Democratic Sentinel, Volume 17, Number 23, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 23 June 1893 — WRITE WORSE THAN EVER. [ARTICLE]

WRITE WORSE THAN EVER.

Author)) Progrc *b»K Backward Steadily In the Matter of Chlrography. It is true that handwriting is growing worse and worse all the world over. This is the statement of Mr. Jackson in his “Theory and Practice of Handwriting.” Official reports seem to confirm Mr. Jackson’s belief. On the other hand, as pointed out by the Boston News, persons of considerable experience in reading literary manuscripts and examination papers of the higher orders can hardly agree with him. As a rule, the manuscripts of novels and examination papers are legible and even rather pleasing. The exceptions are scarcely 4 per cent, in examinations; in novels an author foolishly sends in a mere rough draft, with erasions and additions tacked on by pins or waste ends of postage-stamp paper. But these examples of handwriting are the work, except as regards many novels, of rather highly educated persons, and they throw no light on the hands of people far from literacy. The letters of servant girls and of other people without aspirations to culture are often penned in excellent and characteristic hands, and, on the whole, we do not think that the age writes ill, as a general rule. Naturally people who have to write great quantities of “copy” for the press or for other purposes find their hands, if Boman and fine at first, gradually

disappearing in a scrawl due to fatigue. A number of popular and prolific authors are suffering from “writers’ cramp,” and their hands must have been degenerating in the progress of the malady. To do the work with the minimum of fatlgufj Is the author’s object, and certainly it seems as if the men and women with the most slovenly hands suffer least from writers’ cramp. Mr. Jackson, however, thinks that writ Ing IsftryW, M is due to bad teaching, promiscuous!, Selected models (he prefers examples on the blackboard to the headlines), and, above all, the error Is in sloping as opposed to perpendicular or vertical writing. The natural man, he thinks, sits upright to his work, and would write perpendicular but for the prevalence of sloping copies. From these comes the habit of sprawling sideways at the desk, and that habit is bad for the eyes, bad for the spine, bad for discipline in the school (as it facilitates tattling), and, finally, bad for the handwriting. The slope keeps on running down hill till it loses itself In an indecipherable scrawl.