Rachel Gutman-Wei writes for the Atlantic (archived) about penmanship, an evergreen topic for thumbsucking opinion pieces; there’s a fair amount of thumbsucking here, but I thought this section was interesting:
In the age of text on screens, many of us hardly write by hand at all, so we rarely get the chance to assess one another’s character through penmanship. Handwriting, as a language of its own, is dying out.
Over the centuries, the way people read that language has shifted. Until the 1800s, at least in the U.S., writing styles were less an act of self-expression than a marker of your social category, including your profession. “There were certain font types for merchants, for example, that were supposed to reflect the efficiency and the speed with which merchants work,” Tamara Plakins Thornton, a historian at the University at Buffalo and the author of Handwriting in America, told me. Lawyers used a different script, aristocrats another, and so on. The distinctions were enforced—by social norms, by teachers, by clients and colleagues and employers.
Men and women, too, were assigned their own fonts. Men were taught “muscular handwriting,” Carla Peterson, an emeritus professor of English at the University of Maryland, told me. They used roundhand, a larger script that was meant to be produced with more pressure on the quill or pen; women, by contrast, learned the narrower Italian script, akin to today’s italics. The latter style was compressed, says Ewan Clayton, a handwriting expert at the University of Sunderland, in the United Kingdom, in the same way that women’s waists might be limited by contemporary fashion. Eventually, women switched to using roundhand too.
The idea that handwriting styles might differ meaningfully from one person to another—and that those differences could be a means of showing your true nature—really took off in the 19th century, around the time that business correspondence and records started being outsourced to the typewriter. As penmanship was freed from professional constraints, it became more personal. “It was really believed that handwriting could be the articulation of self, that indeed the character of script said something about the character of a person,” says Mark Alan Mattes, an assistant English professor at the University of Louisville and the editor of the upcoming collection Handwriting in Early America.
She goes on to discuss graphology (“basically, phrenology for handwriting”), and there is for some reason a link to Thomas Wentworth Higginson’s lively defense of women’s rights from the February 1859 issue, Ought women to learn the alphabet? (“It is an alarming feature of this discussion, that it has reversed, very generally, the traditional positions of the sexes: the women have had all the logic; and the most intelligent men, when they have attempted the other side, have limited themselves to satire and gossip”). Me, I can barely read my own handwriting these days, so when I write and send actual letters through the mail, I tend to type them on the computer and just add my illegibly scrawled signature after I’ve printed them out. But I still bristle at the mockery by younger generations of the whole idea of handwriting.
“handwriting could be the articulation of self”
There is definitely more communication in a handwritten note, although I cannot articulate how this is so. Perhaps one could see the human hand as a proxy for the human voice.
One of the highlights of my first trip to the UK was seeing one of my favorite Bronte poems written in her own hand. Somehow, if it had been a typed page with her signature on it, it wouldn’t have been the same.
I agree.
Also, Romanticism.
I refuse to write so fast that I can’t read it anymore.
That’s why I failed my first two attempts at the exam of Introduction to Ecology. The professor (who had a very high opinion of himself) simply had us write too much for the time he gave us.
My handwriting deteriorated so badly that I taught myself a simple species of calligraphy as a corrective. I still use it when the outcome needs to be especially legible.
The linked “Ought Women to Learn the Alphabet?” 1858 article by
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Wentworth_Higginson
is well worth reading. (Though it is distressing to contemplate how many people have yet to accept his reasoning, a century and a half later.)
I don’t recall seeing “font” used for handwriting.. I like it.*
It’s a transparent extension of the computing sense. (General dictionaries don’t even mention computing yet, just physical typesetting.)
*”hand” is OK but confusable. “style” is vague. “penmanship” is vague and gendered
As a proud eheu-fugacist*, I sympathize, yet condemn the use of “font”.
“hand” is OK but confusable. “style” is vague. “penmanship” is vague and gendered
“Ductus”, then.
⸻
* Not quite in the sense Horace meant, but it’s too good of an expression not to use.
@mollymoolly: “font” used for “handwriting”
An article in yesterday’s newspaper said that the Australian Mint is “printing” the first commemorative coin with King Charles III on it.
