How I Learned to Write

Handwriting should be legible, beautiful, and rapid—in precisely that order. Legibility is always the first consideration. Rapidity is useless without it, and beauty nearly impossible.

My wife, who is responsible for most of the good things that happen to me, complained for years that she couldn’t read my handwriting. In general, I’m too lazy to improve myself; but since I’m supposed to be a writer, after all, there was a matter of pride involved here. Eventually it got to me. I decided that I should learn to write all over again: I’d fix my handwriting so she could read it.

I could, of course, have simply improved my handwriting as it was then, which was a sort of hasty printing, but I found that I didn’t really like it well enough to put any real work into it. But I had always admired beautiful cursive penmanship.

So I bought an old copy book from before the Civil War, and I started to teach myself to write that way. I spent hours a day writing, and I never allowed myself a relapse into my old style of handwriting. Since I happened to be working on a book at the time, I had good reason to be writing for hours. I kept at it until my new way of writing was the way I wrote without thinking about how I was writing, and I couldn’t really remember how to do it the old way.

Now my writing seems to amaze people. If I write a check, it gets passed around carefully like some sort of rare artifact. Perfect strangers can’t keep themselves from remarking on my writing when they see me working on something.

And my wife still can’t read it. I learned too late that it was handwriting in general, not mine in particular, that she couldn’t interpret.

But I don’t regret anything. It’s a real joy to be able to do anything well, and I suppose that makes all my work worthwhile, even if I never accomplished what I set out to do.

Cheap Paper

Everyone who cares about writing has a favorite paper. Good paper is worth spending something more on: it makes writing easier in any number of ways. It takes ink in a predictable way; the pen glides across it without snagging or skipping. Using liquid ink, either with a steel pen or with a fountain pen, makes more demands on your paper than writing with a ballpoint pen or pencil does.

I appreciate good paper. I also use quite a lot of paper. It’s a rare day when I don’t go through at least ten sheets of some paper or other, because it’s my job to write, after all. Even that minimal figure adds up to seven reams of paper in a year, which is (as I said) quite a lot. That gives me a strong motivation to seek out not just good paper, but good cheap paper.

Is there such a thing? Well, if you’re a big fan of Clairefontaine paper, for example, you’re not going to find anything as good as that. It is, however, perfectly possible to find good paper for less than a penny a sheet—paper that’s kind to your pen, that won’t feather the ink, and that makes your writing look good.

My first general rule in looking for good cheap paper—and I hope it isn’t offensively unpatriotic—is to avoid paper made in the United States. Most cheap American paper hates liquid ink. I don’t know why, but I suspect it’s because very few Americans write with pen and ink. They write with ballpoints, or gel pens, or rollerballs—all of which are less demanding of a paper’s surface.

My second general rule is to look for paper made in Asia. Fountain pens seem to be ubiquitous in China, so a paper that won’t stand up to them will be noticed. Probably the manager of the mill will be shot, which is as it should be. Taiwanese paper is also usually excellent; paper from Indonesia or India is often very good.

Hardbound composition books are often made with better paper than other kinds of notebooks. Dollar stores are good sources of composition books from Asia. I’ve been disappointed by store-brand composition books from office-supply superstores, but dollar-store composition books almost always take ink well. The paper may be a bit thin, and you may want to write on only one side (which is what I usually do anyway), but a penny a sheet is still a good price—especially when you compare it to that expensive French paper. And even a cheap composition book is hard to destroy.

The best time to look for cheap paper is in August, when the big discount stores back-to-school sales. Their strategy seems to be to advertise basic school supplies at ridiculously low prices, hoping you’ll stay in the store to buy something more profitable, like diamond-studded sneakers. Last August I stocked up on hardbound composition books for the year at 25¢ each, along with wirebound notebooks at 15¢ each. 

How do I know whether that cheap loss-leader paper will be at all friendly to my pen and ink? I don’t. It’s a gamble. I always plan two trips: one to spend a dollar or two on samples, and one to fill a basket with the things I liked. I do that every year, even if I recognize the brands. At the bottom end of the market, there is no loyalty to suppliers: every brand will switch as often as it takes to get the best deal. Last year’s perfect Taiwanese notebook may be this year’s mediocre Brazilian notebook, though the cover looks exactly the same.

