Penmanship is the technique of writing with the hand using a writing instrument. Today, this is most commonly done with a pen, or pencil, but throughout history has included many different implements. The various generic and formal historical styles of writing are called "hands" while an individual's style of penmanship is referred to as "handwriting".
History
Origins
Further information: History of writing
The earliest example of systematic writing is the Sumerian pictographic system found on clay tablets, which eventually developed around 3200 BC into a modified version called cuneiform[1] which was impressed on wet clay with a sharpened reed.[2] This form of writing eventually evolved into an ideographic system (where a sign represents an idea) and then to a syllabic system (where a sign represents a syllable).[3] Developing around the same time, the Egyptian system of hieroglyphics also began as a pictographic script and evolved into a system of syllabic writing. Two cursive scripts were eventually created, hieratic, shortly after hieroglyphs were invented, and demotic (Egyptian) in the seventh century BC.[4] Scribes wrote these scripts usually on papyrus, with ink on a reed pen.
The first known alphabetical system came from the Phoenicians, who developed a vowel-less system of 22 letters around the eleventh century BC.[5] The Greeks eventually adapted the Phoenician alphabet around the eighth century BC. Adding vowels to the alphabet, dropping some consonants and altering the order, the Ancient Greeks developed a script which included only what we know of as capital Greek letters.[6] The lowercase letters of Classical Greek were a later invention of the Middle Ages. The Phoenician alphabet also influenced the Hebrew and Aramaic scripts, which follow a vowel-less system. One Hebrew script was only used for religious literature and by a small community of Samaritans up until the sixth century BC. Aramaic was the official script of the Babylonian, Assyrian and Persian empires and 'Square Hebrew' (the script now used in Israel) developed from Aramaic around the third century AD.[7]
Handwriting based on Latin script
Further information: Palaeography
The Romans in Southern Italy eventually adopted the Greek alphabet as modified by the Etruscans to develop Latin writing.[8] Like the Greeks, the Romans employed stone, metal, clay, and papyrus as writing surfaces. Handwriting styles which were used to produce manuscripts included square capitals, rustic capitals, uncials, and half-uncials.[9] Square capitals were employed for more-formal texts based on stone inscriptional letters, while rustic capitals freer, compressed, and efficient.[8] Uncials were rounded capitals (majuscules) that originally were developed by the Greeks in the third century BC, but became popular in Latin manuscripts by the fourth century AD. Roman cursive or informal handwriting started out as a derivative of the capital letters, though the tendency to write quickly and efficiently made the letters less precise.[10] Half-uncials (minuscules) were lowercase letters, which eventually became the national hand of Ireland.[9] Other combinations of half-uncial and cursive handwriting developed throughout Europe, including Visigothic, and Merovingian.[11]
At the end of the eighth century, Charlemagne decreed that all writings in his empire were to be written in a standard handwriting, which came to be known as Carolingian minuscule.[12] Alcuin of York was commissioned by Charlemagne to create this new handwriting, which he did in collaboration with other scribes and based on the tradition of other Roman handwriting.[13] Carolingian minuscule was used to produce many of the manuscripts from monasteries until the eleventh century and most lower-case letters of today's European scripts derive from it.[14]
Gothic or black-letter script, evolved from Carolingian, became the dominant handwriting from the twelfth century until the Italian Renaissance (1400–1600 AD). This script was not as clear as the Carolingian, but instead was narrower, darker, and denser. Because of this, the dot above the i was added in order to differentiate it from the similar pen strokes of the n, m, and u. Also, the letter u was created as separate from the v, which had previously been used for both sounds.[15] Part of the reason for such compact handwriting was to save space, since parchment was expensive.[16] Gothic script, being the writing style of scribes in Germany when Gutenberg invented movable type, became the model for the first type face. Another variation of Carolingian minuscule was created by the Italian humanists in the fifteenth century, called by them littera antiqua and now called humanist minuscule.[17] This was a combination of Roman capitals and the rounded version of Carolingian minuscule. A cursive form eventually developed, and it became increasingly slanted due to the quickness with which it could be written. This manuscript handwriting, called cursive humanistic, became known as the typeface Italic used throughout Europe.[18]
