The agony of being obsolete

[brokenclay]

Dear Agony Aunt:

 

My daughter (age 34, living with us since the start of the pandemic, a fountain pen user herself) informed me recently that she cannot read my writing. The writing in question was a long-ish poem with mixed English and Spanish, and I thought perhaps the problem was that the Spanish words were so unfamiliar that she couldn't make them out. No, she tells me, it wasn't that. She  cannot even read my grocery lists (apparently that's why I now have an Excel spreadsheet for the grocery list).

 

At first I wandered around feeling guilty: my handwriting is illegible! I'm a bad person! I shared this with her, and she said, no, it's generational. She cannot read script. She's a lovely, intelligent, inquisitive person, but apparently she does not care to learn to read script.

 

I knew this was a thing, but somehow thought that my household was exempt, haha. Now I'm just sad. It's not as though I've been journaling or writing for anyone else but myself, but the thought that my children will not be able to (will not be interested in?) reading anything I have written by hand has got me down. Many years after my father's death, my mother gave me a journal he had kept that, while extremely difficult to read (he suffered from depression), gave me valuable insight into him as a person rather than just as my father. I guess my children will not have that experience. Maybe that's good. Maybe I'm upset because there's an implication here that knowing more about me requires more effort than my child is interested in expending.

 

The handwriting in question:

[LizEF]

19 minutes ago, brokenclay said:

she does not care to learn to read script

Sorry, @brokenclay, that must be painful.  FWIW, I predict when you're gone, she'll care.

 

In the meantime, perhaps do a handwriting dictionary, showing how you write each letter of the alphabet, and various combinations that alter those letters.  Stick it in the front of the first journal, for reference.

 

Alternately, you could write little notes for her, with some cursive and some print - gradually working toward more print cursive, so that she learns your cursive passively.    (As a daughter, it strikes me as unthinkable that a daughter wouldn't want to read a note from her father.)

 

19 minutes ago, brokenclay said:

Maybe I'm upset because there's an implication here that knowing more about me requires more effort than my child is interested in expending.

Perhaps she needs to see this.  People are short-sighted and sometimes need to be poked and prodded before they'll look to the horizon and consider what they see there.  She likely never considered her "I don't want to learn cursive" in light of the consequences or your feelings - she's likely thinking only in terms of "that's not a tool I need in the world out there".

[mizgeorge]

I find this really sad. My daughter is a fair bit younger, and can not only happily read my handwriting, but her own looks very much like it - she is the fourth generation of women in my family who all have very similar hands, across a number of languages and varying alphabets.

 

I think there is a generational aspect to the technicality of it - which perhaps is less evident in the UK, and definitely in Europe, where cursive is still widely used and taught, but I believe it goes further. Not just in terms of the difference in what and how people read - I know families now who have almost no physical books at all - but also in terms of a massive shift from "let me ask you a question" to "look at me", which has been very much driven by social media. If it can't be typed (ideally using just two thumbs) in x number of characters, it seems to be of no interest to far more people than we realise. 

 

I think your handwriting is beautiful. I admire it often, and so enjoy your handwritten poems. I hope that one day your daughter will realise what she's missing out on, and also that it happens before it's too late for her to tell you that.

 

[inkstainedruth]

I've kinda had the flip side of this happen.  Several years ago I got a letter from my niece and it looked as if it had been written by a eight or ten year old -- not someone who was in college (as she was at the time).

Of course my husband's handwriting is just atrocious.  In his case, I think it's a combination of being dyslexic and not having been taught good handwriting where he went to school as a kid.

Ruth Morrisson aka inkstainedruth

[brokenclay]

1 hour ago, LizEF said:

In the meantime, perhaps do a handwriting dictionary, showing how you write each letter of the alphabet, and various combinations that alter those letters.  Stick it in the front of the first journal, for reference.

 

I like this! A little sneaky, possibly, but perhaps I will do it.

 

1 hour ago, LizEF said:

Perhaps she needs to see this.  People are short-sighted and sometimes need to be poked and prodded before they'll look to the horizon and consider what they see there.  She likely never considered her "I don't want to learn cursive" in light of the consequences or your feelings - she's likely thinking only in terms of "that's not a tool I need in the world out there".

 

Good advice. One of the side effects of living together during the pandemic has been getting better at kind truth telling, and this would be an example of that.

 

36 minutes ago, mizgeorge said:

I hope that one day your daughter will realise what she's missing out on, and also that it happens before it's too late for her to tell you that.

 

Thank you, I hope so, too.

 

One of the other things that has been going on here, and I'm sure it's related, is that I have been learning Kurrentschrift in order to be able to better read the letters my mother and her parents wrote to each other, and that's been quite a challenge (Philip Hensher, in The Missing Ink, says that Sütterlin (a successor to Kurrentschrift) is much easier to write than to read, and that exactly matches my own experience).

