Lovers of Harry Potter books know that students at Hogwarts Academy write with quill pens, with eagle feathers ranked the best. Their writing is legible; it has to be; it’s carried by owls all over the wizard’s magic world.

Centuries ago, monks in Ireland painstakingly copied manuscripts spirited from the continent using colored inks and thick pen points — perhaps quill — on parchment. In Latin these illuminated pages from the Book of Kells are preserved under glass at Trinity College, Dublin, where throngs stroll by gazing in amazement at the beauty and artistic magnificence of the letters and the text.

Today the art of writing well seems to be dying. No one writes in longhand anymore — only to sign something. But even then some signatures are simply one initial and a straight line: or initials in such a scrawl they’re just as indecipherable.

That’s why we’re asked more frequently to print our names on documents today.

In an article in the August 21 New York Times, Henry E. Nass, a business-development consultant, bemoans the loss of cursive writing.

Although most people use typewriters or computers to write, some notable authors, he says, compose their first drafts in longhand, “a version that gives them a more concrete and sensuous feel for what they are writing. Having pen or pencil in hand is essential, these authors say, to helping them think.”

Nass feels that penmanship should be brought back to the grade schools because the process of learning to form the loops and curves teaches patience, discipline and the rewards of practice. Besides in 2005, students will have to handwrite the revised SAT essay.

I remember sitting at one of those old wooden desks with an inkwell in the right hand corner practicing, practicing, practicing (and I wasn’t even thinking of Carnegie Hall).


Don’t even suggest that the scratches are ones and zeros, forerunners of the computer language. We had to make the circles and lines using a metal replaceable nib on lined paper with the action coming from the shoulder. (Today we write, when we do, from the wrist — possibly a cause of carpel tunnel syndrome?) We had to form the letters the same way with the ascenders and descenders exactly the same height. Ts were crossed; Is dotted. The writing was legible.

Imagine the left-handed folks trying to scratch the lines and circles with their little hands crooked over the paper — inevitably ink went flying away into a classmate’s braids.

Ironically, most reporters take notes in longhand, most poets write their initial lines with a pencil or pen. Some accountants we know still enter numbers in their spread sheets with a pencil. Are they then the thinkers?
All this to say, as we mentioned in an earlier Adtalk, better we stuck with the pencil. Maybe people would stop and think about what they’re writing, ponder what they mean to convey. Maybe we should write out E-mail messages before we enter them in the computer. Maybe then, they’d make better sense. Maybe if we return to thinking, letting thoughts travel from the brain to paper through a pencil or pen guided by the whole arm and its multitude of muscles, we might become . . . .

Try the exercise, keeping the tops and bottoms of the circles and lines between two parallel lines and the circles touching each other.
Maybe Mr. Nass has a point.

--Suzanne Poor