Copperplate engraving influenced handwriting as it allowed penmanship copybooks to be more widely printed. Copybooks first appeared in Italy around the sixteenth century; the earliest writing manuals were published by Sigismondo Fanti and Ludovico degli Arrighi.[19] Other manuals were produced by Dutch and French writing masters later in the century, including Pierre Hamon.[19] However, copybooks only became commonplace in England with the invention of copperplate engraving. Engraving could better produce the flourishes in handwritten script, which helped penmanship masters to produce beautiful examples for students.[15] Some of these early penmanship manuals included those of Edward Cocker, John Seddon, and John Ayer. By the eighteenth century, schools were established to teach penmanship techniques from master penmen, especially in England and the United States.[16] Penmanship became part of the curriculum in American schools by the early 1900s, rather than just reserved for specialty schools teaching adults penmanship as a professional skill. Several different penmanship methods have been developed and published, including Spencerian, Getty-Dubay, Barchowsky Fluent Handwriting, Icelandic (Italic), Zaner-Bloser, and D’Nealian methods among others used in American education.[16]
Example of semi-cursive style Chinese calligraphy
Handwriting based on Chinese script
Writing systems developed in East Asia include Chinese and Japanese writing systems. Chinese characters represent whole morphemes rather than individual sounds, and consequently are visually far more complex than European scripts; in some cases their pictographic origins are still visible. The earliest form of Chinese was written on bones and shells (called Jiaguwen) in the fourteenth century BC. Other writing surfaces used during this time included bronze, stone, jade, pottery, and clay, which became more popular after the twelfth century BC.[20] Greater Seal script (Dazhuan) flourished during 1100 BC and 700 BC and appeared mainly in bronze vessels.[21] Lesser Seal script (Xiaozhuan) is the precursor of modern complex Chinese script, which is more stylized than the Greater Seal.[21]
Chinese handwriting is considered an art, more so than illuminated manuscripts in Western culture. Calligraphy is widely practiced in China, which employs scripts such as Kaishu (standard), Xingshu (semi-cursive), and Caoshu (cursive).[22] Chinese calligraphy is meant to represent the artistic personality in a way western calligraphy cannot, and therefore penmanship is valued higher than in any other nation.[23] Standard Script (Kaishu) is main traditional script used today.
Japanese writing evolved from Chinese script and Chinese characters, called kanji, or ideograms, were adopted to represent Japanese words and grammar.[24] Kanji were simplified to create two other scripts, called hiragana and katakana. Hiragana is the more widely used script in Japan today, while katakana, meant for formal documents originally, is used similarly to italics in alphabetic scripts.[25]
Teaching methods and history
Books used in North America
'The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog', written by two different hands
Platt Rogers Spencer is known as the "Father of American Penmanship". His writing system was first published in 1848, in his book Spencer and Rice's System of Business and Ladies' Penmanship. The most popular Spencerian manual was The Spencerian Key to Practical Penmanship, published by his sons in 1866. This "Spencerian Method" Ornamental Style was taught in American schools until the mid-1920s, and has seen a resurgence in recent years through charter schools and home schooling using revised Spencerian books and methods produced by former IAMPETH president Michael Sull (born 1946).
George A. Gaskell (1845–1886), a student of Spencer, authored two popular books on penmanship, Gaskell's Complete Compendium of Elegant Writing and The Penman's Hand-Book (1883). Louis Henry Hausam published the "New Education in Penmanship" in 1908, called "the greatest work of the kind ever published."[26]
Many copybooks were produced in North America at the start of the 20th century, mostly for Business Style penmanship (a simplified form of Ornamental Style). These included those produced by A. N. Palmer, a student of Gaskell, who developed the Palmer Method, as reflected in his Palmer's Guide to Business Writing, published in 1894. Also popular was Zaner-Bloser Script, introduced by Charles Paxton Zaner (15 February 1864 – 1 December 1918) and Elmer Ward Bloser (6 November 1865 – 1929) of the Zanerian Business College. The A. N. Palmer Company folded in the early 1980s.
Modern Styles include more than 200 published textbook curricula including: D'Nealian Script (a derivative of the Palmer Method which uses a slanted, serifed manuscript form followed by an entirely joined and looped cursive), Modern Zaner-Bloser which accounts for the majority of handwriting textbook sales in the US, A Beka, Schaffer, Peterson, Loops and Groups, McDougal, Steck Vaughn, and many others.
Italic Styles include Getty-Dubay (slightly slanted), Eager, Portland, Barchowsky, Queensland, etc.
Other copybook styles that are unique and do not fall into any previous categories are Smithhand, Handwriting without Tears, Ausgangsschrift, Bob Jones, etc. These may differ greatly from each other in a variety of ways. The first made video for correcting messy handwriting especially for people with ADHD and or dysgraphia was "Anyone Can Improve Their Own Handwriting" by learning specialist Jason Mark Alster MS.c.
