Hand Writing

When I was a kid I did have good hand writing. As an adult I still don’t have beautiful hand writing. What I do have is legible hand writing. I don’t write in cursive, although I learned in it school and thankfully can read it.

When I was in boarding school I had a friend whose mother had the most beautiful hand writing I had ever seen. She had been raised in Mississippi in a wealthy family in the thirties. She also was a great pianist. I suspect social graces of her time and place required a young lady of her standing to have good manner and the hand writing to go along with it.

She wrote me a couple letters after I visited their home and I treasured them for the artistry of the handwriting as well as the kind words that flowed out of the fountain pen they were written with. This was the late seventies. The bic pen was king, but not for this gentle lady from Mississippi.

Every week I ask my new students to write their name and email in my book I keep my class lists in. I beg them to write the email so I can read it. When I get home and go to type in the addresses to the email I promised to send them I find that one out of five of the emails are unreadable. Sometimes people forget to put .com and I can figure that out. But once in a while the name in the email is spelled differently that the name attached to it. I use the email address as it was written and when it bounces back undeliverable I try using the spelling of the name. Lo and behold, that works. The writer misspelled their own name in their email address.

The worst thing is when people have the number 1 or the lowercase l in their address and it is not part of a name. Unless they make the 1 with a little flag on the top, rather than just a straight line it is impossible to decipher it from a lower case l. If they have a zero and an upper case O, 0 and O it is impossible to tell what they actually meant unless they strike through the zero.

If the gentle lady from Mississippi was still alive, I am certain I would have no problem reading her email address, even in her flowery hand. Each letter was distinct, spaced perfectly from the next one. I never had trouble telling a lower case z from a lower case y in her script, although I had plenty of trouble writing them myself.

The art of beautiful hand writing is long gone. If I had nothing else to do I would practice my hand writing and try and improve it, but I fear that is time I don’t have. For now, I will just try and make it as legible as possible because I know too well the trauma bad hand writing causes the reader.