have to use it? But the kids who like cursive best are the ones who don't yet have to deal with it.

By the way, do you realize one of the most interesting things about that survey? It came from Scholastic magazine. Children get Scholastic in class from their teachers, who often assign it as required reading – and Scholastic set up the survey so that each classroom's teacher would collect the students' answers and send them in. The students couldn't submit their own answers; every answer had to go through the teacher. Well, how do you answer a survey on cursive – if your schoolteacher gave you the survey and your schoolteacher will see your answer? Do you necessarily say you hate cursive and avoid using it? You might very well say that you just love cursive, no matter how you really feel, simply because you want to please your teacher. (It doesn't take long for most kids to figure out that most schoolteachers like to see cursive writing and want their students to like producing it.) You might even worry – younger kids especially might worry – that the teacher would punish the class if they didn't answer the way the teacher wanted. Knowing how far a kid will go to try to please a teacher, I can't help wondering if possibly even more kids and teens despise cursive than actually dared to say so in class.

Speaking of the 96% of eighth-graders who did admit to opposing cursive: I wonder if the folks who write publish cursive handwriting programs have considered the implications . The survey ran in 2006, so those eighth-graders are now tenth-graders: they're in high school, on the way to college, and in ten or fifteen years they will have become the new generation of parents and teachers. What happens to handwriting textbook publishers when the no-cursive generation grows up? What happens to cursive textbook sales in a few years when 96% of available teachers – eventually, 96% of school administrators and school board members – just say “No” to cursive?

If we want to keep handwriting alive – if the handwriting program publishers want to stay in business – the teaching will have to focus on some more practical and more generally welcome style than cursive.

You teach a more streamlined writing style, which seems to be minus loops and curlicues. What is it called? How was this style developed? Why is it an improvement over the previously accepted style?

Kate: The writing style of those early handwriting books goes by the name “Italic” because the books teaching that style first appeared in Italy, during the Renaissance era. The Italic style then, actually pre-dates the handwriting styles – particularly cursive styles – accepted in schools today.

Italic developed as a replacement for various styles known in medieval times – which tended to be quite fast but also very hard to read – under the influence of an early Renaissance style we call Humanist, which was extremely clear but very hard to write fast. (Letters in most typefonts are actually based on the Humanist style of handwriting which was modified for speed to become Italic.)

Just as people today, if they are trying to “print” for clarity on a form, will unconsciously modify the printed letters somewhat for faster performance without loss of clarity, so the Renaissance scribes also made similar modifications to increase the clarity of their own clear-but-slow Humanist. Like fast “print-writers” today, the Renaissance writers who consciously or unconsciously began Italic handwriting increased their speed by modifying rounded strokes into narrow ovals, modifying vertical strokes into slightly slanted ones, and reducing the number of pen-lifts within and between letters where they could do this without altering the overall shape of the letter.

Italic, then, developed to combine high legibility with high speed. To many people today, it looks like a streamlined style of printing with a few joins: making only the very easiest joins, skipping the rest, and using print-like shapes of letters wherever the printed and the cursive shape of a letter disagree. However, the Renaissance scribes who originated Italic wouldn't have thought of it as any form of “printing” at all: because handwriting came before the printing press, not afterwards.

Naturally, you wonder why a style from 500 years ago would be better than whatever printing and/or cursive you learned as a child, or your children might be learning today. Consider this: The features of Italic – slight slant, print-like letter-shapes, and using only the very easiest joins which means joining only those letters that join most easily and rapidly – are the very same features that we find, today, throughout the handwriting of the fastest and clearest handwriters: no matter how or when or where they learned to write.

