History of Handwriting

You’re listening to A Way with Words. I’m Grant Barrett.

And I’m Martha Barnette.

You know, Grant, I was just looking at my handwriting.

I have penmanship envy.

You know, my handwriting is so inconsistent.

I think it’s because all my life, sort of the same way that I pick and choose different words off of people’s vocabulary.

Yeah, that’s the business we’re in.

We pick the best from what we hear, right?

Yeah.

And I’ve just, you know, for a while there I was making G’s in this sort of weird little way

Because I saw somebody’s writing that had this really cool G with a circle and a couple of circles.

And so you borrowed that?

Yeah.

And it’s just, my handwriting is just a mutt.

And it’s very, very inconsistent.

And it’s not, it’s the proverbial chicken scratching.

Will you write me a prescription?

I guess I could.

Yeah.

My handwriting is not much better.

I’ve been known to have the worst handwriting in pretty much every class I’ve ever been in.

Really?

This predates the computer era, so you can’t necessarily blame the keyboard.

And what’s interesting, there are a couple of books that I read, and I highly recommend them, that talk about the history of handwriting.

We think of it as being a stable thing.

Perhaps we’re worried about it being a lost art.

Perhaps we don’t think of it at all.

But handwriting actually has changed so much over the years.

And one of the really striking things that you’ll find if you read a book called Reading Early American Handwriting.

This is a book by Kip Sperry.

It might be used by, say, a researcher or even a genealogist who has a lot of records to go through and they have to try to make it out and decipher it.

They talk about the political consequences of teaching people to write in cursive and longhand in a particular way.

It wasn’t just because you might have a style of script, say, that it was used in the court, you know, the king’s court, or that it was used by secretaries or clerks,

But also because in order to practice that handwriting, they would give you specific scripts from specific sources that had like a political content or a social content.

So as you’re writing and practicing this penmanship, the longhand or cursive penmanship, you would be absorbing the message of the words as well.

It’s very much the same kind of thing you might have if you were being punished by your parents and forced to write at the dinner table for a couple of hours, which is very familiar to me.

And there’s another book I want to recommend to you before we go to calls, Handwriting in America, A Cultural History by Tamara Thornton.

This is a great book.

She talks very specifically about the different modes of longhand that we’ve had, where they were taught, why they were taught, who learned them, why they’ve disappeared or why they’ve stuck around.

It’s really interesting stuff because there isn’t just one way, as you noted, to write a capital G or a capital S or a lowercase y.

Whether or not you put a flourish in, whether you end above the line or below the line,

These are things that people cared at one time very much about,

And particular systems would profess one kind of handwriting over another.

Amazing stuff to me.

We’d love to hear your thoughts about handwriting.

Did you learn how to write cursive?

Are your children learning how to write longhand?

Do you feel like your handwriting is worse or better than it used to be?

Do we even need to learn how to write longhand or cursive?

That’s a loaded question.

Do we even need to learn how to write anything other than a signature?

877-929-9673 or send your thoughts and ideas in email to words@waywordradio.org.