“The written word takes on its highest form when it bears truth laced with beauty.”
The composer of this magnificent sentence is Master Penman Jake Weidman.
Integrating the Transcendentals
This is only one reason that eliminating handwriting from the general school curriculum is unfortunate—even tragic. Part of being human is the quest for truth, beauty, and the other great transcendental—goodness. Integrating those three elements brings all people closer to God—the epitome of all three qualities.
Mr. Weidman penned the sentence in his foreword to Sull’s Manual of Advanced Penmanship by Michael R. Sull.
Like many penmen, Mr. Sull can also express profound thoughts in short but beautiful sentences. “American Cursive Handwriting is your voice on paper.” However, reading the Manual shows that aspiring calligraphers do much more than express their voices. They are joining a long tradition. Unlike other skills, this craft is accessible to all. The only three essential components are pen, paper and diligence. One can even start for less than a dollar using an ordinary pencil and the back of a used envelope.
Tying the Mind to God’s Natural World
As Mr. Sull readily admits, his style owes much to the work of Platt Rogers Spencer (1800-1864). For Mr. Spencer, the writing process went far beyond mere communication. In his mind, the uniquely human writing process ties humanity to the rest of the natural world. Therefore, he based his method on movement, curvature, variety and contrast, which he saw as four universal natural concepts.
He also understood the role of handwriting in developing the child’s mind.
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“Penmanship…puts into full requisition all the higher powers of the mind. Under this impulse, the faculty of perception is called into vigorous exercise, memory is made more tenacious of its treasures, judgment is at work in determining relations, proportions, and distance; while taste, ever alive to the forms of beauty, whether in nature or in art, is busy with all those nicer discriminations of shade, color, outline, and finish which awaken so powerfully the sense of pleasure.”
Training the Mind
Modern readers may find it easy to ridicule Mr. Spencer’s flowery rhetoric. Such language appears excessive. Indeed, Mr. Spencer shared with many writers of his generation a penchant for what modern English teachers call the “run-on sentence.” Moreover, given the limited understanding of brain function during the nineteenth century, his explanations had to be intuitive rather than scientific. Nonetheless, his insights should not be overlooked.
Three years ago, the American Handwriting Association released a tightly reasoned study, Why Handwriting Remains Essential in 2021 and the Future. Compare its findings with Mr. Spencer’s insights.
“Findings from repeated studies at universities in the US, Europe, Australia, Japan, and China over the past fifty years confirm that those who are well-practiced in handwriting accomplish reading, writing, memory, and comprehension tasks more quickly and deeply than those who type on keyboards, tap, or use point-and-click devices.”
A Long Tradition
At the same time, while useful, Mr. Spencer’s complicated instructions were far too complex for the child just learning to write. In the early twentieth century, schools replaced his method with a more straightforward process developed by Austin Palmer (1860-1927). Palmer’s work, in turn, was supplanted by a process named after Charles P. Zaner and Elmer W. Bloser during the years after World War II. Readers whose elementary school experience included block printing as a preparation for cursive writing most likely had teachers who followed the Zaner-Bloser method.
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During the eighties, the pooh-bas of American education largely excised penmanship in favor of keyboarding skills as the computer age sent its tentacles into the schools. Even so, penmanship is experiencing a revival. Of course, the term is too “sexist” for delicate twenty-first-century ears. A far older term, calligraphy—derived from Ancient Greek for “beautiful writing”—has replaced it.
Purists might argue that calligraphy and penmanship are two different pursuits. Calligraphy has a more extended history, going back to China during the first century of the Christian Era. On the other hand, American penmanship always combined its artistry with the daily recordings of commerce. Just the same, the skills and mental processes of each have much in common. So, too, does the joy of producing beauty where once only a blank page existed.
New Popularity for an Old Craft
Nonetheless, those starved of handwriting in elementary school are signing up for calligraphy classes in droves. According to a recent article in the New York Times, “At Michael’s, the largest arts and crafts chain in North America, more than 10,000 customers signed up for lettering classes online between January 2023 and March 2024—nearly three times more than in the same period a year ago, when about the same number of classes were offered.”
When the article appeared in May, one YouTube video on the basics of handwriting and calligraphy had “garnered more than 840,000 views. Less than a month later, that total had increased by another thirty thousand.
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Attending an introductory calligraphy class, as this author did at a local bookstore recently, is a joy. Each participant was at a different level of comfort with the process. However, by the end of the hour-and-a-half session, every student had experienced the pleasure of creating something beautiful. In almost all cases, the beauty of the carefully formed letters surprised their creators.
That is not to say that the process is easy. Like any physical activity, it requires the development of a new expression of “muscle memory.” As any artist, athlete or musician will happily explain, that entails developing and repeating specific techniques until they become virtually automatic.
As Platt Rogers Spencer informed those who read his classic Penmanship, careful work guarantees success. “[I]f the student will but be careful,…he can not fail of the highest measure of attainment of which his natural powers are capable.”
Other than the basics of religion, what lesson could be more important?