Still, with very little effort, you can find cheap paper that’s pretty good for pen and ink. It won’t match the expensive French stuff. But if you use a lot of paper, it won’t drain your bank account quite as fast.

 

Whither Cursive?

I wonder about the future of cursive handwriting. And I wonder how much I care. I’m just not sure what to think.

The demise of cursive penmanship seems to be well under way. According to one figure, which must be accurate because I found it on the Internet, 80% of high-school students in the United States print when you ask them to write something. I did when I was in high school, so I certainly can’t fault anyone else who does.

Writing is as much subject to fashion as any other art. The common cursive hand of Shakespeare’s time is quite different from the cursive of the Declaration of Independence, to take a well-known example from the 1700s. After that, development seems to have slowed down for a while. Most people who can read modern cursive have little trouble with the Declaration of Independence; few who are not specialists can read Elizabethan cursive. So if the knowledge of a whole style of handwriting disappears completely from the realm of the general public, it won’t be the first time.

Perhaps the most interesting question to ask is why we seem to be losing our cursive. I don’t think we can come up with one single answer to that question. There are many reasons—many forces pushing cursive handwriting aside in English. They’ve been at work for some time now.

Certainly the writing machine—first typewriter and then word processor—was one of the strongest forces. As long as all commercial and official writing was done by hand, good penmanship was an obvious professional requirement. If you should be called upon to represent the firm in correspondence, would the firm be happy if you scribbled like a six-year-old? But once professional correspondence was done by machine, bad handwriting was no barrier to living your own Horatio Alger success story. The typewriter took care of all our official correspondence. In social correspondence, there was still a demand for handwriting, since it was (and still is) considered bad form to type a social note; but social correspondence was (and still is) left largely to women, which meant, as a corollary, that it was unimportant to men. Handwriting was therefore mostly for personal use: it composed lists and reminders, not letters and manuscripts. If it was legible to the writer, it was good enough. The schoolteacher who told her class that good penmanship was essential to success in life might rightly be dismissed, at least by the boys in her class, as behind the times.

Next on the list of the assassins of cursive penmanship must be the penmanship peddlers themselves. Fashions in writing change, and it is usually obvious to those happy moderns who follow the latest fashion that the previous fashion was objectively wrong. (This of course is hardly limited to writing; we may call it a general law of fashion.) There is always a certain amount of theoretical justification in any penmanship text, and most of it is humbug. But toward the end of the nineteenth century penmanship methods became really belligerently scientific, which is to say that the theoretical humbug, which until then had been employed in justifying the current fashion, was for the first time actually allowed to shape the letters. Methods of penmanship were promoted according to their supposed effects on posture, or their legibility, as deduced from supposedly scientific principles. The one outstanding feature of all these scientific principles was their complete lack of any real science: they were never based on any organized system of experiment and observation, but always (like most educational theories) on bald assertions of what must be so.

The effect of these supposedly scientific theories on the teaching of writing was quick and profound. It is probably safe to say that there was more difference between the school penmanship of 1870 and 1900 than between that of 1670 and that of 1870. “Vertical writing,” a slantless system that must, by all the (made-up) laws of physics and anatomy, lead to better posture, was preached with the fervor of a religious revival. It infected the famous McGuffey’s Readers, which are still justifiably much in demand among homeschoolers, where it was used for the slate exercises. Even the more conservative Palmer Method is strikingly different from the previously popular Spenserian Method, which bore a surprisingly close resemblance to the eighteenth-century cursive of the Declaration of Independence. And I think most impartial observers would agree that, in spite of all their scientific claims, these newfangled scientific methods of penmanship were considerably less legible than the cursive of the Declaration of Independence. At any rate, it was in the twentieth century that “please print” became a standard instruction on forms—a tacit admission that the average person’s cursive was considerably less legible than his printing. In the 1800s, it would have been a gross insult to any literate person to suggest that he print like a schoolboy.

