How Do You Correct A Penmanship Mistake Or Pen Malfunction?

[Recoil Rob]

So I am just getting back into the joys of using a fountain pen and writing by hand again after years of typing on keyboards and scribbling with fiber tips.

 

However, when I am writing a longer message, letter, journal entry, I make mistakes, probably the fear of retribution form the nuns in grammar school.

 

What happens if the pen burps or I smudge? If the pen skips?

 

I realize eventually I will come to recognize which pen will best serve me but what of operator error?

 

I may be writing a letter and change my thought, misspell a word, use incorrect grammar, whatever...after writing an entire page and making a mistake at the bottom it will be rare that I will start over. I would never get through a full page and good paper is expensive.

 

So what is acceptable to correct the mistake? A simple line through? What if the mistake is not noticed until proofreading, where does one put the correction, in the margin?

 

Would like to see some examples of corrections.

 

thanks,

Rob

 

 

[ac12]

I just line through my mistake, then continue on.

[TheRealScubaSteve]

So I am just getting back into the joys of using a fountain pen and writing by hand again after years of typing on keyboards and scribbling with fiber tips.

 

However, when I am writing a longer message, letter, journal entry, I make mistakes, probably the fear of retribution form the nuns in grammar school.

 

What happens if the pen burps or I smudge? If the pen skips?

 

I realize eventually I will come to recognize which pen will best serve me but what of operator error?

 

I may be writing a letter and change my thought, misspell a word, use incorrect grammar, whatever...after writing an entire page and making a mistake at the bottom it will be rare that I will start over. I would never get through a full page and good paper is expensive.

 

So what is acceptable to correct the mistake? A simple line through? What if the mistake is not noticed until proofreading, where does one put the correction, in the margin?

 

Would like to see some examples of corrections.

 

thanks,

 

Rob

 

 

 

 

 

A single strike through. If you don't notice it until after, you can always line the mistake out and write with the nib in reverse for a thin line on top of the mistake.

[Frank C]

I believe that a strike through is the accepted practice. Depending on the intended use of the writing, I sometimes have to initial it as well.

[Ernst Bitterman]

I sometimes, if my mind wanders (frequent) and I write not the word I intended but something I overhear as I'm writing, or my son or a cat nudges me and the word falls apart, I'll not only put a line through it but insert a small wry comment between lines regarding the reason for the error.

 

That's not for formal correspondence, of course, but most of my correspondence isn't formal.

[DaveBj]

^^^What they said.

 

And if my pen burps, I just carefully blot it dry and write around it. I don't do any writing that's going to get seriously scrutinized, so I don't have to be re-e-eally careful.

[Morphling27]

I do what most say here if it's a note to someone or an entry into something official.

 

If it's a note for my own reading or to the wife - you'd better believe I scribble all over that thing until it's an inked mess of something.

[jar]

Fire my secretary.

[rwilsonedn]

Depends upon what you are writing. Before typewriters and keyboards, a formal letter or document would start out as a draft, and the writer would revise it in any way that he/she found convenient and readable: striking out, inter-line and marginal notes, bracketed text with arrows, writing around blots, and so on. The object was to use the annotated draft to produce a fair copy--a version with good penmanship and no edits. You would sent the fair copy (or a revised copy of it) to the recipient. Prosperous people might have a secretary prepare the fair copy for them, so the penmanship would be better. And of course final copies of business and legal documents would be written by a professional clerk.

For personal correspondence and journals, there seem to have been two schools of thought. One school held that if someone else was going to see it, it was only polite to make a fair copy--even for a journal. Another schools seems to have felt that leaving in corrections, marginal notes, imperfections (scribble out that letter that somehow just didn't come out right), and even doodles was a gesture of intimacy or affection, almost like using an informal salutation or self-deprecating humor. It was as if to say "between us, we accept these little things about each other."

ron

[rafapa]

I use Post-it cover up tape (code 651R)

https://solutions.3m.com/wps/portal/3M/en_US/Partnership_Showcase/Home/Product/Page/Information/?PC_Z7_RJH9U5230GE3E02LECIE20G345000000_nid=ZFGLWMHG7BbeDLC2H0961Dgl

[Frank C]

Depends upon what you are writing. Before typewriters and keyboards, a formal letter or document would start out as a draft, and the writer would revise it in any way that he/she found convenient and readable: striking out, inter-line and marginal notes, bracketed text with arrows, writing around blots, and so on. The object was to use the annotated draft to produce a fair copy--a version with good penmanship and no edits. You would sent the fair copy (or a revised copy of it) to the recipient. Prosperous people might have a secretary prepare the fair copy for them, so the penmanship would be better. And of course final copies of business and legal documents would be written by a professional clerk.

