Penmanship or handwriting is the art of writing with the hand and a writing instrument. Styles of handwriting are also called hands or scripts.
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Ancient Roman handwriting styles included Roman cursive, and the more calligraphic rustic capitals and square capitals, the latter of which forms the basis for modern capital letters and was used in stone inscriptions.
Carolingian minuscule under the influence of Alcuin of York became the dominant hand during the Carolingian Renaissance (750AD–1000AD). Gothic script gained ascendency during the eleventh century, and retained its dominance until the Italian Renaissance (1400AD–1600AD). During this time frame (750–1500) regional variants of the dominant scripts were created, and spread in popularity. By the sixteenth century, these regional copybooks showed little influence of their origins. As countries unified, these regional variations became national notebooks.
The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries saw another revival of clean formalized handwriting in England and the United States of America.
In the United States, starting in the late 19th century, there were cries that handwriting was being neglected due to the typewriter. By the 21st century, blame was being attached to the use of computers. Linked to this decline in penmanship has been a decrease from two hours per day in penmanship instruction during the 19th century to less than an hour per semester in 2007.
Platt Rogers Spencer is known as the "Father of American Penmanship". His writing system was first published in 1848, in his book Spencer and Rice's System of Business and Ladies' Penmanship. The most popular Spencerian manual was The Spencerian Key to Practical Penmanship, published by his sons in 1866. This "Spencerian Method" was taught in American schools until the mid 1920s, and has seen a resurgence in recent years through charter schools and home schooling using revised Spencerian books and methods produced by former IAMPETH president Michael Sull (* 1946).
George A. Gaskell (1845–1886), a student of Spencer, authored two popular books on penmanship, Gaskell's Complete Compendium of Elegant Writing and The Penman's Hand-Book (1883).
Starting at the beginning of the 20th century, Zaner-Bloser Script and the Palmer Method, introduced by Charles Paxton Zaner (15 February 1864 – 1 December 1918) and Elmer Ward Bloser (6 November 1865 – 1929) of the Zanerian Business College and A. N. Palmer in his Palmer's Guide to Business Writing, published in 1894, became the dominant copybooks in North America. The A. N. Palmer Company finally folded in the early 1980s — Zaner-Bloser continues, and accounts for roughly 40% of handwriting textbook sales in the USA.
Later styles include D'Nealian Script and Getty-Dubay — both published in 1976. D'Nealian (named after its designer, Donald Neal Thurber) is a derivative of the Palmer Method and uses a slanted, serifed manuscript form followed by an entirely joined and looped cursive of the typical American variety. Getty-Dubay (named after its designers, Barbara Getty and Inga Dubay) is an Italic hand and uses a slightly slanted, optionally serifed Italic manuscript followed by a partially joined, unlooped Italic cursive with letter-forms similar to those of Italic manuscript. D'Nealian accounts for 40% of American handwriting textbook sales; Getty-Dubay, which accounted for less than 1% of American handwriting textbook sales in 1995, by 2003 had come to account for 7% of American handwriting textbook sales.
Other copybook styles comprise more than 200 published textbook curricula, many differing from these and from each other in often confusing ways: particularly as regards cursive. (E.g., the cursive capital "T" of the Harcourt-Brace handwriting program closely resembles the cursive capital "F" of most other American handwriting programs and in fact looks much more like their "F" than it looks like the "T" of those other cursive programs.)
Forgery of a person's handwriting is a frequent occurrence and commonly appears in the legal court system. Signatures etc. are analyzed by a questioned document examiner.
Handwriting requires the motor coordination of multiple joints in the hand, wrist, elbow, and shoulder to form letters and to arrange them on the page. Holding the pen and guiding it across paper depends mostly upon sensory information from skin, joints and muscles of the hand and this adjusts movement to changes in the friction between pen and paper.[1] With practice and familiarity, handwriting becomes highly automated using motor programs stored in motor memory.[2] Compared to other complex motor skills handwriting is far less dependent on a moment-to-moment visual guidance.[3][4]
Research in individuals with complete peripheral deafferentation with and without vision of their writing hand finds increase of number of pen touches, increase in number of inversions in velocity, decrease of mean stroke frequency and longer writing movement duration. The changes show that cutaneous and proprioceptive feedback play a critical role in updating the motor memories and internal models that underlie handwriting. In contrast, sight provides only a secondary role in adjusting motor commands.[4]
Throughout most British oriented countries such as Nepal, Competitions are held almost everyday as penmanship is an important asset of every student. These competitions carefully analyze the handwriting of the competitor and chooses the one with most ease, neatness, and beauty.
Types of writing
Studies of writing and penmanship
Penmanship-related professions
Other penmanship-related topics
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(Col 2:14). The "blotting out
the handwriting" is the removal by the grace of the gospel of the condemnation of the law which we
had broken.
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