Schools in East Asia
A typical Kanji practice notebook of a 3rd grader
By the nineteenth century, attention was increasingly given to developing quality penmanship in Eastern schools. Countries which had a writing system based on logographs and syllabaries placed particular emphasis on form and quality when learning.[27] These countries, such as China and Japan, have pictophonetic characters which are difficult to learn. Chinese children start by learning the most fundamental characters first and building to the more esoteric ones. Often, children trace the different strokes in the air along with the teacher and eventually start to write them on paper.[27]
In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, there have been more efforts to simplify these systems and standardize handwriting. For example, in China in 1955, in order to respond to illiteracy among people, the government introduced a Romanized version of Chinese script, called Pinyin.[28] However, by the 1960s, people rebelled against the infringement upon traditional Chinese by foreign influences.[28] This writing reform did not help illiteracy among peasants. Japanese also has simplified the Chinese characters it uses into scripts called kana. However kanji are still used in preference over kana in many contexts, and a large part of children's schooling is learning kanji.[29] Moreover, Japan has tried to hold on to handwriting as an art form while not compromising the more modern emphasis on speed and efficiency. In the early 1940s, handwriting was taught twice, once as calligraphy in the art section of school curricula, and then again as a functional skill in the language section.[30] The practical function of penmanship in Japan did not start to be questioned until the end of the twentieth century; while typewriters proved more efficient than penmanship in the modern West, these technologies had a hard time transferring to Japan, since the thousands of characters involved in the language made typing unfeasible.[30]
Motor control
Handwriting requires the motor coordination of multiple joints in the hand, wrist, elbow, and shoulder to form letters and to arrange them on the page. Holding the pen and guiding it across paper depends mostly upon sensory information from skin, joints and muscles of the hand and this adjusts movement to changes in the friction between pen and paper.[31] With practice and familiarity, handwriting becomes highly automated using motor programs stored in motor memory.[32] Compared to other complex motor skills handwriting is far less dependent on a moment-to-moment visual guidance.[33][34]
Research in individuals with complete peripheral deafferentation with and without vision of their writing hand finds increase of number of pen touches, increase in number of inversions in velocity, decrease of mean stroke frequency and longer writing movement duration. The changes show that cutaneous and proprioceptive feedback play a critical role in updating the motor memories and internal models that underlie handwriting. In contrast, sight provides only a secondary role in adjusting motor commands.[34]
See also
Typography – the appearance, arrangement, and style of printed text
Types of writing
Handwriting, a person's particular style of writing by pen or a pencil
Hand (handwriting), in paleography, refers to a distinct generic style of penmanship
Block letters – also called printing, is the use of the simple letters children are taught to write when first learning
Calligraphy – the art of writing itself, generally more concerned with aesthetics for decorative effect than normal handwriting.
Cursive – any style of handwriting written in a flowing (cursive) manner, which connects many or all of the letters in a word, or the strokes in a CJK character or other grapheme.
Studies of writing and penmanship
Chirography – handwriting, its style and character
Diplomatics – forensic paleography (seeks the provenance of written documents).
Graphonomics – is the interdisciplinary scientific study of the handwriting process and the handwritten product
Palaeography – the study of script.
Penmanship-related professions
Letterer – comic book lettering profession.
Marriage certificates design or calligraphy
Technical lettering – the process of forming letters, numerals, and other characters in technical drawing.
Questioned document examiner – forensic science discipline which includes handwriting examination
Penmanship instructor, at a Vocational school
Wedding invitations design
Other penmanship-related topics
Handwriting recognition – the ability of a computer to receive and interpret handwritten input
Regional handwriting variation
Signature
Spencerian script is a script style that was used in the United States from approximately 1850 to 1925[1] and was considered the American de facto standard writing style for business correspondence prior to the widespread adoption of the typewriter.
Platt Rogers Spencer, whose name the style bears, used various existing scripts as inspiration to develop a unique oval-based penmanship style that could be written very quickly and legibly to aid in matters of business correspondence as well as elegant personal letter-writing.
Spencerian script was developed in 1840, and began soon after to be taught in the school Spencer established specifically for that purpose. He quickly turned out graduates who left his school to start replicas of it abroad, and Spencerian Script thus began to reach the common schools. Spencer never saw the great success that his penmanship style enjoyed because he died in 1864, but his sons took upon themselves the mission of bringing their late father's dream to fruition.[2]
This they did by distributing Spencer's previously unpublished book, Spencerian Key to Practical Penmanship, in 1866. Spencerian script became the standard across the United States and remained so until the 1920s when the spreading popularity of the typewriter rendered its use as a prime method of business communication obsolete.
The text in Ford Motor Company's logo is written in Spencerian script, as is the Coca-Cola logo.[3]
It was gradually replaced in primary schools with the simpler Palmer Method developed by Austin Norman Palmer.
