Tonight, I'm just trying to find out why my Lamy Al-star seems extremely scratchy while writing in my cursive script. I also have a Pel M200, and I found that when writing in print (no slant), both pens work just fine, no nib rotation at all. However, when I write in cursive (with a slant), I rotate my hand more clockwise (keeping the paper still). I have found that this leads to the nib contacting the paper with the far right edge of the nib - obviously not a very good place to be writing. To correct this, I rotate the nib almost obliquely (on my Pel) to find the area of smoothness again. However, the grip on my Al-star prevents me from doing this. As a result, I am forced to drag the nib along its right side, resulting in scratchiness. I can rotate the nib like I usually do, but the grip gets in the way.

It seems that I produce slant by keeping my page the same but rotating my hand clockwise. If I hold the nib with no rotation, I will naturally tend to produce lines that slant down the page. Basically if you want to easily reproduce this, take your normal print and hold the pen just how you normally do, but angle the writing 45 degrees upward.

Is this normal, and is the Al-star just being limiting? Or is this a flaw in my technique that I need to correct?

I'm thinking it's more of a flaw - how would I write with a stub this way without having my line variations messed up? I can write cursive with my hand and nib aligned with the page, but it looks funny because it has no slant.

Should I be producing slant with the same hand position as regular print? If so, hmm... a lifetime of slanted cursive will need to be relearned.

I hope I've described what is happening clearly - if requested, I'll post some pictures/video to make things clearer.

Would it work to just rotate the paper instead of your hand? Maybe you could try an oblique nib some time to see if it helps. On his Web site, Richard Binder has a questionnaire about how you write -- try filling it out and ask him what he suggests.

I have a 1.1 mm italic nib in my Lamy Safari and it works very smoothly. My guess is that your pen is fine, too, but you just need to work out all these angles somehow. I only use an edged nib maybe 10% of the time, and I usually find it difficult to get everything aligned satisfactorily at first. After maybe half an hour of struggling, I usually get things flowing better.

The final tweak to get the nib on the page properly is just to spin the pen a little around its long axis, e.g. as if the edge of the nib were the hand of a clock, with the nib slit being the axis around which that edge spins. It should always be possible to spin like this to get the edge of the nib completely on the paper, so the nib isn't cocked up on one corner or the other of the nib.

One challenge is to maintain this contact as you form letters. If you have ever studied differential geometry(!) there is a concept called "parallel transport" - well, I picked this up from studying general relativity in physics, but I guess it comes from differential geometry. Anyway, the idea with the pen is not to plant the base of your hand on the paper and wiggle your fingers to form the letters - this tends to mess up all the angles. Instead, the idea is to let your hand simply hold the pen at a steady and consistent angle with respect to the paper, and to use your arm to move your hand this way and that to form the letters. So the base of your palm will be sliding up and down and back and forth across the paper, with very light contact. This way, once you get all the pen-paper angles right, they'll tend to stay right.

After you can keep the whole nib edge - both corners evenly! - on the paper as you write across the page, the next challenge is to fine tune the angle on the paper between the direction of writing, e.g. the direction of the lines on lined paper, and the direction along which the edge of the nib rests on the paper. There is no strict rule about this, but for italic letters it's nice to keep this around 45 degrees. Other letterforms use other angles, e.g. as I recall uncial uses a quite flat angle, so the edge of the pen is pretty much parallel to the direction of writing.

Sorry if all this is useless and pedantic. I enjoy thinking about all the different angles involved in writing & find it quite a challenge in three dimensional geometry!

Jim

i believe you're supposed to move the paper as opposed to shifting your writing position so that you aren't forced out of a proper pen positioning. Or so I hear... it's rather trying to keep moving the paper along as you write every few words. xD