[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.