[boken]

It is most telling, to me, to hear people (none of them made from straw) admit that writer's cramp is part and parcel of a single session of taking notes or writing an hour-long exam. Professional copyists and secretaries in the early 20th century weren't biting down on their lower lips to push through the pain every time they put pen to paper during ten- and twelve-hour workdays. They just used better tools for that job (leak as the tools might do) and were taught how to write with focus on posture and movement, not on letterforms alone.

I don't strictly use the letterforms or all the best practices of the Palmer method—see the article for a link—but using a Palmer book as a guide, I managed to teach myself to write with a relaxed grip and no movement in the fingers or wrist, and I can go for hours now and walk away with no more discomfort than the stiffness of sitting without relief.

It is hard to write like this using most ballpoints because you do need to exert more force to get a consistent line out of the things. You don't need a fountain or dip pen, however—just a soft-leaded pencil (try an art supply shop), a good rollerball pen, or some gel pens. None of these write as effortlessly as a fountain pen, but neither do they require the kind of cramp-inducing force that a Bic pen does.

I've read mid-century materials on this topic before. My sense is that this isn't a new argument so much as a forgotten one.

[jacobolus]

The Palmer method descends from Spencerian script, an excessively flowery and not-all-that-legible form of writing from the days when people wanted to make their writing look difficult and fancy.

Writing in a fancy style is fine for calligraphers making wedding invitations or whatever, but is a poor model for teaching children or for everyday use for most people.

Italic (aka chancery cursive), a script of renaissance Italy, is a much better model.

Here’s a great page targeted at teaching children to write, with lots of exercises: http://briem.net

Also see http://luc.devroye.org/Briem1985-IcelandicMethod.pdf and http://66.147.242.192/~operinan/8/2/205.html

[boken]

Please don't assume my ignorance on other hands, or that I would argue in favor of teaching students the Palmer method. Teaching children outmoded systems ill suited to the instruments they are likely to have at hand is grossly unnecessary. (One of the reasons, incidentally, that I don't think students ought to be required to use italic nibs.) In its time, Palmer was taught under the assumption that a sizeable portion of each class would need a good—not decorative—hand for professional purposes at some point in their lives. That is no longer true.

Palmer descends from, but is assuredly not, Spencerian. Nor is it in any sense of the word fancy, except perhaps in comparison to blockletter print. It is a business hand designed for practical, quick, and legible business communications. It is not a coincidence that Palmer books begin with posture and movement exercises before students are even to lift a pen. It really is meant for everyday, injury-free use.

[jacobolus]

I wasn’t trying to disagree with your original comment, which makes great points.

My point is just that Palmer’s script isn’t practical/legible in comparison to italic. It’s filled with lots of little flourishes, makes it easy to write letters in a confusable way, and is very difficult for children to learn. The capital letters in particular are ridiculous. For someone highly trained, it can be fast, but it’s not inherently faster than other styles. It only seemed “professional” because it was the trendy style at the time.

As a curriculum/pedagogy, teachers using the Palmer method focused on drilling and discipline, the same “do it correctly or I’ll hit you” style common to instruction in the 19th and early 20th centuries.

Features of handwriting technique like using muscles in the arm to move the whole hand in preference to fixing the hand and mostly using finger motions can be applied to any writing style.

[ghaff]

>As a curriculum/pedagogy, teachers using the Palmer method focused on drilling and discipline, the same “do it correctly or I’ll hit you” style common to instruction in the 19th and early 20th centuries.

Where early 20th century extended into at least the 1960s at one Catholic grade school I could name :-)

[watmough]

There was a ruler poised over my knuckles well into the 70's...

[Retric]

There are two man limitations your ignoring. The arm is less precise so you need longer strokes, and changing pen pressure is much harder. Combined it's far harder to create a legable and fast script.

[jacobolus]

I’m not “ignoring” anything.