😀
I sometimes can’t read my own handwriting five minutes or two hours after I have written something (which is almost exclusively diary entries and shopping lists). With a supermarket shopping list there is only a fairly limited number of things a word can possibly be, and somewhere inside me there must be a memory of the need for an item that caused me to write it down, yet every now and then I fail to discern something I intended to buy and so I don’t get it.
However, I can easily read what I wrote as a 10-yo creating a small encyclopedia for primary school, but no doubt I was being careful. More amazingly I can easily read copious lecture notes taken in real time at university in 1978-81 when I was around 20. Every word is legible, even though I must have been under some time pressure.
One reason for my legible handwriting in the past is that I used to do a lot of drawing, even spending a year at art college, so was always handling pencils and pens and using my wrist and fingers in all sorts of subtle controlled ways. Nowadays if I do graphic images it is almost always on a computer, as is the bulk of my writing.
*”hand” is OK but confusable. “style” is vague. “penmanship” is vague and gendered
From my elderly perspective—
1) Once upon a time, long away and far ago, it was called handwriting.
2) Back in the days when penmanship was not an uncommon term, it was—if gendered at all—
neuter gender.
What I wrote was not “font” used for “handwriting” but rather “font” used for handwriting. To avoid misinterpretation, I ought to have written “font” used in relation to handwriting.
Back when I was a TA grading tons of handwritten homework and tests, I came to believe that there was such a thing as “accents” in handwriting. People had their individual handwriting, but there was a distinctive look of Chinese students’ handwriting in English: it was more spiky, I think, with hooks on a lot of strokes. Eventually I thought I could recognize “accents” from Japanese (rather rounded), Russian (some letters formed more like Cyrillic ones), and Hebrew (don’t remember how this looked). And one time a European colleague said my blackboard handwriting looked American, because I didn’t join up the letters.
Was I just imagining this? I asked the internet whether anyone else thought so, and it found a few: for example, here’s a translation service commenting on handwriting “accents” including Chinese and Arabic. And there are well-known cultural differences in details of numerals, especially 7. Even within the Latin script, there are different teaching traditions; somebody said “My parents write like Poles”, with more rounded letters and straight up-and-down verticals than how Americans were taught.
My handwriting deteriorated so badly that I taught myself a simple species of calligraphy as a corrective.
Same here. I’ve written elsewhere about my life- (or at least hand-) changing encounter with The Puffin Book of Better Handwriting.
@ktschwarz, you may find Primarium, a repository of handwriting models from different countries, of interest. Perhaps it will confirm/deny some of your potential accents.
@ktschwarz
Stumbled upon this some time ago: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regional_handwriting_variation
Btw, the form of handwritten capital L and small t is one of the clues to spot people (around my age) from the neighbouring Bundesland for me.
I can read and write Sütterlin, but that’s a most uncommon skill (and rather useless one, of course).
@pc: Wonderful! Thank you for sharing.
As a proud eheu-fugacist*, I sympathize, yet condemn the use of “font”.
“Font” sounds totally wrong to me in this context. It’s a term for the printed word, whether printed on paper or a screen.
The best word, the one that seems to me most natural, is used synonymously in the very same paragraph of the text: script.
Drawing printed letters by hand is on average a very American thing. I wasn’t even taught to do that; being taught to write meant being taught something that would count as a rather simple cursive in the US.
It’s a learned term for me, but the default term for an individual’s distinctive writing is hand. It’s commonly used in manuscript analyses, where it is also synecdoche for the person doing the writing. However, it is also used just for the writing itself. Dr. Jekyll, upon finding himself in the body of the wanted murderer Mr. Hyde,* can only identify himself by his continued ability to write his “own hand.” (Conversely, it turns out that even when he wants to make Hyde’s writing look different from Jekyll’s, they are immediately spotted as too similar for coincidence.)
* My current favorite trivia question is:
@David M
Not just an American thing.
Here in Australia, most people under 40 don’t use cursive.
One notable exception was for signatures, where they’d make some attempt.
I say ‘was’ because in 2023 I witnessed a 20-something sign a document. His “signature” was identical to his “printed” name on the form.