Today, the people who write most quickly and clearly are those who don't write a purely printed or a purely cursive style. The quickest, clearest handwriters don't actually write the way that their schoolteachers probably tried to get them to write, in printing or in cursive. Instead of either joining absolutely all letters like cursive writers or joining absolutely none of them like printers, the highest-speed highest-legibility handwriters join only a few letters, by making only those joins that you can actually make without slowing down. Instead of using strictly vertical and often circular forms like most printing styles, or extremely slanted and/or elaborate forms like most cursive styles, high-speed high-legibility handwriters gravitate towards a very slight slant – not quite vertical, but not anywhere near as slanted as most cursive styles today either – and to drop the loops, curlicues, and other features that make today's cursive handwriting styles so different from printing, and so difficult for many writers. Without knowing it, today's most successful handwriters – the high-speed high-legibility handwriters have been quietly re-evolving Italic – without even knowing that this style has a name – because Italic is the style that fits the habits of successful handwriters. At high speeds of writing, Italic is easier to keep in good order – it is less accident-prone – than other styles.

If you look closely at the handwritings of most of the fast, clear handwriters out there who say: “Oh, I just do a sort of fast printing” or “My handwriting is partly printed and partly cursive” or “My handwriting is basically printed, but a few of the letters tend to join from time to time” – you will see that these people are actually coming to write Italic without knowing it. Most of the people who write quickly and clearly are writing a sort of quasi-Italic even though they have probably never heard of Italic. On the other hand – pun intended – most of the people who actually try to follow the rules of school-style handwriting are /a/ not succeeding in this, and are /b/ not among the fastest and clearest handwriters even if they do succeed in actually joining every letter and using all the other stylistic features of whatever writing style or styles they learned in school.

When school instruction doesn't support – but actually goes against – what we know about the best performance of a skill, the school instruction needs to change. If we want basic handwriting instruction to reinforce, not to conflict with, what the fastest and most legible handwriters actually do when they write, then we need to be teaching Italic.

Thanks, Kate. As one who believes cursive should be kept alive for the simple reason that I’d like future generations to be able to enjoy the letters and journals left by past generations, I hope the educators of this country pay attention.

Are your kids/grandkids being taught cursive? How do they feel about writing in longhand?

Come back tomorrow for Part 3, “The Politician Legibility Act.” Find out more by visiting Kate’s website HandwritingThatWorks.com.

Thanks for stopping by.

Tags: Bart Simpson, Kate Gladstone, handwriting repair, cursive, Scholastic, Renaissance, Italic,

Update

“Barbie Anderson had no reason to believe that this particular Thursday would be any different from any of the other approximately 8,395 days of her marriage.” Quote from The Ride

I chose that quote because, like Barbie, my life started spiraling out of control on a recent Thursday morning. Although it was after approximately 14,235 days of marriage and for entirely different reasons, I still found the similarity rather ironic.

I’ve always been a happy, healthy, active, non-smoker. I took it for granted that I’d stay that way, at least for another decade or two. So you can imagine my surprise when I paid a visit to my doctor for what I thought was a minor little respiratory virus on a Thursday morning and found myself in a hospital bed by Thursday night. After over a week’s stay, I received a diagnosis that totally shocked me—lung cancer.

After a few ups and downs and a roller coaster of a ride, Barbie regains control. That’s exactly what I plan to do as well. I know it won’t be easy, but I’m prepared to fight aggressively in order to return my life to normalcy as quickly as possible.

I intend to post the remaining blogs written by Kate Gladstone on handwriting starting tomorrow. After that series, I will probably begin posting once a week.

I do, however, have some good news to share—the Kindle edition of The Ride is now available for only $9.99. Click here to download your copy.

I appreciate all your good thoughts, prayers and well wishes after my previous blog. Your comments and emails meant a lot to me.

Thanks for stopping by.

Tags: The Ride, Kindle, lung cancer, Kate Gladstone,

A Brief History of Handwriting

Part 1 of an Interview with Kate Gladstone

“A man's penmanship is an unfailing index of his character, moral and mental, and a criterion by which to judge his peculiarities of taste and sentiments.” - Philip Dormer Stanhope, 4th Earl of Chesterfield

Last July I wrote “Another Dying Art Form,” a blog about the demise of handwriting. That post elicited a phone call from Kate Gladstone, who identified herself as a Handwriting Repairwoman. I found the idea intriguing and her story fascinating. I asked if she would share it with my readers, and she kindly agreed. Then life happened, interfering with her plans and delaying her response time.