[mauckcg]

I'll be the divergent opinion and agree with your daughter.  From what you scanned i'm not able to decipher very many words.  Your F's are straight lines with a squiggle at the bottom which makes them look like J's, L's are hit or miss whether they have a loop to distinguish an L from an I, U or M/N.  Too many letters are too similar to too many other letters is the issue from where I sit at the moment.  

[I-am-not-really-here]

How about a different solution?  Record yourself reading the poem and whatever else comes along more important than a shopping list.  Give her the recordings, then, when you are gone eventually, she will have your voice always.

[ParramattaPaul]

19 minutes ago, mauckcg said:

I'll be the divergent opinion and agree with your daughter.  From what you scanned i'm not able to decipher very many words.  Your F's are straight lines with a squiggle at the bottom which makes them look like J's, L's are hit or miss whether they have a loop to distinguish an L from an I, U or M/N.  Too many letters are too similar to too many other letters is the issue from where I sit at the moment.  

I too have trouble reading the scanned example.  I will add that your 'e's do not have an open loop which makes them indistinguishable from your 'i's, and -- in some cases -- other letters (second 's' in a word for instance) as well.  Then too, 'strong' at the end of the tenth line is hard to decipher given that the connection from the 's' through the 't and on to the 'r' makes it appear to be one letter.  Also, 'gather' and 'flourishing', two lines later, are hard to read, and for the same reason -- the connection between letters.

 

It actually is nice looking handwriting.  How you form and connect your letters makes it difficult to read, but it is still far better than my handwriting.

[brokenclay]

49 minutes ago, mauckcg said:

I'll be the divergent opinion and agree with your daughter.  From what you scanned i'm not able to decipher very many words.  Your F's are straight lines with a squiggle at the bottom which makes them look like J's, L's are hit or miss whether they have a loop to distinguish an L from an I, U or M/N.  Too many letters are too similar to too many other letters is the issue from where I sit at the moment.  

 

20 minutes ago, ParramattaPaul said:

I too have trouble reading the scanned example.  I will add that your 'e's do not have an open loop which makes them indistinguishable from your 'i's, and -- in some cases -- other letters (second 's' in a word for instance) as well.  Then too, 'strong' at the end of the tenth line is hard to decipher given that the connection from the 's' through the 't and on to the 'r' makes it appear to be one letter.  Also, 'gather' and 'flourishing', two lines later, are hard to read, and for the same reason -- the connection between letters.

 

It actually is nice looking handwriting.  How you form and connect your letters makes it difficult to read, but it is still far better than my handwriting.

 

Thank you both. I appreciate the feedback and will take it to heart. 

[askwyatt]

I am in the business of handling and reading old documents every day. I can tell you this, I can read your handwriting just fine. Some of the points mentioned can be helpful in improving legibility, but in all honesty, the contextual clues in the text are enough to identify every word rather easily. I had no problems reading it whatsoever. 

 

Now, since I am in the business of handling and reading old documents every day, let me also say this. Someone will be interested in reading your writing when you have gone. A family member will be interested in reading it, guaranteed. And with your journaling and copying poems or whatever it is you choose to do, I can also say this--those items will become treasures to the family who receive them. They will be super important family treasures.

 

I have a handwritten note from my grandfather, and his writing is super illegible compared to yours. The note is one written in passing. 3 sentences. The only thing he ever wrote just for me. 

 

It's one of the most important things I own. 

 

Just a few thoughts . . . hope it helps. 

[brokenclay]

Thanks, @askwyatt. 

 

I had to laugh, @mauckcg, at your comment about i/m/n/u - when I was in school the teacher did a scribble on the board that looked like /\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\ and complained that (all of our) writing looked like that, no difference between i/m/n/u. That being said, post war German school hands were still influenced by Sütterlin and its predecessor Kurrent, in which i/m/n/u look like this:

 

so we came by it honestly.

[A Smug Dill]

58 minutes ago, askwyatt said:

Some of the points mentioned can be helpful in improving legibility, but in all honesty, the contextual clues in the text are enough to identify every word rather easily. I had no problems reading it whatsoever.

 

I'll be honest; I struggle to read it with any sort of flow, because I find the shapes take deciphering, and that makes the exercise a hard slog for me, not something to attempt for either enjoyment or idle curiosity. I'd have to really want the information content, and be convinced that it is worthwhile, to decode the sequence of symbols, word after word, line after line.

 

The shape of the minuscule ‘n’ is not well distinguished from ‘u‘. (It's a fault in my own handwriting as well.) If I have to look for contextual clues to determine the symbol is, then quite frankly it isn't clear and straightforward communication. Of course, it depends whether that is intended by the author of the written artefact.

 

The cross-stroke in the minuscule ‘t‘ is sometimes too low (e.g. in the word ‘Gather’ in the poem title), thus making it difficult to distinguish from a minuscule ‘s‘ with a connector to the next letter.