One simple example of the changes that swept through the world of penmanship a century ago is in the relative heights of the letters. In penmanship manuals of the middle 1800s, a small a is a third, or sometimes a quarter, the height of a small b. This seems, when you think about it, to be a monstrous extension of the ascenders, serving no purpose and therefore to be deprecated in any rational system of handwriting. The scientific handwriting methods of the turn of the twentieth century make the small letters half the size of the capitals, which is perfectly rational. Most subsequent methods have adopted this eminently scientific proportion. 

Yet the old unscientific and irrational proportion is, to my eye, much more legible. I think I know the reason: the tall ascenders create an empty space between the lines that makes it easier to distinguish each line. This wasn’t the result of some theory: the older writers based their proportions on what looked good to their eyes. The theorists based their proportions on what must be right, and—to my eye—got them wrong. It almost goes without saying that the theorists also deprecated all shading, flourishes, and ornamental capitals as useless and therefore bad. Some of them even reproduced pages of stunningly beautiful penmanship to show what ought not to be done.

When beauty is no longer a goal, we have lost one of the chief attractions of good handwriting, which is the aesthetic pleasure of it. We fall back on necessity—but necessity has already been eliminated by the keyboard.

What’s left?

Well, there’s compulsion. I will learn cursive handwriting if I am forced to learn cursive handwriting. But I will not learn it well. If a skill appears to be of no use to me and brings me no joy, I’ll abandon it as soon as I can do so without consequences. This is what the great majority of students do today with the cursive they were taught in elementary school, and who can blame them?

Now we find a considerable movement to abandon traditional cursive writing altogether in our schools, replacing it with an italic hand inspired by the calligraphy of the Italian Renaissance. Considering the dismal quality of most cursive handwriting, this italic stuff can only be an improvement. Written with a stub pen, it could potentially be very beautiful. It can also evolve into a sort of cursive hand, if for some reason that seems desirable. But most students will probably end up sticking with pure disconnected italic.

That brings us back to our first question: if cursive handwriting is really becoming extinct, is that necessarily a bad thing? I don’t know the answer. I can see both sides.

On the one hand, replacing the ugly and illegible cursive that has been the norm lately with a beautiful and legible italic would doubtless be an improvement in almost every way. Aside from the practical benefits, it could restore the aesthetic pleasure of writing.

On the other hand, people who never learn cursive are cut off from a large part of the past. Old letters become mysterious hieroglyphics, as illegible as Linear A. If you have no old letters or diaries in your family, perhaps you don’t care about that. I care because my family has boxes of useless old things.

So I don’t know what to think about the fate of cursive. And I suppose it doesn’t matter what I think, any more than it matters what I think of whether it rains tomorrow.

 

 

The Steel Pen

Out there in the great ethereal regions of the Internet you can find countless sites and forums and blogs devoted to the lore of the fountain pen, which is a marvelous instrument for laying ink on paper, and perhaps the second-best thing that ever happened to the art of writing. I respectfully disagree with the many voices on the Web that would proclaim the fountain pen the king of all writing instruments. That honor I reserve for the steel pen.

Because I suspect that a good many even among fountain-pen users have never written with a steel pen, I’ll start by describing what a steel pen is. A steel pen (they can also be made of other metals) is that little metal nib you stick in the end of a pen holder and dip in an inkwell. Steel pens are still standard items in art-supply stores, where they’re sold as drawing or calligraphy nibs; but until the 1960s, they were the standard pen everyone learned to use at school for ordinary writing.

The steel pen began as an artificial feather. Up to the 1830s or so, a pen was a goose or turkey feather, with the tip carefully shaped with a “pen knife.” Learning to cut a good pen was an important part of learning to write. Steel pens, on the other hand, could be made by the millions, each one exactly like all the others of that sort. It quickly became obvious that—just as with feather pens—minor differences in shape produced major differences in the writing, and the various makers each sold a vast range of pens to suit every writing style. No matter how many different nibs your favorite fountain-pen maker offers, it’s a poor selection when you compare it to the enormous variety of pens every steel-pen maker offered.