I recently heard from Kate again when she forwarded her answers to the questions I had asked. Her passion for handwriting shines through in her detailed responses. Since the interview turned out longer than I anticipated, I am turning my blog over to Kate for the next 5 consecutive days. I wanted to warn you as I am deviating from my usual Monday/Thursday post days.

I am starting with my last question, because Kate gives a short history of handwriting, which I think is a good lead in to the other questions so here goes:

Is there anything else you’d like to say?
Handwriting history tends to go in cycles about 500 years long. Even throughout the millennia before anyone thought to publish books on handwriting, we can look at surviving scripts and see that they all started out very clear and easy to read. Then either the impulse for speed at all costs, or else the desire for ornament, takes over – legibility gets pushed onto the back burner – and after half a millennium or so, an originally legible writing system becomes so decorative, so scribbly, or both that people consciously or unconsciously start casting about for something that will work better: just as the early Renaissance scribes did, trying to find something clearer and more practical than the decorative but complicated handwriting styles of the late medieval era.

Today too, we have people dissatisfied with their handwriting styles, consciously or unconsciously casting about for something better: everyone from Italic teachers like me, right down to college students (and those kids and teens in the survey) who increasingly say “No” to cursive – not to mention the millions of people at any age who write fast and clearly in a semi-joined printing that tends to look more and more like Italic the faster and clearer it gets.

So the sad state of handwriting today may mean a culture desperately seeking some better form of the skill. This lets me hope that our own times can see a modern Renaissance of simply beautiful – and beautifully simple – handwriting.

The year 2022 will mark the 500th anniversary of the earliest widely influential handwriting book published in our alphabet: an Italic handwriting textbook written by, of all people, a Vatican bureaucrat (after all, back then a bureaucrat had a quill, not a keyboard, on his bureau). What if each and every one of us prepared for the occasion. by committing to repairing the state of our own handwriting, – and to making sure our children and grandchildren learn a handwriting that works? When that 500th anniversary rolls around, let's celebrate it as a world of legible writers.

What exactly is a “Handwriting Repairwoman?”
I improve people's handwriting (or teach children “write” from the start) using a streamlined modern writing style based on the style of the earliest handwriting books ever published in our alphabet, long before the print-writing and cursive styles taught today.

What made you decide to become a “Handwriting Repairwoman?”
I came into it through repairing my own – formerly – very bad handwriting, which probably had a lot to do with various neurological disabilities I have (including dysgraphia) because even my best efforts and a lot of outside help had failed to bring it to functional legibility, let alone speed. My bad handwriting and its consequences reached a crisis at age 24: halfway through graduate school.

To find out why handwriting didn't work for me, and how I could make it work, I combed through literally everything I could find on handwriting that anyone had written over the past 500 years: right back to those earliest published books. I tried anything and everything, threw out what didn't work, and retained and integrated what did work.

At first, folks who knew me thought I shouldn't waste my time on this. If I hadn't learned to write “normally” as a child or teenager, no matter how hard I tried, why did I want to spend precious time and effort on it now? But when they saw the results – especially when I helped my father (then age 65 and also a lifelong handwriting washout!) – my family and even my graduate school instructors convinced me that the world needed my services. Starting in 1987, I took on some private students as a sideline to my (then) day job as a school librarian in Brooklyn, New York. Eventually the “sideline” became full time, though I didn't start teaching group classes until 1996 when I began getting calls from hospitals begging me to teach their MDs to write legibly. A few years after 1996, schoolteachers and school administrators started calling me too – and not just about the children. Amazingly often, I've run into teachers who couldn't read their own handwriting – which always makes me wonder how they expected students to read it.

Kate, will be back tomorrow with Part II – "Why Kids Hate Cursive." In the meantime, you can learn more about Kate by visiting her website, HandwritingThatWorks.com.

Please feel free to leave your questions and comments for Kate or myself.

Thanks for stopping by.


Tags: Philip Stanhope, Kate Gladstone, handwriting repair, history of handwriting,