In this age of e-mail, internal fax modems and other keyboard-driven communication tools - coupled with the hectic pace of daily living - composing a handwritten note in neat penmanship seems like the equivalent of a chisel and stone.
The rush to get your point across in the easiest, quickest way possible has caused an erosion of penmanship skills across the land, according to cursive watchers.Handwriting so sloppy it can't be deciphered costs American businesses about $200 million annually and creates untold loss of productivity, according to officials of Zaner-Bloser, an Ohio-based publisher of handwriting texts for students in kindergarden through eighth grade.
Zaner-Bloser dominates the lucrative classroom market today, having displaced the Palmer method as the pre-eminent handwriting teaching tool nationwide.
If you've been in elementary classrooms and seen the wrap-around poster displaying properly cursive alphabet letters, you've encountered the long reach of Zaner-Bloser.
But there are also signposts of the decline of handwriting. Consider:
- About 400,000 rolls of processed film annually can't be returned to their owner by Eastman Kodak because the return address is illegible, according to the Rochester film giant.
- An estimated 10 million pieces of mail can't be delivered each year and expire in the dead-letter pool because of undecipherable handwritten addresses, costing the U.S. Postal Service $4 million annually.
- Physicians remain stereotypically sloppy handwriters. A 1995 survey of pharmacists in eight states revealed that 93 percent said they had lost time trying to make out the scrawl on a prescription and that they call for clarification on roughly 20 percent of handwritten hospital medication orders.
These are the sort of statistics that fuel Kate Gladstone's quixotic one-woman crusade from a basement office in her Albany, N.Y., home to rewrite the rules of handwriting across America.
"Handwriting has gone downhill for the last 500 years, and my life's mission is to get the quality back up and to have us writing legibly and beautifully by the year 2022," says Gladstone, 33, who works with individual clients in a service she calls Handwriting Repair.
The year 2022 is significant to Gladstone because that will mark the 500th anniversary of the publication of a seminal text in Rome in 1522 by Ludovico Degli Arrighi translated as "The First Writing Book."
Gladstone has adopted Arrighi's calligraphic cursive from the Renaissance as the stylistic windmill toward which she tilts. She says it's more sensible than the methods taught in today's classroom because it's easier to learn, faster and is less likely to be abandoned in adulthood.
Gladstone, who writes with calligraphy pens in an ancient flowing style that is an homage to Arrighi, considers the Zaner-Bloser and Palmer methods as so much corporate chicanery.
"I've had teachers call me un-American, a heretic," Gladstone says. "I'm talking about making major changes in the way we teach handwriting and teachers resist change. I'm convinced when people know the whole story, they'll see my point."
Gladstone launches into a critique of Austin Palmer, father of the Palmer Method - "the man we all love to hate," she adds. Palmer parlayed his Midwestern roots and public relations savvy at the turn of the century into placing his handwriting textbooks widely throughout parochial schools.
The system swept the nation, indoctrinating generations of elementary school students in the rubric of margins, arrangement, balance, slant, spacing and precision.
Gladstone is an unlikely iconoclast. She hit a developmental wall in elementary school in Brooklyn with the onset of handwriting instruction.
"My teachers said I was an idiot because I couldn't learn cursive," Gladstone recalls.
Eventually, Gladstone was diagnosed as having neurological problems, including attention deficit disorder, dysgraphia and dyslexia. The calligraphic writing style she settled upon helped her overcome writing difficulties, and she earned a bachelor's degree in linguistics from the University of Pennsylvania and a master's degree in library sciences from Long Island University.
Gladstone's handwriting expertise is self-taught. She charges $15 to $30 per hour for consultation and handwriting instruction and has worked with a handful of doctors, dentists and lawyers - including her husband.
Gladstone sees her pragmatic approach to handwriting as liberating.
"There are no cursive police who are going to come and arrest you if you write my way," she says.
That's missing the point, according to Christy Clemente, third-grade teacher at St. Gregory's School For Boys. Clemente is just two years out of Saint Bonaventure University, where her bachelor's degree in elementary education included not so much as a single class in teaching handwriting. Yet she represents a new generation of teachers who still place value on artfully constructed p's and q's.
"Handwriting is a reflection of who you are, and you can be the smartest person in the world, but if nobody can read your ideas, what good are they?" asks Clemente, who teaches penmanship based on both Zaner-Bloser and Palmer textbooks through handwritten assignments rather than rote drill.
Handwriting can offer glimpses into the writer's personality, Clemente believes. Without looking at names, she can identify her students by their cursive style.
"Here's my perfectionist," she says. "There's my rusher. Here's my creative one. . . ."
No matter what your handwriting style, there's no denying it's yours. To experts, a person's handwriting is as individual as a fingerprint, says Dale Pager, who works with Probst Investigations, a Loudonville, N.Y., firm that conducts handwriting analysis, particularly in lawsuits involving contested wills, contracts and deeds.
"The reality is that you can't disguise your handwriting, be it good or bad," Pager says.