Last week I had the occasion to write a
note to someone, and I was confronted with the hideousness of
my handwriting.
There was a time, some thirty years ago, that it was not that bad. Now it is
almost illegible to everyone but me.
It is not a matter of not having to practice it. From my days as a freelance journalist, I have become a habitual note taker. I am never far away from a pad, and I almost always have a pen with me. But these are notes for my eyes only.
Indeed, it has been years since I ever truly wrote anything. At some point I decided that printing was the better option. Even that scawl is horrid, though.
So, here I am, confronted with this note to a client, and it should be a handwritten note. I had to write it over three times before I had something with which I was even remotely happy.
I once worked with a woman who was an amateur graphologist, someone who studies handwriting as a window to a person’s character and personality. Her theory was that your handwriting on any particular day indicated your mood. In one instance the owner of the business was on her way to an important meeting and gave this woman a list of tasks. The graphologist took one look at the list and said, “Is there any way you can cancel that meeting? You should not be going there today. Not with this handwriting.”
I have known several people throughout my life, all women, who maintain two or three different styles of handwriting. The one they used depended upon their mood or what they were writing about. All of them were clearly legible and very nice, but they were different.
I have also observed elderly people who spend hours practicing their handwriting over and over and over, trying to maintain its legibility as they lost control of fine motor skills.
Once, when touring a Steinbeck museum in Salinas, CA, I examined a handwritten draft of one of his novels. Not only was is surprisingly free from scratchouts and sloppiness, but the script was neat and easily read.
Even though my handwriting is atrocious, I am still choosy about the pens I use. I prefer the Bic SoftFeel. It is a comfortable and relatively inexpensive pen. The latter trait is important, because I almost always lose my pens before they run out of ink. If I am using a pencil, I prefer the standard #2 lead with a good point. I am also a black ink man. Very seldom do I use blue.
If I am a letter (which is almost always computer generated, of course) and all I am signing is my name, then I prefer to use a black Flair pen, although the aforementioned Bic SoftFeels will work.
As for the note I had to write that prompted this column, I have not sent it yet. I will deliver it tomorrow, so there is still time to rewrite it, as soon as I find my Bic pen.
See ya’ later.
WhatIfYouCouldNotFail.com by Tim Sunderland is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
Image by Guillaume Carels (http://www.flickr.com/photos/aliceinw/227116873/) [CC-BY-2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons.
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