Jump to content

Can Handwriting Be "too Neat"


Solitaire146

Recommended Posts

I don't think "too neat" is a thing. ;) Adhering too strictly to a model may be, though.

81AbmzELG0L.jpg

the cat half awake

and half sleeping on the book

"Quantum Mechanics"

 

(inspired by a German haiku by Tony Böhle)

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • Replies 30
  • Created
  • Last Reply

Top Posters In This Topic

  • ParramattaPaul

    7

  • dms525

    3

  • Estycollector

    3

  • A Smug Dill

    2

Now, my everyday handwriting these days is cursive italic. It is unusual enough to elicit comments from bank tellers, post office clerks and, before I retired from practice, pharmacists. The most common comment is something like "beautiful/nice handwriting/penmanship!" Occasionally, some one will call it "calligraphy" just because they regard certain handwriting styles as "calligraphy," without necessarily making an aesthetic judgement.

 

Some people think that anything written with a fountain pen is "calligraphy." I often have patients ask me, "Is that a calligraphy pen?"

Rationalizing pen and ink purchases since 1967.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Some people think that anything written with a fountain pen is "calligraphy."

 

Some people think that anything that counts as "handwriting" is cursive./.running./.flowing. *shrug* Yet others imagine there are certain inherent qualities to "handwriting" outside of being produced by hand using a writing instrument (which could be, say, a pencil or a felt-tipped pen), including but not limited to speed of execution and the language itself. Consistency is not logically the same as neatness; one could have a habit of always putting down a cross-bar in his/her lowercase 't' that is longer and wavier than it strictly needs to be and punches through the vertical stroke in any adjoining lowercase 'h' (ergo not neat), or one could have write a lowercase 'l' with inconsistent slant but still stay within the printed or imaginary guidelines for each line of text.

 

I suspect that, as with a lot of other things, for most people what is "proper" is "as much as I choose to do" and what is "excessive" (e.g. "excessively neat" or "too neat") is "more than I would do" and especially "more than I would aspire to".

Edited by A Smug Dill

I endeavour to be frank and truthful in what I write, show or otherwise present, when I relate my first-hand experiences that are not independently verifiable; and link to third-party content where I can, when I make a claim or refute a statement of fact in a thread. If there is something you can verify for yourself, I entreat you to do so, and judge for yourself what is right, correct, and valid. I may be wrong, and my position or say-so is no more authoritative and carries no more weight than anyone else's here.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I want to be able to read what I wrote.

When I picked up a fountain pen after a 40 year hiatus it was to intentionally relearn to write cursive well enough to read it later. Not being able to read my own handwriting had become a personal embarrassment. I learned two things almost immediately; slow down and add space to my letters and words. To the chagrin of my long departed mother I always wrote with my fingers and my hand anchored to the page. Cramming letters together came natural and writing well and legible has been creating new muscle memory. Even now after a year and a half of relearning, my fountain pen writing is way more legible than just jotting notes with a pencil or gel pen.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I want to be able to read what I wrote.

Yes this, and that others can read it as well essentially define neatness. What is too neat may be a matter of perspective for reader more so than the writer.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • 4 weeks later...

My mom wrote in **PERFECT** Palmer style....it was spectacular. I have never gotten close to her level of writing. -Bruce

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • 3 weeks later...

I was at primary school in the late 60s/early 70s, and around about that time, it was thought that teaching handwriting was too old-fashioned, so although I "did" handwriting at school initially,, it was dropped before we were taught cursive. As a result I never could join letters, memorise what to join or where or how to join it. So I printed all my life (although I did teach myself Italic as a teen that wasn't cursive).

 

Years later, I trained to be a teacher as the awful National Curriculum was introduced and not sure about now, but right back at the start, we were told to teach handwriting. As someone who hadn't really ever formally learned it, I was clueless.

