Handwriting

Mary Ann

What ever happened to a good signature?  When signing a credit card, most people do a squiggly line.  You would never know who the person was who signed.  When I sign something, I always neatly write my name, and many times I get complimented for my efforts.  It is the teacher in me that feels compelled to write it correctly.  Do you find yourself in that same situation?  People our age had handwriting every day for six grades. 

 Round, round, ready, write!  Do you recall saying that phrase when you were doing handwriting in elementary school?   It was the Palmer Method that most of us learned how to write.  We would do overlapping circles from the top line to the bottom line on the paper. This was done to learn how to control the pen and develop muscles in our forearms.  

I read somewhere that Americans had great handwriting when we were an agrarian society. If you ever seen old letters or signatures in a Bible from your ancestors, you could see that they indeed had beautiful script.  The reason attributed to this was most people milked cows.  The very muscles that you use to milk a cow are the same muscles that you need for good handwriting.  Not too sure who figured that out, but it makes sense.   

Back to round, round, ready, write!  We used a type of fountain pen that used metal tips, a step up from feather quills, and far from the ball point or gel pens of today.  I used to call them dip pens.  Most of us educated in the 50s and 60s used an inkwell right in the little wooden desk that were used at the time.  

I remember using colored ink for holidays.  We would round, round, ready write green for Christmas trees or red for hearts at Valentine’s Day.  It may have been my teachers who did the colored ink, but it made the redundancy of handwriting fun! 

We had penmanship, the fancy name, every day. In most schools today, they don’t even teach manuscript, so you only learn how to print.  Every few years, American school systems ping pong back and forth from teaching handwriting or not.  If you go online, you can find research that supports handwriting helps with brain development – strengthening neuro pathways for learning, attention, and memory.  The National Institute of Health has an in-depth study.  Writing is foundational to reading.  Handwriting is much more complex than just writing.  

There is the battle raging in education with handwriting vs typing with devices at odds.  Typing does not support brain development in the same way.  Still out for debate – too much screen time is detrimental to brain development.  

When we ended our elementary education back in the 50s and 60s, the Palmer Company would issue beautiful certificates for completing 6 years of penmanship work.  It was written in artistic calligraphy.  It kind of puffed you up to receive it.  Next time you sign something, just remember that you have a readable signature that you can be proud of and was worth all that round, round, ready write!