"About six months ago, I realised that I had no idea what the
handwriting of a good friend of mine looked like. I had known him for
over a decade, but somehow we had never communicated using handwritten
notes. He had left voice messages for me, emailed me, sent text messages
galore. But I don't think I had ever had a letter from him written by
hand, a postcard from his holidays, a reminder of something pushed
through my letter box. I had no idea whether his handwriting was bold or
crabbed, sloping or upright, italic or rounded, elegant or slapdash.
It hit me that we are at a moment when handwriting seems to be
about to vanish from our lives altogether. At some point in recent
years, it has stopped being a necessary and inevitable intermediary
between people – a means by which individuals communicate with each
other, putting a little bit of their personality into the form of their
message as they press the ink-bearing point on to the paper. It has
started to become just one of many options, and often an unattractive,
elaborate one.
For each of us, the act of putting marks on paper
with ink goes back as far as we can probably remember. At some point,
somebody comes along and tells us that if you make a rounded shape and
then join it to a straight vertical line, that means the letter "a",
just like the ones you see in the book. (But the ones in the book have a
little umbrella over the top, don't they? Never mind that, for the
moment: this is how we make them for ourselves.) If you make a different
rounded shape, in the opposite direction, and a taller vertical line,
then that means the letter "b". Do you see? And then a rounded shape, in
the same direction as the first letter, but not joined to anything –
that makes a "c". And off you go.
Actually, I don't think I have
any memory of this initial introduction to the art of writing letters on
paper. Our handwriting, like ourselves, seems always to have been
there.
But if I don't have any memory of first learning to write, I
have a clear memory of what followed: instructions in refinements,
suggestions of how to purify the forms of your handwriting.
You
longed to do "joined-up writing", as we used to call the cursive hand
when we were young. Instructed in print letters, I looked forward to the
ability to join one letter to another as a mark of huge sophistication.
Adult handwriting was unreadable, true, but perhaps that was its point.
I saw the loops and impatient dashes of the adult hand as a secret and
untrustworthy way of communicating that one day I would master.
There
was, also, wanting to make your handwriting more like other people's.
Often, this started with a single letter or figure. In the second year
at school, our form teacher had a way of writing a 7 in the European
way, with a cross-bar. A world of glamour and sophistication hung on
that cross-bar; it might as well have had a beret on, be smoking Gitanes
in the maths cupboard.
Your hand is formed by aspiration to the
hand of others – by the beautiful italic strokes of a friend which seem
altogether wasted on a mere postcard, or a note on your door reading
"Dropped by – will come back later". It's formed, too, by
anti-aspiration, the desire not to be like Denise in the desk behind who
reads with her mouth open and whose writing, all bulging "m"s and
looping "p"s, contains the atrocity of a little circle on top of every
i. Or still more horrible, on occasion, usually when she signs her name,
a heart. (There may be men in the world who use a heart-shaped jot, as
the dot over the i is called, but I have yet to meet one. Or run a mile
from one.)
These attempts to modify ourselves through our
handwriting become a part of who we are. So too do the rituals and
pleasurable pieces of small behaviour attached to writing with a pen. On
a finger of my right hand, just on the joint, there is a callus which
has been there for 40 years, where my pen rests. I used to call it "my
carbuncle". "Turn right" someone would say, and I would feel the hard
little lump, like a leather pad, ink-stained, which showed what side
that was on. And between words or sentences, to encourage thought, I
might give it a small, comforting rub with my thumb.
In the same
way, you could call up exactly the right word by pen-chewing, an
entertainment which every different pen contributed to in its own way.
The clear-cased plastic ballpoint, the Bic Cristal, had a plug you could
work free with your teeth and discard, or spit competitive distances.
The casing was the perfect shape to turn into an Amazonian blowpipe for
spitting wet paper at your enemies.
