WRITING A FAIR HAND . . .

Good riddance! I welcome it (mainly cuz I suck at cursive, odd cuase I do great caligraphy).

Good handwriting was forever screwed up by the invention of the ball point pen. Anyhow, that's my story and I'm sticking to it.

Which is why, in desparation, i smothered the bleating of my cheap heart and shelled out $40 for a reliable fountain pen . . .

Thoughts?

I remember getting a grade for "penmanship" on my report cards in elementary school. I tried to emulate my father's handwriting. He literally drew his letters...just beautiful. My handwriting is beautiful, too. I have actually been paid to develop script headlines for advertising, etc. So I suppose all those hours of practicing paid off.

I still write thank you notes to my clients, and I am told they appreciate them. I miss the days of handwritten letters. But those days were gone long before e-mail came of age. Since that happened, there has been an explosion of correspondence unlike anything I've ever seen. I think that's a good sign.

my handwriting looks like a doctors.....i still write to people though, theres alot to be said for written proof

A few summers ago, while visiting relatives of my wife, I was given a large bundle of envelopes. They had belonged to one of the great-aunts and had laid in a box pretty much forgotten until someone mentioned that I was working on a family geneology. I spent most of a weekend on a side porch sorting them by date and then reading them and the story they told.
=The family knew vaguely that the husband's great-grandfather had left his wife and three small children in the early 1930's. As far as they knew he'd gone to California, found work and occasionly sent back to New York City a little money, never enough, but something. The great-grandmother never re-married, raised her children to be independent thinkers and never spoke of her husband. The children received their information from the great-aunt, the sister of the runaway father. =

The letters tell a different story. They are all from the father to his children and span over 25 years. The early ones are written for little children and are full of "remember that I do love you''s and ''miss you lots''s. Most are to his daughter telling about the weather and the mountains. When she is about 13, he begins to try to explain his life with her mother, these are full of painful revelations about falling out of love and what constant discontent can do to a relationship. Heavy stuff for a 13 year old. Later, the war approachs and the letters stop for almost a year and half. (A look at his passport from the time reveals that he went to France and from there through Nazi Germany to the Polish/Russian border, then to Austria, back to Germany and shipped out of Le Havre to America in late 1939. Pretty heavy trip for a Jewish Doctor.)

During the war and after, the children are grown or almost grown, the letters are full of praise for school accomplishments and starting jobs. More about the weather and nothing about the war.

The letters stop in the early fifties, apparently one of the children or all of them have written about coming out to visit, he weakly protests but say ''Whatever.''

The family legends contain the tale of the young woman driving with her friend/lover across the country to see the father she only remembers from pictures. She had to stay in California for almost a year because when she arrived the father was in the process of dying. Her lover drove back to New York and was never again in the picture. The father died. She met a pianist who was going to dental school. She married him and stayed married to him.

====
Without bundles of letters left forgotten,
who shall tell the histories of little lives
lived daily, one by one,
filled with love and lost love
and whose adventures are as grand
as those in the history books?

Joe

I failed handwriting in grade 6, and it has been - via thousands of lecture notes and case-notes and suchlike - downhill ever since.

I actually welcome email and chat as a new way of communicating via the written word without the pain (bad neck and such) of handwriting - but, Setanta, I see your point.

I save emails and so forth as a record of conversations and fun - and I actually think that we are in a new age of written communication - after the age of the telephone - but the handwritten stuff was wonderful - to see the actual writing of such folk as Elizabeth I and Captain Cook and Darwin and Flinders is a marvellous thing and a breathless wonder...

Can't see it disappearing too fast - there are some issues about non-Western scripts that preclude the easy use of keyboards. If your 'alphabet' contains close to 9,000 characters - you might find it easy to just write the damn thing!

A romantic, old-fashioned story:

A boy and a girl meet and fall in love. Alas, the girl is due to go overseas within a few months. She departs amidst many tears and promises to write every day. And he fulfills that promise -- one or maybe two letters arrive for her every single day that they are apart. She answers them all.

That's me 'n' E.G, 11 years ago. All of the letters handwritten, from when I lived in England. We have two piles about a foot high -- one from me, one from him.

I LOVE to write, and like my handwriting. I have another box of treasured letters from when I left for college -- I left behind two dear friends who had a gift for sending wonderfully embellished letters.

I hand-write cards, though rarely letters anymore -- but my cards have writing on every available surface, not just a line or two. I adore email -- just adore it -- but my heart is glad when I get a letter or card. (My best friend is a particularly good letter/card writer.)

I used to write and write and write. For over a decade, my friend Douglas and I wrote letters that were 10 to 20 pages long to each other, 2 or 3 times a week. There is a box of them at my parents house. I'm waiting for Douglas to become famous, so I can become rich. KIDDING!

My hand-writing is so legible most of the time, that it just looks like curvy printing. It is not particularly stylized. I was once a decorator of envelopes and such, when I sent letters. That has fallen by the way-side for the most part.

For many years, when I had to write pages and pages of case notes, I simply felt I couldn't write for pleasure anymore. As computers took over, and system notes became the standard, I almost 'forgot' how to write. I can recall my hand cramping up in an industry exam a few years ago, as I hadn't done a long stint of hand-writing in so long.

Now, I'm back in a setting that does hand-written file notes. I'm enjoying it now, but am amazed at how many pads of paper I'm going through.

E-mails didn't really change how much I write personally - but cheaper access to long-distance phone calls did. I needed to send Douglas 17 page letters, to keep him up to date on every event and every thought. Now I can just call Setanta and tell him. With the new phone cards I have, it is cheaper than writing a letter every day or so.

Setanta's hand-writing is very bold and handsome.