Campaign For Better Handwriting

Bay of Plenty Times, Volume LXXVII, Issue 14930, 18 March 1949, Page 6

Campaign For Better Handwriting

Ball-Pointed Pens Hasten Expiry Of Dying- Art

Deterioration In Good

Penmanship

British bankers have announced that they prefer their clerks not to use the new ball-point pens because (a) the fluid used in some models is not durable, and (b) they make forgery easier. The news is welcomed by calligraphists—i'n the interests of good handwriting, says the Overseas Mail. This has been a sad century for calligraphists, graphologists, , and those who practise the art of scrivenry, and they mourn that ballpointed pens are just about the end in penmanship. It saddens the experts that many schools, allow children to use the ball-pointers ip spite of a drive for better writing in schools which was begun only two years ago by the Ministry of Education, which issued a directive pronouncing good handwriting to be a “primary form of art.”

Whitehall urged that, as children developed, their handwriting should bo encouraged to become “easier and more flowing.” There has been no official assessment of the results of this campaign, but the privateexperts are not optimistic. A Vicious Circle

“Writing,” they say, “is a dying art. It has been knifed by the craze for speed, by the popularity of the typewriter, and by our own laziness. “The deterioration began towards the end of the last century. In the past 20 or 30 years people have become more and more accustomed to reading printed letters, and it is quite an effort for them to read ordinary handwriting. “And with ordinary handwriting growing mere and more slovenly we have got into a vicious circle. “Today, when form-filling and memoranda have become a fetish, it is a fact that the person who types a letter or an application gets quicker attention than anyone who 'writes. “Business men openly admit that their secretaries have orders to ‘translate’ on the typewriter any handwritten letters —• ‘to save the boss’s time and energy.’ Legibility

“Twenty years ago people did at least try to make their signatures legible, but even that has gone. For a period there was even a snobbery about making one’s signature as unreadable as possible, and cut of that grew the modern custom of typing the writer’s name at the dnd of a letter, under the signature, in case the reader cannot make out the writer’s name!

“And some people even think they are bestowing a favour if they write a letter instead of .typing it.” Schools are still being blamed for a lot of the damage to modern handwriting by the 1920’s vogue for teaching children script writing only. The modern practice Is to start, infants on script (letters printed and not joined up) and move them on to writing the letters and joining them together as quickly as possible. Undergraduates generally complain that prodigious note-taking ruins their handwriting, kills 'thenstyle, and forces them into microscopic writing.