I’ve found relief from current personal stress in an unexpected place: what my mother calls “penmanship”, i.e. cursive writing that is pleasing to the eye and clearly legible. (Wikipedia’s definition of “penmanship” differs, interestingly. Later.) Herewith notes from the handwriting front.

[Oh, that stress: We’re in the final stages of moving into a newly-bought house we from the one we bought 27 years ago, and then selling the former place. This is neither easy nor fun. Might be a blog piece in it but first I have to recover.]

My generation · I’m not sure which decade handwriting ceased to matter to schoolchildren; my own kids got a derisory half-term unit. I have unpleasant elementary-school memories of my handwriting being justly criticized, month after month. And then, after decades of pounding a keyboard, it had devolved to the point where I often couldn’t read it myself.

Which I never perceived as much of a problem. I’m a damn fast and accurate typist and for anything that matters, my communication failures aren’t gonna involve letterforms.

I’ve been a little sad that I had become partly illiterate, absent a keyboard and powerful general-purpose computer. But it wasn’t actually a problem. And my inability to decipher my own scribbling occasionally embarrassed me, often while standing in a supermarket aisle. (If your family is as busy as mine, a paper notepad in a central location is an effective and efficient way to build a shopping list.)

Then one night · I was in bed but not asleep and my brain meandered into thoughts of handwriting; then I discovered that the penmanship lessons from elementary school seemed still to be lurking at the back of my brain. So I started mentally handwriting random texts on imaginary paper, seeing if I could recall all those odd cursive linkages. It seemed I could… then I woke up and it was morning. This has continued to work, now for several weeks.

So that’s a quality-of-life win for me: Mental penmanship as a surprisingly strong soporific. Your mileage may vary.

What, you might ask, is the text that I virtually handwrite? Famous poems? Zen koans? The answer is weirder: I turn some switch in a corner of my brain and words that read sort of like newspaper paragraphs come spilling out, making sense but really meaning anything.

Makes me wonder if I have an LLM in my mind.

Dots and crosses · After the occasional bedtime resort to mental cursive, I decided to try the real thing, grabbed the nearest pen-driven tablet, woke up an app that supports pen input, and started a freehand note. I found, pleasingly, that if I held the childhood lessons consciously in focus, I could inscribe an adequately comprehensible hand.

(Not the first attempt.)

Dotting and crossing · There’s a message in the media just above. I discovered that one reason my writing was so terrible was lacking enough patience to revisit the i’s and t’s after finishing a word that contains them, but rather trying to dot and cross as I went along. Enforcing a steely “finish the word, then go back” discipline on myself seems the single most important factor in getting a coherent writing line.

I’ve made the point this blog piece wants to make, but learned a few things about the subject along the way.

Wikipedia? · It says penmanship means simply the practice of inscribing text by hand (cursive is the subclass of penmanship where “characters are written joined in a flowing manner”). But I and the OED both think that English word also also commonly refers to the quality of writing. So I think that entry needs work.

Oh, and “Penmanship” also stands for Tommaso Ciampa the professional wrestler; earlier in his career he fought as “Tommy Penmanship”. I confess I offer this tasty fact just so I could include his picture.

Pop culture? · As I inscribed to-buys on the family grocery list, going back to dot and cross, it occurred to me that “or” was difficult; the writing line leaves the small “o” at the top of the letter, but a small “r” wants to begin on the baseline. I addressed this conundrum, as one does, by visiting YouTube. And thus discovered that a whole lot of people care about this stuff; there are, of course, /r/Cursive and /r/Handwriting.

Which sort of makes sense in a time when LPs and film photography are resurging. I think there are deep things to be thought and (not necessarily hand-)written about the nature of a message inscribed in cursive, even when that cursive is described in pixels. But I’m not going there today. I’m just saying I can read my grocery lists now.

Trollope’s aristos · I distinctly recall reading, in one of Anthony Trollope’s excellent novels about mid-19th-century life, that it was common knowledge that the landed aristocracy heedlessly wrote in incomprehensible chicken-scratches, but that the clerks and scriveners and merchants, the folk lacking genealogy, were expected to have a clear hand.

The new hotness? · I dunno, I don’t really think cursive is, but the idea isn’t crazy.