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Grip matters a great deal for a calligraphic hand. Take a chisel-tip felt pen and try to write sensibly with the broad part of the chisel, and you’ll quickly di

Grip matters a great deal for a calligraphic hand. Take a chisel-tip felt pen and try to write sensibly with the broad part of the chisel, and you’ll quickly discover a few things: why calligraphic hands look like they do, how to form letters with a mixture of line widths, and how your hand has to hold the pen in order to produce legible text. Incidentally there’s this often implicit belief that people’s handwriting was better in the past than it is now. I mostly don’t believe this—there’s just a sample bias towards only showing the nice writing that was often made by professional scribes. And some scribes had shitty hands, too.

falcolas 7y ago
> implicit belief that people’s handwriting was better in the past than it is now I, on the other hand, believe this. When typing doesn't exist, and your livelihood depends on your records being legible, you put a lot more effort into legibility (and having heard a few stories about the corporal punishment associated with poor handwriting in schools a century ago, you'd get better out of pure self-preservation). To back that up with an anecdote, I found a box of private bank ledgers maintained by my maternal grandfather, and I was absolutely astounded at how neatly he wrote. These were for only his own consumption, but the handwriting was clearly legible to me a five decades later. Even my mother's handwriting is quite legible, even though computers became popular in her 40's (and typewriters in her teens).
- hprotagonist 7y ago
  On the other hand, you can find a consistent thread throughout written history of scribes bitching about punk kids these days and their crappy communication styles...
- jandrese 7y ago
  Occasionally you'll find old notes from some club that Newton was a member of or similar historic handwritten notes posted to this site and usually the handwriting is horrible, but also highly variable. Some people having nearly impenetrable script while other script looks beautiful. One person with amazingly clear handwriting: Donald Knuth. I showed one of his handwritten notes to a colleague and they asked why he had typed it up in a Comic Sans derivative.

falcolas 7y ago

> implicit belief that people’s handwriting was better in the past than it is now I, on the other hand, believe this. When typing doesn't exist, and your livelihood depends on your records being legible, you put a lot more effort into legibility (and having heard a few stories about the corporal punishment associated with poor handwriting in schools a century ago, you'd get better out of pure self-preservation). To back that up with an anecdote, I found a box of private bank ledgers maintained by my maternal grandfather, and I was absolutely astounded at how neatly he wrote. These were for only his own consumption, but the handwriting was clearly legible to me a five decades later. Even my mother's handwriting is quite legible, even though computers became popular in her 40's (and typewriters in her teens).

hprotagonist 7y ago
On the other hand, you can find a consistent thread throughout written history of scribes bitching about punk kids these days and their crappy communication styles...
jandrese 7y ago
Occasionally you'll find old notes from some club that Newton was a member of or similar historic handwritten notes posted to this site and usually the handwriting is horrible, but also highly variable. Some people having nearly impenetrable script while other script looks beautiful. One person with amazingly clear handwriting: Donald Knuth. I showed one of his handwritten notes to a colleague and they asked why he had typed it up in a Comic Sans derivative.