See also
Copperplate script, a style of calligraphic writing most commonly associated with English Roundhand
D'Nealian, a style of writing and teaching cursive and manuscript adapted from the Palmer Method
Palmer Method, a form of penmanship instruction developed in the late 19th century that replaced Spencerian script as the most popular handwriting system in the United States
Round hand, a style of handwriting and calligraphy originating in England in the 1660s
Zaner-Bloser, another streamlined form of Spencerian script
Teaching script
Wyoming County is a county in the U.S. state of New York in the state's western area. As of the 2020 census, the population was 40,531.[2] The county seat is Warsaw.[3] The name is modified from a Lenape (Delaware) Native American word meaning "broad bottom lands". Wyoming County was formed from Genesee County in 1841. Wyoming County is one of New York's mostly agricultural counties. With an estimated 47,500 dairy cows in the county, there are more cattle in Wyoming County than people.[4]
As with the rest of Western New York, Wyoming County was part of disputed territory throughout the 17th and 18th centuries, claimed by the Massachusetts Bay Colony, Connecticut Colony, Pennsylvania Colony, New York Colony, and New France. New York's claims were not recognized until the Treaty of Hartford was ratified in 1786 and were not actively asserted until the Holland Purchase.
In regard to New York's claim, as of 1683 the present Wyoming County was part of Albany County of the Province of New York. This was an enormous county, including the northern part of New York State as well as all of the present State of Vermont and, in theory, extending westward to the Pacific Ocean. This county was reduced in size on July 3, 1766, by the creation of Cumberland County, and further on March 16, 1770, by the creation of Gloucester County, both containing territory now in the state of Vermont.
On March 12, 1772, what was left of Albany County was split into three parts, one remaining under the name Albany County. One of the other pieces, Tryon County, contained the western portion (and thus, since no western boundary was specified, theoretically still extended west to the Pacific). The eastern boundary of Tryon County was approximately five miles west of the present city of Schenectady, and the county included the western part of the Adirondack Mountains and the area west of the West Branch of the Delaware River. The area then designated as Tryon County now includes 37 counties of New York State. The county was named for William Tryon, colonial governor of New York.
In the years prior to 1776, most of the Loyalists in Tryon County fled to Canada. In 1784, following the peace treaty that ended the American Revolutionary War, the name of Tryon County was changed to Montgomery County in order to honor the general, Richard Montgomery, who had captured several places in Canada and died attempting to capture the city of Quebec, replacing the name of the hated British governor.
In 1789, Ontario County was split off from Montgomery as part of the establishment of the Morris Reserve.
Almost all of the land west of the Genesee River, including all of present-day Wyoming County, was part of the Holland Land Purchase in 1793. It was sold privately to settlers through the Holland Land Company's office in Batavia, starting in 1801.
Genesee County was created by a splitting of Ontario County in 1802 to govern the land acquired in the Holland Purchase. This territory was much larger than the present Genesee County. It was reduced in size in 1806 by creating Allegany County; again in 1808 by creating Cattaraugus, Chautauqua, and Niagara counties. Niagara County at that time also included the present Erie County.
In 1821, portions of Genesee County were combined with portions of Ontario County to create Livingston and Monroe counties.
Genesee County was further reduced in size in 1824 by creating Orleans County.
Finally, in 1841, Wyoming County was created from the southern half of Genesee County, the northwest corner of Allegany County, and a small portion of the northeast corner of Cattaraugus County.
The Town of Gainesville was established in 1814 from part of the Town of Warsaw. The original name was "Hebe." The Town of Gainesville is the birthplace of David Starr Jordan, the first president of Stanford University; as well as Ella Hawley Crossett, prominent activist in the women's suffrage movement.[4]
Nearby :
Larger Settlements
# Location Population Type Sector
1 Perry 3,673 Village Northeast
2 †Warsaw 3,473 Village Northeast
3 ‡Attica 2,547 Village Northwest
4 Arcade 2,071 Village Southwest
5 Varysburg 1,646 Village Southeast
6 Castile 1,015 Village Southeast
7 Silver Springs 782 Village Southeast
8 Strykersville 647 CDP Northwest
9 Bliss 527 CDP Southwest
10 Wyoming 434 Village Northeast
11 Pike 371 Hamlet/CDP Southeast
12 Gainesville 304 Village Southeast
Towns
Arcade
Attica
Bennington
Castile
Covington
Eagle
Gainesville
Genesee Falls
Java
Middlebury
Orangeville
Perry
Pike
Sheldon
Warsaw
Wethersfield
Varysburg
Hamlets
Portageville
Silver Lake