New York Times Article on Penmanship

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Surfing through the net about penmanship, I found this interesting article in the New York Times on handwriting tips entitled Op-Art: The Write Stuff.

"American handwriting is in a woeful state. Schools’ insistence on teaching looped cursive handwriting has left a generation of Americans with script they dislike or is often illegible. The Palmer method and subsequent 20th-century methods were based on an ornate style that was difficult to learn and broke down under pressure. 

The loops and curlicues of Palmer and other similar methods obscure legibility. For good reason, one rarely finds looped cursive in print media or computer fonts. We have become a “Please Print” nation. Even worse, we have failed to find a replacement.

But there is hope. We can stop mumbling on the page and become legible writers by turning to a style that existed long before Palmer rendered our world illegible. We can embrace letterforms born in the Italian Renaissance. We can go italic.

The article mentions the woeful state of American handwriting and
although I agree with the writer that this predicament should be remedied in schools, I would certainly still encourage learning the cursive method and not just resort to the Italic Renaissance method shown in their article. 

But whatever one chooses to adopt as a handwriting method, bottomline is we all need to work on making our penmanship legible because at the end of the day, not everything could be digitally printed out.

So grab that pen and paper and start dressing up your handwriting!