Op-Art

By Inga Dubay and Barbara Getty

The Write Stuff

ET us begin the school year by stating the obvious: American

handwriting is in a woeful state. Schools insistence on teaching
looped cursive handwriting has left a generation of Americans
with script they dislike or is often illegible.
The Palmer method and subsequent 20th-century methods were based
on an ornate style that was difficult to learn and broke down under pressure.
The loops and curlicues of Palmer and other similar methods obscure
legibility. For good reason, one rarely finds looped cursive in print media
or computer fonts. We have become a Please Print nation. Even worse,
we have failed to find a replacement.
But there is hope. We can stop mumbling on the page and become legible
writers by turning to a style that existed long before Palmer rendered our
world illegible. We can embrace letterforms born in the Italian Renaissance. We can go italic.
What follows is a guide to help you get started whether you are in
elementary school, graduate school, in between or beyond. Think of it as
an emergency first step to improve American handwriting.

Trace and copy these basic italic lowercase family groups:

If you want to join some letters, its easy to do. When you move between
letters, you are lifting the pen or pencil, so the join is the air. If you
want to report that join on the paper, you can connect the letters with
no change in the letter shapes (see dotted lines below):

Think of cursive in a new way. Cursive does not necessarily mean continuously joined or looped letters. The root of the word cursive is the
Latin cursus, past participle of currere, to run. Hence, cursive writing
means a running hand. Letters do not have to be relentlessly connected,
as with the looped cursive of Palmer and its relatives. Many people find
this to be a relief. Your running hand can have rapid, legible handwriting that is semi-joined or perhaps uses few, if any, joins. The choice about
joining is yours.

The key, though, is to avoid loops.

Why?
Because we recognize letters by reading the top of letters, rather than
the bottom of letters.

Also, always be sure to close up the tops.

In English, we read and write lowercase letters most of the time, so

practice lowercase first.

Next come the capital letters.

Be sure to close up the tops of capitals for the sake of legibility.

For more comfort, hold your pen or pencil lightly, without a thumb
wrap or a death grip.
Try an alternative hold by placing the pen or pencil between your forefinger and middle finger, with those fingertips and thumb resting near
the pencil tip. This hold can help alleviate an aching forearm as well as
wrist or thumb pain.

And now pick up a pencil or a pen (if youre really courageous) and
practice on this very page. Then practice more. With each stroke, you will
bring our nation one step closer to legibility.
Inga Dubay and Barbara Getty are co-authors of a series of books on
italic handwriting.