Our rituals and sensory
engagement with the pen bind us to it. The other ways in which we write
nowadays don't bind us in the same way. Like everyone else, I write a
lot on a computer, and have done for more than 20 years. I can identify
the exact moment of my transition from writing with pen on paper to
using a keyboard. It was when I submitted the first chapter of my PhD to
my supervisor at Cambridge University, in 1987. I had handwritten it,
not affectedly, but just because that was how I had always written
essays. He marked it, sighed, handed it back and said: "In future, could
you just type your work?" I did so, graduating inevitably from
typewriter to computer. But in all that time, I haven't yet evolved many
warm sensations towards the object, being unable to suck it or regard
it as a direct extension of my being, like a pen. The pen has been with
us for so many millennia that it seems not just warm but almost alive,
like another finger: "The moving finger writes, and having writ, moves
on," Omar Khayyám writes in Edward FitzGerald's translation, and everyone knows what is meant.
Those
other writing apparatuses, mobile phones, occupy a little bit more of
the same psychological space as the pen. Ten years ago, people kept
their mobile phone in their pockets. Now, they hold them permanently in
their hand like a small angry animal, gazing crossly into our faces, in
apparent need of constant placation. Clearly, people do regard their
mobile phones as, in some degree, an extension of themselves. And yet we
have not evolved any of those small, pleasurable pieces of behaviour
towards them that seem so ordinary in the case of our pens. If you saw
someone sucking one while they thought of the next phrase to text, you
would think them dangerously insane.
We have surrendered our
handwriting for something more mechanical, less distinctively human,
less telling about ourselves and less present in our moments of the
highest happiness and the deepest emotion. Ink runs in our veins, and
shows the world what we are like. The shaping of thought and written
language by a pen, moved by a hand to register marks of ink on paper,
has for centuries, millennia, been regarded as key to our existence as
human beings. In the past, handwriting has been regarded as almost the
most powerful sign of our individuality. In 1847, in an American case, a
witness testified without hesitation that a signature was genuine,
though he had not seen an example of the handwriting for 63 years: the
court accepted his testimony.
Handwriting is what registers our
individuality, and the mark which our culture has made on us. It has
been seen as the unknowing key to our souls and our innermost nature. It
has been regarded as a sign of our health as a society, of our
intelligence, and as an object of simplicity, grace, fantasy and beauty
in its own right. Yet at some point, the ordinary pleasures and dignity
of handwriting are going to be replaced permanently.
The question
is: should we even care? Should we accept that handwriting is a skill
whose time has now passed, or does it carry with it a value that can
never truly be superseded by the typed word? Sometimes, however, it does
matter in the most brutal economic or human sense. This has been true
even before the invention of the internet transformed everything. American Demographics
claimed that bad handwriting skills were costing American business
$200m in 1994. Thirty-eight million unreadable letters couldn't be
delivered. Kodak said that 400,000 rolls of films couldn't be returned
because names and addresses were illegible. Does it still matter now
that there is no film-development industry any more and not so many
hand-addressed envelopes to misread? Well, in 2000, a US court awarded
$450,000 to the family of a Texas man who died after a pharmacist
misread the doctor's handwritten prescription. In a 2005 Scottish case,
the court heard that the handwriting of a staff nurse called Fiona
Thomson in Airdrie, Lanarkshire was so appalling that a colleague
misread an instruction to give four units of insulin for 40. The
patient, Moira Pullar, died, and the nurses and hospital were savagely criticised by the judge at the inquest.
Repeated
anecdotal evidence suggests, however, that few people now believe that
handwriting is something that ought to be improved in the interests of
communication. What does it matter if your aunt's birthday card gets
lost in the post? All these cases are arguments for the printed
prescription, ordering everything over the internet with typed details,
never setting pen to paper.
In this world, we understand that
people will write exclusively on keyboards. When such people are forced,
by rare circumstance, to write a letter by hand, do we forgive the ugly
confusion on paper made by those who have taken the decision, or had
the decision forced on them, not to write by hand any more? Some recent
public episodes suggest that this isn't yet the case. We seem to believe
both that handwriting doesn't matter, since everyone types, and that
when people do write a handwritten letter, it ought to be elegant,
graceful and well practised.
