Earlier quoted context omitted.
Maybe you should write a web blog post nobody will read about it
sure?
I was being tongue-in-cheek. Didn't mean to sound like a smartass. Thanks for reading!
Penmanship
91–100 of 120 posts
Re: Penmanship
#92Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'd toyed with fountain pens on and off for twenty years. In 2019, I dug an old Waterman Expert out of my closet, watched some videos for how to use bottled ink and converters and off I went into the hobby. I still use traditional late 20th century American cursive (D'Nealian, I think), but all the practice with fountain pens has made my handwriting more legible than it's been in a long time. Cursive came about becau…
Likewise! And if you've yet to try a Vanishing Point or a Decimo, you've got a pleasant surprise in store, I think - I've found them nearly perfect for work notes in particular thanks to their speed and ease of one-handed operation. (The Vanishing Point was admittedly a little too big and heavy for comfort, but a Decimo has the same nib and mechanism in a lighter, narrower body. Looks a lot more elegant, too, with th…
The Decimo is a great form factor, it's also just about the most inconspicuous fountain pen possible so you won't get weird looks from people who've never seen a fountain pen before. That said I have one as well as a Custom 74, both in EF, and somehow I like the 74 a lot more in that size. The Decimo nib seems finer and is noticeably softer (18k vs 14k), and I'd prefer it with a medium nib for maximum smoothness. I think it also dries out a little bit, something that I've never had with the Custom 74.
On the other end of the spectrum I have to recommend the Lamy Safari and Kaweco Sport for their utilitarian design and timeless aesthetics.
Re: Penmanship
#93Earlier quoted context omitted.
Something like this [0], but don't worry about the counting, just doodle the patterns [0] https://fcmdsc.files.wordpress.com/2010/06/exercises.jpg
is the "italic" style slanting deliberate and required?
It is deliberate for most Latin cursive scripts. I believe it is common wisdom that ovals are easier to write consistently and quickly than circles. Though I suspect this perhaps has more to do with older pens and styluses than a universal.
Edit: come to think about it, it's probably a universal, since you see angling in Arabic and Chinese scripts' calligraphic styles as well.
Re: Penmanship
#94Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is a good comment. I do have a contrary opinion however as I generally recommend a spencerian derivative over an italic one to new learners these days. One could say simple Spencerian derivatives are like Rust with a steep learning curve to inculcate the core shapes into muscle memory but have lesser overhead during runtime owing to their dependence on muscle memory. Italic derivatives otoh more like Go, easier…
This Spencerian example looks like what I learned in U.S. (Northern Utah) schools in the 80's. It doesn't say what it's called other than "Early American Spencerian". http://www.richimages.net/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/spencer...
That one is a little bit simplified, and as such is very close to something like D'Nealian which is what I learned in school. Technically in Spencerian the letters "d", "t", and "p" have the same basic stem height and are somewhat shorter than other full-height lower case characters. Basically instead of two heights for lower case letters, you get three.
But adapted into business script AFAIU the simplification into two heights, and the shrinking of the "p" stem, is pretty common. I'm definitely not used to making "p" taller than "q" and I am not always consistent about it.
Re: Penmanship
#95Fun (or maybe not-so-fun) fact: my 15-year-old nephew recently had to sign a document for some volunteer work, and he didn't know how. Apparently, schools no longer teach cursive, not even enough for kids to learn how to sign their own names for legal documents. The secretary was just like, "Yeah, we get that a lot; he can just print his name instead, that's fine." I've always had shitty handwriting, and when I was i…
I just bought a house, and signing all the mortgage docs, they told me I had to sign my name exactly as it appears on the document: First Middle Last. My signature, the one that is most personal, recognizable, and ubiquitous to me, is a quick scribble that kind of includes the first letter of my first name, then some flairs of loops and things. Having to laboriously write out my full name in script was a giant pain in the ass. I could not repeat the same signature twice. In many cases I couldn't remember how to write the capital cursive letter for my middle and last name.
TL;DR: I am 38 and completely sympathize with your nephew. I can't sign my name either.
Re: Penmanship
#96Earlier quoted context omitted.