What is the first name of the main character in “Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde”?
Mr. Utterson’s first name is not given. (If you mean either Jekyll or Hyde, their given names are Henry and Edward.)
I’m pretty sure that I would print individual letters if called upon to write something on a blackboard (which, as far as I can recall, I never have been.)
But then my actual (properly-cursive) handwriting well exemplifies the professional stereotype (mentioned as a cultural norm for us in the article. It may be so …)
[Better than some: as a senior house officer, I recall being asked by a team of physicians to interpret for them what my consultant had written in the casenotes after they asked for his opinion. True story …]
@John Cowan: You avoided the trick of the question (which is the hard part for people who have never read the original story) but then missed the comparatively easy part.
Having just reread the story, I was about to post to that effect. I have now embarked once again on the recorded adventures of Miss Mary Jekyll, her sister Miss Diana Hyde, and their friends Sig.na Beatrice Rappaccini, Mlle. Catherine Moreau, and Frl. Justine Frankenstein (plus their long-suffering housekeeper Mrs. Poole), with further reference to a certain consulting detective, an inmate of Seward’s Asylum, and various other well-known personages of the day. Their literary agent is Ms. Theodora Goss.
DE: I thought your code only bound doctors who write prescriptions, whose handwriting only pharmacists can read; and that the latter’s handwriting cannot be read even by themselves. Ocular and other surgeons are not obliged to write so.
I have seen handwritten labels written by pharmacists. They lived up to the myth, magnificently.
Ophthalmologists in the UK are amphibious*: basically physicians who do their own operating.
(It is not so in Germany, or indeed in most countries, and probably isn’t the way you’d design the service if you were starting with a clean slate.)
I have prescribed many a dangerous illegible drug in my time. Suppressing the immune system is the way to go in my subspecialty. Nobody really needs an immune system. They just cause trouble.
* ‘E’s a kind of a giddy harumfrodite—soldier an’ sailor too!
In the U.S. ophthalmology is definitely a surgical specialty, but of course surgeons of all sorts do diagnose and prescribe. After all, so is OB-GYN, and the amount of actual slicing and dicing seems to be shrinking all the time. If you look at the number of years of residency, it’s a cline with psychiatry at one end and neurosurgery at the other, with no visible sharp (heh) line anywhere.
That could just be the autism spectrum. My signature is simply my name in my handwriting; I never tried to develop a special signature (and I haven’t signed enough for it to happen naturally). I even correct it when it gets too illegible.
Finger-written signatures on touch screens for credit card purchases are hard to do well. And so, many people seem to have figured out that any vague zigzag line will satisfy the Electronic Brain.
It’s always fun signing for office deliveries on a small handheld pad.
My signature is simply my name in my handwriting
It used to be that my signature was my name (…OK, most but not all of my last name) in cursive with a flourish at the end (because I was under the impression that all good signatures should have a flourish at the end). As I started signing stuff more and more it had slowly deteriorated until by now about all that’s left is the flourish; the latest iterations had came out looking suspiciously like crosses.
Maybe some day I should go back to the full version again.
Finger-written signatures on touch screens for credit card purchases are hard to do well. And so, many people seem to have figured out that any vague zigzag line will satisfy the Electronic Brain.
Whenever it came up (usually at banks) I’ve usually been explicitly told to do any vague zigzag line; even that much was nontrivial as the touch screens had trouble registering my fingers properly, and/or kept ending the entry too early.
(IIRC a few times the bank clerk got tired of my attempts to get my zigzag lines to be registered in sufficiently few seconds and reached across to do it themselves – and at least once they didn’t manage it on the first attempt either.)
Signatures are such a strange cultural phenomenon.
Signatures are such a strange cultural phenomenon.
Not at all ! Like ring seals, they are precursors of ID cards, fingerprints and passwords (shibboleths). They were used to verify identity. No identity, no legitimacy. One did the best one could with the available hardware.
Fancier hardware is making them all obsolete, but only in their traditional forms. Identification now requires “two of three factors” – you must present on demand “proof that you are something (biometrics such as a fingerprint), have something (a cellphone for SMS) or know something (a password)”. Being circumcised, having a pager and a poor memory is just not good enough nowadays to gate-crash Angela Merkel’s birthday ball.