A Grenadier Guardsman, Jamie Janes,
was killed in Afghanistan by a bomb on 5 October 2009. In the days
following his death, the then prime minister, Gordon Brown, wrote to
Jamie's mother. When Mrs Janes received the letter, she, horrified, took
it straight to the newspapers. Brown had written the letter in his
usual felt-tip pen. It was filled with spelling mistakes which gave the
impression that it was dashed off in haste, without much care – "Dear
Mrs James, It is with the greatst of sadness that I write to offer you
and you family my personal condolencs on the death of your son, Jamie. I
hear from colleagus…" Perhaps still more frightening was Brown's
handwriting, which not many people, probably, had seen. It leant
backwards; it was printed and joined randomly; there were no real
upstrokes or downstrokes. It was not, people said, the handwriting of an
educated man.
This was deeply unfair. Brown, as was only half-known at the time and rarely alluded to, was not far from partially sighted.
He clearly knew how "condolence" and "colleague" were spelled. This was
the letter of someone who had great difficulty in writing by hand for
good medical reasons. The poor man was obliged to phone the indignant
mother, and turn the whole episode into a discussion of his
near-blindness.
Nevertheless, the Brown episode shows that,
sometimes, we expect people to write well. In certain circumstances, we
deplore bad writing: the bad, ugly, illiterate, ill-formed writing of
someone who has never practised writing, never considered that it might
be a duty to write in ways which people can read and take some pleasure
from. If we expect good writing on elevated occasions, is it not
reasonable to expect people to write reasonably well all the time? It is
not reasonable to think that people can write terribly, illegibly badly
almost all the time and then elevate their handwriting for special
purposes. Sometimes, it clearly matters a good deal.
I've come to the conclusion that
handwriting is good for us. It involves us in a relationship with the
written word that is sensuous, immediate and individual. It opens our
personality out to the world, and gives us a means of reading other
people. It gives pleasure when you communicate with it. No one is ever
going to recommend that we surrender the convenience and speed of
electronic communications to pen and paper. Though it would make no
sense to give up the clarity and authority of print which is available
to anyone with a keyboard, to continue to diminish the place of the
handwritten in our lives is to diminish, in a small but real way, our
humanity.
In all sorts of areas of our life, we enhance the
quality of our lives by going for the slow option, the path which takes a
little bit of effort. Sometimes, we don't spend an evening watching Kim
Kardashian falling over on YouTube: we read a book. Sometimes, we don't
just push a pre- prepared meal into the oven and take it out some time
later. We chop and prepare vegetables; we follow a recipe, and we make
dinner from scratch, with pleasure. We often do this because we love
people, and think they are worthy of our effort from time to time.
Sometimes we don't get in a car and get to where we have to go as soon
as we possibly can. We open our front doors, and go for a walk in the
spring sunshine and feel better for it.
Perhaps that is the way to
get handwriting back into our lives – as something which is a pleasure,
which is good for us, and which is human in ways not all communication
systems manage to be. It will never again have the place in people's
lives that it had in 1850. But it should, like good food or the capacity
to take a walk, have some place in our lives from which it is not going
to be dislodged. I want to know what people are like from their
handwriting – friends, intimates, acquaintances, strangers, and people I
can never and will never meet. I want everyone to maintain an intimate
and unique connection with words and ink and paper and the movement of
hand and arm. I want people to write, not on special occasions,
but daily.
It seems to be a losing battle. I hear, in talking to
people, the claim that they "never write anything" these days. The
unconsidered movement away from handwriting is gathering pace, without
anyone really deciding to stop. I don't believe that it needs to be like
this. We can let handwriting maintain a special place in our lives, if
we choose. If someone we knew died, I think most of us would still write
our letters of condolences on paper, with a pen.
And perhaps
there are other occasions when we still have a choice whether to write
with pen and paper or with electronic means, and we should make the
right, human choice. I dream of creating a space every day where we
write with pen on paper, whether for ourselves or to communicate with
other people. I think we would feel happier about ourselves, and I think
we would feel more secure in our relationships with those around us.
Here are some small suggestions of ways in which we could reintroduce
handwriting back into our lives.
1 Handwriting should be taught in schools
This seems obvious. Yet a study in 2006,
carried out by London University's Institute of Education, discovered
that fewer than half of British primary schools set time aside in a week
to teach handwriting. Too much time has been spent discussing what
letter forms are best for children to learn. In my opinion, it hardly
matters.
2 Enjoy your own handwriting
Start from the good psychic point that you can always value it, because it has so much of you in it.