For personal correspondence and journals, there seem to have been two schools of thought. One school held that if someone else was going to see it, it was only polite to make a fair copy--even for a journal. Another schools seems to have felt that leaving in corrections, marginal notes, imperfections (scribble out that letter that somehow just didn't come out right), and even doodles was a gesture of intimacy or affection, almost like using an informal salutation or self-deprecating humor. It was as if to say "between us, we accept these little things about each other."

ron

 

Now that is a good historical reply. I guess it comes down to who is the expected reader.

[Dronak]

I think I'd agree with most of the responses here, in particular that it depends on the audience. If you're writing something on the more formal side, it might be better to start over and make sure you write out a copy with no mistakes (the fair copy, as rwilsonedn called it). If it's more informal, a single line strike-through is probably fine for marking the mistake as something to ignore. If the pen skips, you could probably go back over the problem area and re-ink it. In the opposite case, too much ink, I'm not sure what you can do.

 

As for getting a fair copy, I'd say it's not really difficult, but does take concentration and patience. I've done it plenty of times when writing out things in calligraphy, where a mistake basically renders the resulting product unusable. I just go very slowly, checking every word, taking care not to rush, ensuring that I'm spelling things correctly, making sure I stop and pause if I start to lose concentration, etc. It can take a significant amount of time to do this (and things like making test copies first to get the spacing, layout, etc. right adds to it), but the end result is typically worth it. Plus writing slowly helps make sure everything is neat and easily readable.

[Jamesbeat]

When I was at school, we used to use ink eraser pens.

It was like a felt-tip marker that erased washable ink. It had a pen the other end that was immune to the eraser chemical.

 

It seemed great until you looked at it a couple of months later. The ink came back!

[tinkerteacher]

Don't get too hung up on it, whatever your heart desires. Your paper, your rules.

 

As I tell my uni-level students: "A rough draft is not for consumption by anyone but yourself and a trusted reviewer, it's not going to be critiqued by anyone important. If you're not screwing up in your rough draft, you're not trying hard enough. Now try harder."

 

Sometimes I wish I could get them before they've had 12 years of bad habits and phobias drilled into them about writing.

[Intellidepth]

However, when I am writing a longer message, letter, journal entry, I make mistakes... Would like to see some examples of corrections.

If it were formal, I'd keep redoing copies until I got the best I could reasonably manage. I'd use a strikeout if I had to.

 

I wish I had photocopied my first fountain-pen-friend letter for you to have a look at. It had errors and wry self-deprecating annotations all over it. I even managed, after successfully using wax seals for years, to set a new type of wax on fire as I was sealing the envelope. That got annotated too. Stuff happens. Of course, target audience mattered there. The next letter was remarkably better as I had gained confidence.

 

Short thank you notes: I keep redoing them until they are as good as I can make it. I've discovered shorter notes are far more successful and just as adequate .

 

Journal: I'm making myself accept imperfection, in fact, encouraging it by deliberately not writing in a straight line in a blank journal. Still feels odd. But I'll get there. After many decades of ultra-fast typing and salaried expectations of perfection, going back to handwriting requires a different kind of thought-to-execution process. In my journal, if I make a mistake, I strikeout (or colour it out depending on my interest in the ink colour) then continue on by rewriting the word again next to it.

[ISW_Kaputnik]

My only experience with actually being held to a standard for this was keeping log books in the Navy. Those were handwritten in block letters, and mistakes were strongly discouraged, but if we did make one, we neatly lined it out with a single line and initialed it. We were using ballpoint pens, although I suppose a fountain pen might have been permitted; I hadn't started using them yet. Now that I'm long out of the Navy and using fountain pens, I don't worry about it, but I've kept the habit of putting single lines through a mistake; I just don't initial it.

 

If it's a formal communication, I'm going to type it on a computer and only sign with a pen. If I really butchered the signature somehow, I suppose I would print out another copy and sign that.

 

But for a handwritten letter to a friend or acquaintance, I don't expect to be judged that harshly. I line out the mistake, if it's a wrong or misspelled word, or a grammatical error.

 

Blobs of ink aren't that common by now, as I've got my fountain pens behaving pretty well. It does sometimes happen, and might be a little more common with my dip pens. What I like to do is turn the blobs into little improvised abstract drawings, using the tiny puddle of ink as a little ink well, and drawing out the ink from the center into radiating curving lines until the ink is used up, then carefully blotting it, and continuing to write around the drawing. It looks better than a simple blot. Can't show you an example, as I don't want to take a picture of a journal page, and any letters I've done it with have already been sent, but hopefully the idea is clear enough.