Being circumcised, having a pager and a poor memory is just not good enough nowadays to gate-crash Angela Merkel’s birthday ball.
Sorry to hear that. It must have been awfully embarrassing (the pager, especially).
Last week in a movie from the 90s I saw a character checking his pager. What a shock, I hadn’t seen one for twenty years. They were very cool in Germany for a while, because you could receive a message without having a phone, or being near a public phone. It was one-way communication only, of course – sort of a classless servants’ bell, or like messages delivered by moribund carrier pigeons. Unlike bells and pigeons, pagers were easy to smuggle into prisons.
Rather the opposite. You can tell the pagee you’d like their attention, but if you don’t hear back, you won’t know whether they can’t or don’t want to. Surely that power was part of the appeal to drug dealers, real and ersatz.
What is the opposite of what ? I used one with a friend who was on hard times. When you don’t hear back after a while, that doesn’t necessarily mean anything. Not everyone experiences time and priority the way I do.
Another friend of mine usually leaves his cellphone ringtone off, because he prefers to exchange text messages with his other friends, and hates telephone conversation. I hate text messaging.
It drives me crazy when I want to contact him and can’t. Unlike the old days before cellphones (I mean handies), when it was natural not to be able to contact someone at the instant I wanted to.
These are signature behaviors.
The signature on a credit-card slip is not for identification purposes. The bank doesn’t care if you sign “Jon Snow”. The sole purpose is so that if you disclaim having signed the slip they can confront you with your signature and say “Well??”
What a shock, I hadn’t seen one for twenty years.
Apparently, they are still used by US medical doctors.
The mere mention of pagers makes me wish to display Excellence in Swearing.
My first sixth months as a houseman, just after qualifying, was the worst six months of work I have ever done, in any country.
Not the least of this was the “bleep.” This was of a primitive sort, which alerted you only to ring the hospital switchboard – a thing which everyone else who had been bleeped was of course also trying to do at the same time. It was not unusual to have to wait ten minutes or more for them to answer, during which time you were often bleeped again. When you finally got through, they would tell you the extension you were supposed to ring (they didn’t put you through, such technical sophistication not yet having been achieved.) While waiting to for the line to stop being engaged, or for anyone to actually answer, you were often bleeped again, sometimes by the very people you were trying to get through to.
I had patients on five wards (widely scattered about a very large hospital.) I always saw all of them, spontaneously, without being asked to do so specially or summoned by the ward staff. This never seemed to dawn on any of the ward staff concerned, who would invariably “bleep” me to come to see them (for routine matters) every day. My promptness in so doing was often significantly impaired by having to answer the very call in question.
I am not exaggerating even a little to say that it was quite usual for me to spend an hour every day just answering the Fucking Bleep.
[Still bitter, as you may notice. At the time, I thought it was me. In retrospect, there were some people there who basically needed a good punching. The upside was that every single job I have ever done subsequently was much better.]
The telephonic ideal was when I worked in Ghana. No telephones at all in those days. (There was said to be a telephone in town at the post office, but I never saw it. It may have been mythical. The classical name is rather suggestive of myth. Wasn’t Teléphonë a nymph of some sort? Echo’s sister, perhaps?)
Not the least of this was the “bleep.”
In the pre-bleep era things (I am told) were even worse, as the hospital’s public-address system was used instead. There was a more or less constant stream of announcements: “Dr. A, call NNN; Dr. B, call MMM”. Each of which, of course, poor Dr. Z had to listen to in case it was his own name being called.
They used to say that doing casualty at Moorfields was the worst six months of your life including house jobs. I can only say that they didn’t do my house job …
[Senile muttering gradually withdrawing into the distance …]
That was the idea fifty years ago. But few signatures could be used to verify identity these days. Those you do with your finger on a touchpad to confirm your package was delivered, for example, are so unlike your pen-and-paper signature there’s no fucking way to tell if they’re forged. I’ve sent numerous job applications and invoices as Word files (sometimes converted to PDF), with a scan of my pen-and-paper signature included; I could theoretically have gotten it anywhere. (The invoices were paid. A few of the job applications were answered.)