This variety is one of the great charms of the world of steel pens. Do you like an italic hand, with thick downstrokes on every letter? Pick a stub nib. For smooth, even strokes, pick a ball-pointed pen (which of course is nothing like a modern ballpoint). Flexible nibs will give you precise control over the width of every part of every stroke; firm nibs will make a carbon copy; and so on.

Most of these kinds of nibs are sold for fountain pens, but the fountain-pen versions are poor imitations. No “flexible” nib on a fountain pen is anywhere near as flexible as even a fairly ordinary steel pen. Fine-point steel pens make a line finer than anything a fountain pen could ever manage—which is the main reason artists still rely on them for drawing.

Fountain pens are simply steel pens made portable with a complicated and rather clumsy apparatus for storing and feeding the ink. I love fountain pens, and I spend a good bit of my working day writing with one. But I recognize the sacrifices a fountain pen makes for the sake of portability. If I’m at my desk, I’ll use the steel pen. The fountain pen will never be anything more than almost as good.

An Introduction to Ink

If you use either a fountain pen or a steel pen, chances are good that you don’t know anyone else who does, at least not personally. Yet there are probably more kinds of ink within easy reach now than there were in the days when everyone used liquid ink.

I credit the Internet, which allows a small business to find widely scattered customers who together make up a profitable niche market. We might also credit the shrinking of the market for ink, which by a curious quirk of capitalism may actually lead to more variety. When ink was a standard commodity that everyone bought, the market was naturally dominated by a few manufacturers who made a few colors and kinds of ink in enormous quantities. But when ink cannot be sold on that scale, the advantage passes to whoever can appeal best to that small cabal of fanatical connoisseurs who make up the remainder of the market. It’s surely no accident that, of the companies now making ink for fountain pens, a large number offer a dizzying array of colors.

At any rate, you have the pen, and you want some ink, and the choices are bewildering. How do you choose?

Etiquette. Etiquette has at least one suggestion here. For formal correspondence, only two colors are considered proper: black and blue-black. If you’re writing for yourself, of course, there are no limits.

Fountain pens. If you have a fountain pen, you need ink for fountain pens. Unless the ink is made especially for fountain pens, it will probably clog. Since fountain pens are where the action is in the ink business, you’re not restricting your choices that much. You can probably regard all the standard brands as safe for your pen, except the drawing and calligraphy inks in art-supply stores, which I would avoid until I’d made some experiments with a really cheap pen, even if they say “for fountain pens” right on the bottle.

Steel pens. Steel pens can write with nearly anything, but be aware that some inks may eat pens. 

India ink and similar permanent black inks, which can kill a fountain pen at ten paces, work well with steel pens, but they coat the pen with crusty black soot, making it useless for anything else. If you have a gross of the same pen, the sacrifice of one pen to India ink doesn’t amount to much, and it does have advantages. India ink is wonderfully black, the blackest black you can imagine. A line of India ink on a white page is like a rip in the universe through which you can see the blackness of eternity. Black holes are simply balls of India ink let loose in the universe to suck up all the light.

You can use fountain-pen ink with a steel pen, but it may be harder to handle if you’re not used to writing the steel-pen way. You need a light touch at first, or you’ll have nothing but blots all over the page. Some inks go well with certain pens, and others with others, and the only way to know is to experiment. The good thing about fountain-pen ink is that you can just wipe it off with a rag, and the pen will be ready to dip in some other ink.

There are also all the drawing and calligraphy inks at the art store, many of which are cheaper per ounce than fountain-pen ink. My favorite right now is Walnut Drawing Ink by Tom Norton Designs, a walnut-colored ink that seems to give me better control over “shading”—the relative thickness of the lines—than any other ink I’ve tried. It’s cheap, and you can find it at almost any art-supply store.

This will do for an introduction to ink. There’s much more to be said about particular kinds of ink, of course, and much more will be said. But I have one piece of general advice from my own limited experience. Experiment widely, and revisit your experiments. As your writing develops and changes, the ink you rejected as unworkable a year ago may turn into your favorite. It’s happened to me more than once.

 

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