3 Rediscover the joy of writing by hand, all for yourself
Go
and find some writing equipment – a 15p Bic Cristal pen, one black, one
red (let's say). Get a couple of pencils – a soft 2B pencil, a hard 2H.
A fountain pen, a felt-tip pen, preferably in a garish colour –
anything else you can think of. Get some paper – cheap, shiny, ordinary,
handmade, recycled, writing paper, nothing remarkable. Just write on
it, one sheet after the other.
4 Play with your letterforms
Do
you like your handwriting? If not, do something about it. Whose
handwriting do you like? Copy it. The other day I was overcome with
jealousy at the terrific swoop and hook of a friend's y, and promptly
started trying it out on paper. It looked completely absurd. Doesn't
matter. Your handwriting is a living thing, or should be – if it looks
the same as it did 10 years ago, even, do something about it. Mix it up a
bit. After all, do you still have the same haircut that you did 10
years ago?
5 When you go to the supermarket, make a shopping list with a pen on a scrap of paper
Write
notes on the kitchen corkboard; enjoy the sensuous pre-Gutenberg
quality of the scribbled reminder, to yourself, to your nearest and
dearest, to the cleaner. Make lists by hand. Keep a small volume for
thoughts and observations, small enough to keep in a pocket or a coat.
Great for passing reflections, ideas, plans, recording idle wonderings.
There's really nothing nicer than looking back through a notebook full
of a year's casual thoughts. I personally don't keep a diary, but who
could doubt that a diary, written by hand, is a million times nicer than
a bloody blog?
6 Write to other people
Write
to people you love, people you like, people you work with. Write
postcards. When you go somewhere remotely interesting – when you drop
into the National Gallery, when you have a nice day out, when you go
away for a weekend or an overnight – find some postcards and send
three to your mum and dad, your siblings and nieces, your significant
other, your best friend or that old friend you haven't seen for a while.
What could be better than to know that you'll be the only nice thing in
your old friend's postal delivery that day? Write to your husband or
wife or children and tell them that you love them. It will have a lot
more impact than a text message.
Here is a story about
how handwriting can still be important, and why we shouldn't let it go.
In the university where I teach, one undergraduate creative module
contains a specific task, a "writer's notebook". The students have to
make notes on all sorts of things – observations, passing fancies, plot
ideas, scribbled asides, as well as sketches and drafts of poems, short
stories, perhaps bits of drama. When I explain this task to the
students, invariably someone says, "Can I type it all on the computer
and hand it in because I can't write any other way?" I give in, having
been instructed that I have to, but I do encourage students to write as
much as they can by hand. It makes you think, I say. It looks less
permanent. It has more of you in it. Most students, even now, take this
advice and do produce volumes which are full of work written by hand,
notes and thoughts and inventions both casual and highly developed. When
they have been a student's constant companion over four months or so,
they are, I have to say, a total joy.
Last month a student of mine
died, quite suddenly. It was a terrible shock to everyone who knew her:
she was a grand girl all round. She had done this module, and had
produced a fat notebook in which every word was written by hand – you
would recognise her handwriting as soon as you knew her. It bulged with
invention, and cutouts, and marginalia, and massive crossings-out, and
all manner of things. After I heard that she had died, I went down to
the cellar where these things are stored and extracted her writer's
notebook from the archive.
It was just full of her. You could see
where her pen had moved across the page, only months before; you could
see her good creative days and the days where nothing much had come; you
could see what she had written quickly, in inspiration, and the bits
she had gone over and over. I only taught her, but I was moved by it,
and felt a connection with the poor girl, whom I had liked a great deal.
The
department in which I work had created great difficulties in letting me
see it at all. Administrators who had never met the girl had pretended
that it was locked up and could not now be unlocked. Looking at it, I
could understand why it had created such nervousness in them. It
frightened people who were frightened of literature, and humanity, and
the texture of life. Written at length, in hand, it just was my student.
Some part of the writer's spirit had passed into the handwriting, and
had stayed there. Her humanity and her hand overlapped, and something
remained, indelibly, in these physical traces.
Extracted from The Missing Ink: The lost art of handwriting (and why it still matters) by Philip Hensher (Macmillan)"
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