The Curse of Penmanship Or How I Learned to Write Badly

I recently got a handwritten letter from a friend who has Parkinson Disease. It was surprisingly well written. As a former English teacher, he’d developed very legible penmanship. I offered to send him one handwritten, but told him it would be indecipherable. Since grade school, I had trouble with making my letters conform to the standard form. I remember getting Ds in grade school for my penmanship, never being one to make nice rounded letter “o.” Once I had to make other odd shaped letters, the Gs with the sweeping round heads that dipped around and circled back, I was lost. I dreaded making the long lines of the same letter, one “o” after another. I would try and fail. I might get an “o” or two down, but getting a long, evenly space, set of them was impossible. I found no matter how I tired, one “o” never quite looked like another. Each seemed to be a different species, some with larger empty spaces in the middle, others that looked more like a flat tire than an “o.”Some letters I dreaded. If I could write a word without that letter in it, I was happy. But that does inhibit one’s vocabulary. I hated the capital “I” that required me to make an oval, but more a rectangular oval that started on the middle line, swept up to the next line, folded over and drew down, having to make a perfect landing on the middle line. It looked horrible every time I made it. As I pulled down the pencil, it would go too far, way past the main line and leak into the one below it. So I’d erase that part, trying to fidget with the form, shaving it off to fit on the middle line. Next time, I’d stop too soon, truncating the I. Naturally, I preferred the printed I, the one with the stick with the top hat and shoes on the bottom. Although I was told there was a Right way to make every letter and although many of my classmates, particularly some finicky girls and boys, made letters that looked so perfect that I swore they were manufactured, penmanship always aggravated me. It seemed to be such a waste time that could be much better spent on the playground kicking a ball around with my friends. My mom made a really pretty capital P that I imitated. It had elegant loops at the top and bottom and was fun to make since you could start on the middle line and, drawing the pencil downward, made a large loop that would sweep upward past the middle line and form another loop that, in turn, came back to the middle line. It was like racing a train along a looping track. But it was not RIGHT. Not according to Mrs. Obedoyster who, in her black dress with black semi-high shoes that clamped on the floor like a Nazi storm trooper, had a very strict sense of Right and Wrong. She didn’t want loops on the bottom and top, only on the bottom. She scared me into doing it Right. But anytime I could I sneak another loop into my P just for fun I did it just to spite her. Sometime in that year, and the years that followed when I’d get marked down for penmanship, I must have made up my mind to write in code, using my own design, eliminating as much from each letter to give only a hint of what it was, cutting off lower case 0s without tops, undercutting any downward loops or upward flares, keeping the pen marching along on a line, making sure (which was always a challenge for me) that I could keep up with my thoughts, finding ways to get the words down quickly. If I didn’t my thinking was two or three lines—and sometime pages—ahead of my pen. Eventually I tamed my mind enough to stay put and let the pen catch up although my mind felt like a dog at the end of a leash, tugging, saying, “Come on! What is taking so much time?” My pen learned to keep up. But if Mrs. Obedoyster saw the letters, squished together like chicken scratches, she be slapping my desk saying, “That’s NOT how you do it!” Given that I’m older than she was, I’d now have the presence of mind to say, “Yes, that’s how I do it,” and shoo her off to intimidate others who may have learned to form perfect letters but may never have, as I have, learned to love to write.