Pens: " “You could be wealthy if you did that for a living in China.” That was the comment made to me by Dr. Edward Su back in 1978 when I was in the hospital for surgery. I had taken along a calligraphy set recently purchased from a catalog and was filling a sheet of paper with “Chinese” characters, which I invented as I went along. It was an exercise I remembered from an art class I took years ago at OU-C. I have no idea what I was writing in Chinese, but trust that I had not written anything indecent. To me, writing is very much like art, even if the writing is done in English. I remember the writing workbooks we had in elementary school beginning in the second grade. At that time, our writing took up three lines with the top of some letters touching the top line and the top of other letters touching the middle line and the tails of some letters extending below the bottom line. We would make a whole row of each letter, probably nearly 8 inches from left to right. When I was in the sixth grade, I landed a teacher who seemed to love cursive as much as I did. Miss Recobs stressed the formation of each letter, and we still had the writing workbooks. She appreciated my efforts to get each letter to slant exactly the same as the others in the practice rows. What fun it was to make the capital L and the capital Q, which looked like an egotistical 2. I loved putting smiles in the curves that ended the last letters of words. By the way, in the lower grades, our writing workbooks were completed using a No. 2 pencil, but later we sometimes used a pen. We would insert a pen nib into a wooden stick shaped much like a watercolor brush. The upper right corner of our desks had a round hole called an ink well. A bottle of ink fit into that hole, and we would dip our pens into the ink. The pen nib had a piece of metal that held a little bit of ink, and we would refill the pen after a few words when we had used all that ink. Cursive is taught in the Wisconsin schools that two of my grandchildren attend. However, cursive is not taught in the schools my other three grandchildren attend in California and Connecticut. I know my granddaughter in California can write legibly in cursive, and my son is taking steps to make sure my grandkids in Connecticut can read cursive. I hate to think that 100 years from now when someone sees a document written in cursive, specialists will need to be consulted to translate it. Our cursive should not become as extinct as Egyptian hieroglyphics. Will the fascinating art of graphoanalysis survive if cursive disappears? An analysis of a person’s hand-printed letters might yield some information. However, some of the important elements would be missing. And a document done by computer would be useless for handwriting analysis ... unless there is an app for that. Last year as a Christmas present to me, my two sons gave me my own font for my computer. I had to fill a page with my own handwriting, and that included writing some nonsense words so that the company providing the service of creating my font could analyze how I wrote each letter based on the letter before and after that one. It took a few weeks to get my font back, and then I needed to test it for a while and let the company know of any problems I found. Once those problems were corrected, I was able to install the font on my computer. Now I can type a document using my own font, and it looks very much like my own handwriting. There are a few differences, and I want those differences to remain in my font so there will be no question about whether I actually wrote the document or whether someone typed it using my font. I suggest that all students learn cursive writing so historical documents will not be a mystery to them. Furthermore, I think it might a good idea for some people to get their own font created for their computers so that if writing becomes difficult for them because of time restraints or age, their own handwriting style will be preserved. Documents showing each person’s own writing should be preserved as an integral part of family history files. Grandma Montgomery sent me a letter years ago that she had written in ink in shaded script, and I think that was the most beautiful handwriting I had ever seen. Charlotte R. Mitchell retired in 2009 after working in the insurance industry for 33 years. She has lived in Chillicothe for 55 years and is a member of the Gazette’s Board of Contributors. Contact her at chs59rosebud@gmail."
Posted on: Tue, 01 Oct 2013 21:42:21 +0000