Great point about muscle memory, I found it fascinating to learn Spencerian as it kind of distills the essence of writing to a surprisingly low number of forms (7 or 8 I think?), a kind of local optimum for Latin-based cursive. The hardest thing for me to learn about it, with which I still struggle, is keeping the arm posture correct and using the upper, rather than lower, part of the arm for control. I also found it…
> The hardest thing for me to learn about it, with which I still struggle, is keeping the arm posture correct. It’s great that you recognize this handicap as dealing with it sooner rather than later is a good; bad posture is indeed harder to correct later as we know. The first measure you can take is course correcting yourself over shorter intervals i.e. Move The Paper towards yourself with no shame, even during the…
> If this is true
arctan( 11 / 8.5 )Re: Penmanship
#97Every couple years, I'll adjust my doodling habits to a set of patterns based on a simplification of the Palmer method. This simple doodling practice has given me the best handwriting at just about every place I've worked in the past ten years. Draw two horizontal lines about half an inch apart and in the space between them doodle one of: + continuous clockwise stream of overlapping circles (imagine you flattened a s…
Qualifications: former professional penman, focusing specifically on American Penmanship from ~1860-1920. Spencerian script, and the Palmer method both fall into this time period.
> If you start doodling these figures when you're bored on zoom, your penmanship will magically improve
I find this sentiment common, particularly amongst people who learned penmanship "recently". It is incorrect.
A brief interlude--When I was in middle school I resisted learning cursive. My teachers would tell me that drawing little circles and lines would make my penmanship better. I asked why, but they didn't know. Their teachers told them it was true, so now they're telling me it's true.
Push pulls and oval drills will only improve your penmanship if:
1. You practice them "correctly"
2. Your write in a style that is applicable to the drills you've practiced
Happy to answer any clarifying questions regarding cursive or penmanship.
Below are some of my favorite references in business penmanship.
[0] https://archive.org/details/ChampionMethodOfPracticalBusines...
[1] https://archive.org/details/armmovementmetho00zane
[2] https://archive.org/details/MillsModernBusinessPenmanship
Re: Penmanship
#98Earlier quoted context omitted.
Something like this [0], but don't worry about the counting, just doodle the patterns [0] https://fcmdsc.files.wordpress.com/2010/06/exercises.jpg
is the "italic" style slanting deliberate and required?
Most English language handwriting has an up-and-to-the-right tilt. Architects will frequently adopt a precisely vertical style but it tends to feel cold and impersonal (or perhaps just unfamiliar as most writing does have a bit of slant to it). I suspect it's a bit like the serif vs sans serif debate. People generally prefer the look of sans serif fonts but they read farther into and retain contents better when the font has serifs (first measured in the 1950's and first discussed broadly in Ogilvy On Advertising, the book that most of Mad Men season one's plot points were based on). Straight up and down seems like it would be best, but for whatever reason hundreds of years of practice have retained that small angle as the preferred style.
Re: Penmanship
#99Earlier quoted context omitted.
Something like this [0], but don't worry about the counting, just doodle the patterns [0] https://fcmdsc.files.wordpress.com/2010/06/exercises.jpg
is the "italic" style slanting deliberate and required?
Yes and yes!
It's due to the way penmanship was written. Consider the arm position [0] of proper penmanship. The page is at an angle to the left, such that it is similar to the angle of your forearm on the page. Pivoting at the elbow allows you to swing your arm from the left side of the page to the right. The forward slant allows you to always be moving "forwards" as you write across the page.
I hope that was clear. Please feel free to ask clarifying questions if not.
[0] https://archive.org/details/armmovementmetho00zane/page/12/m...
Re: Penmanship
#100Earlier quoted context omitted.
Likewise! And if you've yet to try a Vanishing Point or a Decimo, you've got a pleasant surprise in store, I think - I've found them nearly perfect for work notes in particular thanks to their speed and ease of one-handed operation. (The Vanishing Point was admittedly a little too big and heavy for comfort, but a Decimo has the same nib and mechanism in a lighter, narrower body. Looks a lot more elegant, too, with th…
The Decimo is a great form factor, it's also just about the most inconspicuous fountain pen possible so you won't get weird looks from people who've never seen a fountain pen before. That said I have one as well as a Custom 74, both in EF, and somehow I like the 74 a lot more in that size. The Decimo nib seems finer and is noticeably softer (18k vs 14k), and I'd prefer it with a medium nib for maximum smoothness. I t…
The award for utilitarian and timeless has to go to the Lamy 2000.
The Safari is very good as a starter (though I'm partial to the Pilot Metropolitan or TWSBI Eco for starters). I don't have experience with the Kaweco Sport, though I hear only good things.