 

I ended up following whatever the scheme the school bought in was (and I don't recall now, this would have been around 1990). And I still couldn't understand it, not even from the kiddies' text book, so basically would just plod through the (boring IIRC) guide we were given, bit by bit, learning it about half an hour ahead of the kids. And I'll admit, it didn't stick.

 

At teacher training college we'd been taught that handwriting lessons were just a hangover from bad Victorian educators - trying to churn out people with legible handwriting to be clerks or whatever, for commerce.

 

In the intervening years I have learned a bit more about handwriting and calligraphy as well but still to this day can't do cursive. I always had a lot of compliments on my handwriting, ironically - and especially so when I worked in the US (where, I noticed, so many of our students wrote in all caps!) I can't say I was formally taught anything, just sort of arrived at my own version of printing because I missed out on being taught cursive. And despite teaching it to kids for several years on and off, I never got the hang of cursive at all.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Pendarion, Thank you for your narrative. I sat next to a young educator on a plane last year. I was doing the sudoku puzzle in the airline magazine with a fountain pen so we started talking about “archaic” technology. His opinion was that teaching cursive was a total waste of time. He thought it would disappear entirely from the culture in the near future. Instead he felt that keyboarding was much more important. The teacher training college observation of cursive being “just a hangover from bad Victorian educators - trying to churn out people with legible handwriting to be clerks or whatever, for commerce” seems even more relevant for keyboarding.

I am sorry that you never got the hang of cursive writing. I started school in the mid 1950’s and can’t recall when the writing lessons went from printing to cursive. At that time writing in any form was more of a drudgery chore. Sadly it wasn’t until I picked up a fountain pen with the intention of relearning to write legible cursive that I discovered the joy of writing.

Edited by gpsgrandpa
Link to comment
Share on other sites

Create an account or sign in to comment

You need to be a member in order to leave a comment

Create an account

Sign up for a new account in our community. It's easy!

Register a new account

Sign in

Already have an account? Sign in here.

Sign In Now


  • Most Contributions

    1. amberleadavis
      amberleadavis
      43844
    2. PAKMAN
      PAKMAN
      33494
    3. Ghost Plane
      Ghost Plane
      28220
    4. inkstainedruth
      inkstainedruth
      26624
    5. jar
      jar
      26101
  • Upcoming Events

  • Blog Comments

    • Shanghai Knife Dude
      I have the Sailor Naginata and some fancy blade nibs coming after 2022 by a number of new workshop from China.  With all my respect, IMHO, they are all (bleep) in doing chinese characters.  Go use a bush, or at least a bush pen. 
    • A Smug Dill
      It is the reason why I'm so keen on the idea of a personal library — of pens, nibs, inks, paper products, etc. — and spent so much money, as well as time and effort, to “build” it for myself (because I can't simply remember everything, especially as I'm getting older fast) and my wife, so that we can “know”; and, instead of just disposing of what displeased us, or even just not good enough to be “given the time of day” against competition from >500 other pens and >500 other inks for our at
    • adamselene
      Agreed.  And I think it’s good to be aware of this early on and think about at the point of buying rather than rationalizing a purchase..
    • A Smug Dill
      Alas, one cannot know “good” without some idea of “bad” against which to contrast; and, as one of my former bosses (back when I was in my twenties) used to say, “on the scale of good to bad…”, it's a spectrum, not a dichotomy. Whereas subjectively acceptable (or tolerable) and unacceptable may well be a dichotomy to someone, and finding whether the threshold or cusp between them lies takes experiencing many degrees of less-than-ideal, especially if the decision is somehow influenced by factors o
    • adamselene
      I got my first real fountain pen on my 60th birthday and many hundreds of pens later I’ve often thought of what I should’ve known in the beginning. I have many pens, the majority of which have some objectionable feature. If they are too delicate, or can’t be posted, or they are too precious to face losing , still they are users, but only in very limited environments..  I have a big disliking for pens that have the cap jump into the air and fly off. I object to Pens that dry out, or leave blobs o
  • Chatbox

    You don't have permission to chat.
    Load More
  • Files






×
×
  • Create New...