All fine hand control (fencing, kitchen knife work, writing, eating with chopsticks, soldering, knitting, playing a piano, ...) uses a combination of whole-forearm motion, wrist motion, and finger motion. The human brain/body are incredibly good at translating intended action into precisely choreographed movements combining multiple muscles. The question is how much of each type of motion to use; the more the work can be offloaded to the whole arm, and the more relaxed the wrist and fingers are, the more comfortable it is to do something for a long period of time. The fingers still do quite a bit of fine motion, regardless.

But my comment doesn’t even advocate any particular grip or hand movement technique; all I said is that those bits of advice from the Palmer school, under discussion by the top-of-thread poster, are applicable across various letter-shape styles. As far as I can tell that’s a completely uncontroversial statement.

[Retric]

There is a wide range of comfortable shapes people can make using whole hand motions, but arms have a vastly more momentum than the tip of a pen. So for example the center of an uppercase E is much harder to do using whole hand motions if you need to stop your arm motion in the middle to add details. It can be a fairly direct tradeoff between legibility and readability. Scripts that are less legible because they lack detail can quite simply be far easier to pull off.

[DanBC]

Briem is great, but can tend to very similar zig-zags when written at speed.

Modern systems aim for legibility, at speed.

Anyone wanting to see different systems used during 20th century might be interested in this book: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Handwriting-Twentieth-Century-Rosema...

[NoGravitas]

What are you thinking of as modern systems? In my experience, Palmer or Zaner-Bloser fails much worse at speed than chancery italic -- tending towards very similar loops :)

After college, my handwriting (Zaner-Bloser, as taught in elementary school) had deteriorated into a completely illegible scrawl. I taught myself to write again, using Arrighi's Operina and Briem's commentary. If I were homeschooling my children, I'd probably use either Getty-Dubay or Barchowsky.

[NoGravitas]

I strongly agree with you about chancery italic as a better "standard" handwriting than Palmerian and its relatives (e.g., Zaner-Bloser, which I was taught in elementary school). It degrades less at speed, and has the advantage that it can be taught first without joins(i.e. as printing) and then have joins added later. That is, the transition from print to cursive doesn't require learning completely new letter forms.

[jjoonathan]

> Spencerian script, an excessively flowery and not-all-that-legible form of writing

Agreed with one exception: capital A. The Spencerian A looks elegant while the Palmerian A looks like 3/4 of someone's bottom.

Everything else is a bit of a shrug in my book.

[rndn]

This hobby was missing in my life… I always thought writing cursive is oddly rhythmic.

[keithpeter]

I take your point, but it has to be said that the copyists and e.g. book keepers in 19th and 20th century wrote more slowly and methodically than students scribbling in a lecture. As the author Rosemary Sassoon quoted in OA put it...

"most of us need a flexible way of writing—fast, almost a scribble for ourselves to read, and progressively slower and more legible for other purposes."

I have a suspicion that we mainly use pens/paper for the writing fast bits and the purposes for which slower writing was needed are now achieved using our keyboards.

My personal test for a pen of any kind is to hold it lightly between thumb and index finger, and then drag the pen down a page so that the only force pressing the nib/ball/tip onto the paper is the pen's own weight. If it leaves a line then I can use it without hand pain for fairly long periods. If it does not, then I'll use it mainly for shopping lists and post-it notes. Most but not all fountain pens pass that test as do some of the gel pens that produce wider lines such as the Uniball signos. Felt pens e.g. Sharpie fine points can pass the test as well!

As mentioned in a sibling comment to this, italic writing was taught in most UK schools for most of the 1960s onwards.

[stewbrew]

Since Bic Cristal pens are my writing tool of choice, I have to say I find it strange you only mention Bic. Maybe a Bic pen isn't the right tool for how you write, but you can definitely use it without getting cramps.

[keithpeter]

Quote from Rosemary Sassoon's book in the OA...

"We must find ways of holding modern pens that will enable us to write without pain. …We also need to encourage efficient letters suited to modern pens."

Can you describe the way you hold your pen when writing and perhaps comment on the way you form your letters? I'm interested as I find the ubiquitous Bic impossible for more than a couple of sides.

