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By Nick Fonda

Local Journalism Initiative

A friend who keeps an eye on a wide variety of topics sent me a link to an on-line article in The Conversation, a nonprofit media outlet.  Written by Misha Teramura, an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Toronto, the article had the long title:  Think tech killed penmanship?  Messy handwriting was a problem centuries before smartphones.

My first reaction was to ignore the article.  I already knew that messy handwriting predated smartphones and computers.  I had firsthand experience with messy handwriting dating back to the middle of the last century. 

I was first made aware of penmanship in Grade 5.  That was the year that pupils were expected to make the big step of graduating from pencil to pen.  In September, we were doing all our work in pencil.  At some point in the year, those whose penmanship was judged adequate began writing with a pen.  This was the late 1950s and a pen consisted of a handle and a nib.  Every few strokes, the nib would have to be dipped into an inkwell.  It could be messy.  Hence, our teacher insisted that we had to write neatly and legibly with a pencil before we were permitted to write with a pen.  At the end of Grade 5, I was one of those still writing with a pencil.  (As I recall, in Grade 6, despite my failures in Grade 5, I was writing cursive with a ballpoint pen.)

It was only on second thought that I scrolled down to scan the rest of the text.  It was written in response to an article in the New York Times several months earlier which attributed the poor penmanship of today to the use of laptops and smartphones.

Teramura begged to differ.  As someone immersed in the world of Shakespeare and his contemporaries, the professor from Toronto had ample evidence that bad handwriting could easily be found 400 years ago.

Teramura wrote, “In countless letters that survive from the early modern period, writers apologize for their bad handwriting.  Sometimes they blame it on circumstances:  they were groggy from just waking up or tired late at night (“scribbled with a weary hand in my bed” reads one sign-off from 1585).”

At other times, he noted, the excuses for poor handwriting were medical:  a broken arm from falling off a horse, a hand injured in a duel, or stiffening joints from arthritis or gout.  A common excuse—as it still is today—was that the letter had to be written in haste and hence the handwriting was poor.

Teramura described cacography—or bad handwriting—as calligraphy’s evil twin.  He pointed out that there is a long list of famous people who had poor handwriting, including Queen Elizabeth I and the Dutch scholar, Erasmus. 

At the time, before typewriters and laptops, handwritten letters were all that could be sent.  Penmanship was a necessary skill, or at least a useful one.     

Strangely enough, although good penmanship was of benefit to the upwardly mobile, it was cacography that that appealed to the ruling class.

Teramura wrote, “The aristocratic nobility was notoriously bad at writing by hand.  Popular dramatists even made jokes about it.  But bad handwriting may have been deliberate.  In fact, Shakespeare’s Hamlet says just that:  I once did hold it, as our statists do,/ A baseness to write fair, and labored much/ How to forget that learning.”

Hamlet had mastered handwriting, but he now intentionally neglects to use this skill.  It was below those born into power and privilege to write neatly. 

Teramura noted, “Writing carelessly could be a way of asserting one’s social or political clout by forcing others less privileged to struggle to decipher what one had written.”

Today, or at least up until quite recently, the medical profession tended to be associated with cacography.  A few decades ago, it was still commonplace for a doctor (sometimes more that one) to run a general practice in a small town.  Typically, a patient would call the doctor’s office, show up for an appointment, and leave with a prescription for the pharmacist.  In my experience, the prescription was always all but illegible.

Cacography is as close as I got to med school.  Perhaps my handwriting wasn’t bad enough.  Equipped with ball point pens, I remember carrying on regular and even frequent handwritten correspondence with friends through my teens and twenties.  (Of course, I made a point of typing my papers at university.)

Today, on my laptop, I type the stories I send to my editor.  The notes I take during interviews however, are scribbled with my ballpoint pen into my notebook.  My handwriting hasn’t improved with age.  I always try to type up a story as soon as possible after the interview.  Even with a fresh memory, I’m not always able to decipher my hastily scrawled notes.  And reading something scribbled three or four days previously is often impossible.

Teramura reminded me that I was in good company, “The Reformation theologian Martin Bucer allegedly couldn’t even read some of his own manuscripts.  Nor was he alone.  As the preacher John Preston (1587 – 1628) observed in a sermon, “One would think a man should read his own hand, yet some do write so bad, that they cannot read it when they have done.””

Teramura finished his article, “Today, the ubiquity of smart phones and laptops has no doubt played a role in the ways we write.  But for those of us who can’t read our own sticky notes and to-do lists, it may come as a relief to know that bad handwriting is not an unprecedented phenomenon, but has its own centuries-long history.  We’re simply living a new chapter of it.”

A quick inquiry into penmanship in school today makes me wonder if handwriting hasn’t already gone the way of straight pens and inkwells.  Has cursive script already disappeared?

Describing her Grade 5 class, one teacher told me that of her 21 students, only one—a girl—always wrote in cursive script.  All her other students wrote in block letters.

As well as being unable to use cursive script, many young people today cannot read a handwritten text.

In 2019, an enterprising teacher at a local elementary school initiated a local history project for Remembrance Day.  The research material included documents from Archives Canada and handwritten letters from WWII.  One of the difficulties the students met was that much of the old documentation was handwritten.  The students had to learn to read and write cursive script to make sense of their research material.  And then, as would those of us long accustomed to handwritten letters, they had to cope with cacography.  The project planned for mid-November was completed in June.

Handwriting was useful until quite recently because writing in cursive script is much faster than printing out words in block letters.  However, it is not as fast as typing and, in most circumstances, not nearly as convenient as a laptop or a smartphone.

Penmanship, in the form of calligraphy, continues to exist as a minor art form.  For those of us who still do put pen (or pencil) to paper, cacography continues to be an occasional—if not frequent—presence, even on things as innocuous as a shopping list.