But please for heaven's sake do not consider great handwriting to be a sign of intelligence or greatness as a value in itself. This sort of thing destroys kids in their early days. During my days in school(In India). Good handwriting was considered a mandatory trait of good, brilliant and hard working students. Any body who didn't have good hand writing was automatically considered a bad student.
The net result was kids with genuine brilliance, appetite for hard work but with a bad handwriting struggled. Some times forced to imitate their class mates in a bad way. I was a big victim of it. In fact the head mistress called my mom and told her, every thing was brilliant about me and if only I could have great handwriting I could score higher than everybody else. The worst part of it was I took it seriously, I had convinced myself no matter how hardworking or intelligent I was I didn't deserve to score well as I didn't have a good handwriting.
It was not until a couple of years later. During my pre university days. My uncle cleared my mind of all this. He convinced me that good handwriting discipline is nothing great in itself. Although its good to have one. But greatness lies in what you write and not how you write it.
Later I developed how to write in script with separate letters without joining them as in cursive writing. It greatly increased readability. But people around me used to find that strange and some even suicidal for a student.
Its basically what Leo Tolstoy said:
What a strange illusion it is to suppose that beauty is goodness.
I was told off repeatedly - and my parents told - about my poor handwriting, my tendency to "rush" work, and even that I went to the toilet too often. Of course, the reality was that I was bored and the teacher was a vindictive fool.
I remember saying to my mum at 8: "I'm worried about my 's'es", and she said "it's hardly likely you'll be sacked from a job because of your 's'es is it?".
Not exactly an issue as I sit here and type this is it?
Mind you, the one thing i did do when i got a chance, was to do a typing course meant for secretarys as I knew i'd have to type.
theres instead of theirs, secretarys instead of secretaries and none of your I's are uppercase as they're supposed to be.
Think of it more like painting and drawing.
What makes it worse is the visual appeal and they way it can be preserved over the years.
"Bad handwriting is a sign of imperfect education." - Gandhi
"But though I was none the worse for having neglected exercise, I am still paying the penalty of another neglect. I do not know whence I got the notion that good handwriting was not a necessary part of education, but I retained it until I went to England. When later, especially in South Africa, I saw the beautiful handwriting of lawyers and young men born and educated in South Africa, I was ashamed of myself and repented of my neglect. I saw that bad handwriting should be regarded as a sign of an imperfect education. I tried later to improve mine, but it was too late. I could never repair the neglect of my youth. Let every young man and woman be warned by my example, and understand that good handwriting is a necessary part of education. I am now of opinion that children should first be taught the art of drawing before learning how to write. Let the child learn his letters by observation as he does different objects, such as flowers, birds, etc., and let him learn handwriting only after he has learnt to draw objects. He will then write a beautifully formed hand."
If Gandhi says 'Bad handwriting is a sign of imperfect education.' Evaluators correcting the exam papers may think anybody with a bad handwriting is a poor student discarding the content of what he has written.
Sometimes people just go by the trends. Times have changed a lot since Gandhi. These days non-violence is taken as a sign of cowardice, during Gandhi's time it was considered a sign of perseverance, patience and taking on the enemy with moral courage and ultimately defeating him by mere Kindness and courtesy.
Do you suppose that means that Gandhi deliberately wrote this letter with his left hand?
When his right hand got tired, he wrote with the left.
His left-hand writing was more legible.
Also many programmers like working out problems on paper first before firing up the editor.
We do a lot of writing but of a different kind. We don't write essays, stories and records of historical events. But we definitely scribble a lot of symbol manipulation stuff.
my signature(which has now become a symbol more than my name in cursive)
To which my grandfather replied: "you had to write like that with a fountain pen"
I've never used a fountain pen, but I gather you have to maintain a fairly constant speed as the pen moves along the paper. If you want that handwriting back, I think you have to get rid of ball-point pens and pencils. Although while pretty handwriting is nice, I'm not convinced its worth the time to learn. (Which isn't to say legible handwriting isn't worth learning)
Regarding the ball-point pen, when I switched to it, I had to write fast, so the writing might have deteriorated from both the speed and the tool.
We now know a lot more, about what this does to a child's brain, but then, teachers just believed to be right.
One day he told us about this. And said that the result was that he could write with both hands. Different things. He demonstrated. Wrote with both hands at once, different things, on 2 neighboring boards. Kept on writing. Got to the bottom of the boards. Then turned around, began lecturing from the first board, reached the bottom, and continued the lecture from the second. He had laid out the boards perfectly to do this.
It was a very impressive party trick.
In a gradual shift toward ambidexterity, I've found that questioning society's insistence on 'right-ness' can be enlightening...
edit spellchecker : left handed scribes became left handed scones. The history of heavy baked goods in the development of human civilisation has been scandalously neglected by a blinkered academic community.
I'm not sure if that's really the cause. Furthermore in many ancient scripts the direction was quite unimportant, in some cases even reverting in each line (Boustrophedon).
Interesting take on direction of writing: http://shkrobius.livejournal.com/292987.html
I have a vintage Parker 51 and some oldish German pens. Modern Japanese pens are quite good though nibs can be narrow for Western taste.
You get splotches everywhere and they often dry up for no apparent reason.
Cursive handwriting (combined with often poor microfilm or fiche photography) was an occupational hazard, he got fairly good at interpreting some documents but it might take him the better part of an afternoon to transcribe 4 or 5 pages of journal entries from some documents.
I'd like to get that back somehow.