[sandGorgon]

since you went through the research, what do you think of the other "methods". I ask because of this:

The Palmer Method began to fall out of popularity in the 1950s and was eventually supplanted by the Zaner-Bloser method, which sought to teach children manuscript before teaching them cursive, in order to provide them with a means of written expression as soon as possible, and thus develop writing skills.[6] The D'Nealian method, introduced in 1978, sought to address problems raised by the Zaner-Bloser method, returning to a more cursive style. The Palmer company stopped publishing in the 1980s.

[boken]

Zaner-Bloser, to my knowledge, is not so far off from Palmer except in its prescribed teaching style, as carried out over multiple years in a child's schooling. The final product, that is, looks quite similar, and the techniques are not so far off from one another.

D'Nealian was one of the final blows to nibbed pens in the U.S., even wiping them out of most Catholic schools: it was ballpoint from then on, almost without question. With longhand in the workplace largely supplanted by typewriters (and soon by personal computers), the public at large moved toward writing implements that were "easier to pick up." After all, few people have need for an instrument whose finickiness is made up for only by ease of use in long sittings. Ballpoints are among the easiest writing tools to care for; you basically keep them out of the wash. No ink refilling, no cleaning out converters between colors and brands of ink, no ink drying out after two weeks in the drawer, no worry of the dreaded "baby bottom nib" of new fountain pens. Buy a Bic, get on with life. There's much to recommend them. If your writing is purely utilitarian and miscellaneous—lists, thank-you notes, reminders, memos, etc.—you probably don't want to bother with anything more complicated.

As it was taught to me, D'Nealian seemed to be designed for easy entry, plain and simple. Many other methods tend to concentrate on technique early, quite apart from letter formation. In D'Nealian, students are taught the proper manner in which to hold a pen, but little else. And ballpoint pens don't really allow for the old "proper" grips that are still often taught, as other commenters have touched on. You have to exert force downward onto the page to get a ballpoint to write, while the old, loose tripod grip that is still recommended was designed for nibs that only needed to glance the page. So D'Nealian is associated in the minds of many students with cramping exertion, and forcing the pen into practice.

Anyway, as soon as you can hold a pen, you start tracing and copying letters. You basically "draw" them; the letter is taught, not the movement. That's about all I can remember.

I'm not in education, so my recommendation of one over another shouldn't be sought. But I would easily believe that there were great things to say about a system that gets children writing as soon as possible. This is particularly true if the manner in which we make our letters by hand will have no bearing on our future prospects. Which, of course, it almost certainly won't.

Personally, I think D'Nealian looks childish. And if you aren't writing with a flowing technique, I see little point for joining all letters in a word. Not that cursive has always been written with streamlined, flowing, efficient, "full-arm" movement, as in the Palmer method and some of its relations. But from my point of view, why waste the extra ink or graphite needed to join letters just to encourage cramp?

I don't think D'Nealian killed cursive; Palmer or similar methodologies, which are hellish to learn if you go by the book, would likely have done even worse. More or less everything that we deal with today is in manuscript, unless your apartment complex happens to have cursive lettering on its awning or something, in the hopes of looking nice. Or maybe if you're digging through old relatives' things. So it's natural for children not to care about it, and even resent the drills needed to learn it.

I think the argument that ballpoints killed cursive is naturally overstated. If ballpoints hadn't become popular around the same time that typewriters did, there may well still be need of different writing implements and quick cursive in the workplace. But certainly ballpoints do make cursive much more difficult.

[ghaff]

On the other hand, I certainly used ballpoint pens a lot when I was taking primarily handwritten notes or taking exams and I didn't get writer's cramp the way I do today if I write for any length of time. I never really cared for fountain pens and the mass market alternatives weren't available at the time so all the way through high school and college I mostly used ballpoints. I did type in college for papers and articles but notetaking was all by hand.

[philwelch]

Practice might be another aspect of this. When I was a young child, I had the ability to write longhand all day, and a callus on my middle finger where I rested my pen or pencil. As an adult, that is all gone.