BAD WRITING

Dominion, Volume 24, Issue 105, 28 January 1931, Page 8

BAD WRITING

Making Signatures Legible

“FULL OF WISDOM”

Aiming at the improvement of the signatures of businessmen, a Government servant wrote to the council of the Wellington Chamber of Commerce last evening suggesting remedies. “Many businessmen, whether from sheer carelessness or from a mistaken idea that correspondents are impressed with the deliberately illegible and flourishing scrawl they fondly imagine to be a signature, daily provoke the wrath of their fellow-men, who, perforce, must fret and fume and waste time in trying to decipher this rather important item,” said the writer. “May I suggest that your chamber, in common with all other chambers of commerce, would be doing something worth while by disseminating a little propaganda for the abatement of the nuisance referred to. I suppose, though, that the perpetrators would find it difficult to modify their signatures, and in any case the banks would need reassuring until such time as they became familiar with the legible product. “Perhaps the best solution would be to encourage the practice, prevalent in certain other parts of the world, of signing over a typed transcription of the name.”

No action was taken, although members agreed that the epistle was full of vflstlom.