It gets much more scurrilous than that. Writing your name at the end of an e-mail is so customary even I do it usually, because I figure people will feel like something is missing. But why??? My name is already in the sender line; and the end of the text is already marked as well – this isn’t a five-page letter of which a sheet might get lost.
I’m not done yet! There are people who extend the tradition of signing letters to internet comments. And some of those sign with a different name than the one in their name field. *facepalm*
the end of the text is already marked as well
But it isn’t; that’s the whole point of adding a signoff — to say “See, the text is ended, you’ve read everything I had to say.” For all your “this isn’t a five-page letter of which a sheet might get lost,” people in general need an explicit marker. That’s also why they say “Goodbye” or the equivalent instead of simply hanging up.
Also, too: I hate that I have been conditioned and hectored to put a subject line on emails. For some things, like business correspondence, sure. For personal letters no one should have to put in a dummy subject (“Hi”).
Four steps to a successful presentation before an audience (“they”):
1) Tell them what you’re going to say
2) Tell them how you’re going to say it
3) Say it
4) Tell them when you’re finished
I regard 4) as a mild, humorous admonition to those who are in thrall to some high-flown Principle of Parsimony and would argue: “After 1)-3), 4) is unnecessary”. But even POP presenters can drift into droning on and on, apparently reneging their promises, and making the audience restless. The weak point is 3). When have you said your say ?
I shouldn’t have said “marked”. The e-mail just ends, you can’t scroll any further; the end is impossible to overlook.
That’s politeness, a separate topic – though I guess “signing” e-mails has now become part of politeness.
I know that as “tell them what you just said”; and most of my papers have been long enough to make a summarizing Conclusion section useful. (A 40-page paper is coming out soon.)
That’s politeness, a separate topic
I don’t think it’s separate at all, and “signing” e-mails has always been part of politeness.
It’s not commonly known, but increasing demand for unique ID brought the ring seal to the brink of extinction.
I’m not done yet! There are people who extend the tradition of signing letters to internet comments. And some of those sign with a different name than the one in their name field. *facepalm*
I used to do this back in my teenage years. Not any more, I think…
In plurality cases it’s common to see a tag clarifying which particular personality had authored the comment. I think those are usually at the start rather than at the end, but neither option seems particularly uncommon.
Not sure if it’s a thing now but back in the 90s and 00s it was common to have default email templates that already came with a signature. My mom still uses one of those (seemingly because she never bothered to get rid of it), though modern email viewers tend to make those default sigs hidden (and that’s good because they don’t really add anything).
Re email signatures:
I don’t have a problem with the addition of a signature to an email, especially in work communication. Other than politeness, there are some other reasons for this:
1 If you need to copy & paste the email into another program or app, the “from” field may not always be able to be copied, but a signature is part of the email text and can be copied.
2 Some email addresses are group addresses, used and accessed by more than one person. A signature block (at least in the version of MS Outlook that I use) lets you see who in that work group wrote the email.
3 Signature blocks often contain other contact information (phone, street address), as well as a person’s work title.
An email may have a boilerplate auto signature. In some companies this is standardised analogous to the letterhead on physical company stationery. I have worked in places where my name is in a standard format as part of the boilerplate. I don’t sign/type my name separately above this; the redundant duplication is too obvious. The nearest approach to an individual personal touch a handwritten signature gives on a physical letter is the typing of a bespoke sign-off like thanks, regards, best,…
I have worked in places where my name is in a standard format as part of the boilerplate. I don’t sign/type my name separately above this; the redundant duplication is too obvious.
I know people who consider it grave impoliteness not to sign above the boilerplate, even if your name is part of it. De gustibus…
When I used a mail client I could fully control, viz. mutt, my 4-6 line signatures were drawn at random (literally using a random number) from this file. When ccil.org cut over to being a Gmail domain, I wrote a utility similar to the Recent Comments engine but running every minute (I would hardly write more than one email per minute) into a different wbb page on the same site. Eventually, I got sick of the refresh-copy-paste cycle and stopped using signatures at all. Maybe I’ll bring it back to life at some point with a little bit of JavaScript to help automate things.