 

The height of the ascenders is generally short, and unbalanced with the height of the descenders. While that's a matter of style, it makes the minuscules ‘l‘ and ‘h‘ difficult to read, and sometimes can be confused with (part or all of) ‘u‘. The ‘fl‘ in the first line of the poem could be mistaken for the minuscule ‘p‘.

 

The typically short downstroke in the miniuscule ‘r‘, and without visual indicators to delineate it from the next letter (e.g. in the word ‘flourishing‘ in the first line of the poem, and to an extent the one in the title as well), makes it difficult to read where there is no pen lift and clean break immediately after it.

 

3 hours ago, brokenclay said:

Maybe I'm upset because there's an implication here that knowing more about me requires more effort than my child is interested in expending.

 

I'm not sure whether you desire the information contained in your handwritten artefacts to be read with active interest, understood, and make an impression; the requisite effort is thus an implicit barrier you want the (intended) reader to surmount to prove her level of interest prior to the reward of getting the meaning of the written content. I'm not posing the (implied) question just to be ornery, either. I've just ordered myself a bunch of Chinese calligraphy books to learn how to write in seal script, which is difficult (although not impossible) for the average reader of Chinese to decipher, precisely because I want the arcane, ‘obsolete’, and difficult to be part of my personal style in certain ‘artistic’ expressions. When I want what I've written to be easily understood at a glance (e.g. by the postman, or public servants reading paperwork that I have to fill), I write in a different script or hand, instead of demand that others exert themselves to overcome challenges on account of it being their duty.

 

So, assuming you can't have everything on your terms — write in your personal handwriting style unchanged, while still arousing sufficient interest with the ‘promised’ informational content, such that family members will want to overcome any challenges that stand in the way to read it — what is the compromise you're prepared to make? Or is having to make a compromise at all in the context the cause of the ‘agony’?

 

 

[brokenclay]

Thanks, @A Smug Dill. I, too, write in a different hand (printed capital letters) when addressing envelopes or filling out forms, and aside from grocery lists and the occasional very short note (e.g., "I've left for the doctor's, the dog has been fed"), there are almost no use cases in which my family members need to read my handwriting, so I don't think there's a day to day problem to be solved here. As I said in the OP, I'm not writing in a journal for future readers, related or otherwise. I haven't even decided if I want to destroy them while I still can.

 

So my lament is more general, with a touch of "in my day, you had to actually turn a crank to get the car window up/down".

[ParramattaPaul]

22 minutes ago, brokenclay said:

So my lament is more general, with a touch of "in my day, you had to actually turn a crank to get the car window up/down".

My car still has a crank that gets the windows down.  He's old and sits in the driver's seat --- it's me!

[amberleadavis]

I've included a rosetta stone in my journals in case my sons ever do want to read about themselves.

[brokenclay]

28 minutes ago, amberleadavis said:

I've included a rosetta stone in my journals in case my sons ever do want to read about themselves.

Nice!

[AmandaW]

2 hours ago, ParramattaPaul said:

My car still has a crank that gets the windows down.  He's old and sits in the driver's seat --- it's me!

 

Made me spit coffee on my monitor.

 

I found the book Teach Yourself Better Handwriting by Rosemary Sassoon to be helpful in renovating my chicken scratch into something more readable. She focuses on letter shapes, spacing and maintaining a consistent slant. Your writing is already pretty good on most of that, there are just a few letter shapes and joins needing a habit-check. I borrowed the book from the library, found it useful, took it back and was inspired enough to move on to practicing an italic hand instead. My ordinary cursive remains more readable than it was because I pay more attention and know where to be applying that attention. (Not so much to be ending up all form and no content though!)

[mauckcg]

9 hours ago, ParramattaPaul said:

My car still has a crank that gets the windows down.  He's old and sits in the driver's seat --- it's me!

Hey now, my Jeep is only 6 years old and is manual everything, windows, mirrors, door locks, stick, 4x4 etc.  

[mauckcg]

10 hours ago, brokenclay said:

Thanks, @askwyatt. 

 

I had to laugh, @mauckcg, at your comment about i/m/n/u - when I was in school the teacher did a scribble on the board that looked like /\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\ and complained that (all of our) writing looked like that, no difference between i/m/n/u. That being said, post war German school hands were still influenced by Sütterlin and its predecessor Kurrent, in which i/m/n/u look like this:

 

so we came by it honestly.

Interesting.  What i was taught in the US in the late 80s early 90's looks like what amberleadavis posted.

[askwyatt]

15 hours ago, A Smug Dill said:

I'll be honest; I struggle to read it with any sort of flow, because I find the shapes take deciphering, and that makes the exercise a hard slog for me, not something to attempt for either enjoyment or idle curiosity. I'd have to really want the information content, and be convinced that it is worthwhile, to decode the sequence of symbols, word after word, line after line.

I have to slog through a number of old documents at work. So many of them so illegible it's truly difficult to understand anything at all. The daily practice of slogging through different people's handwriting made this very easy for me.