The Art of Penmanship

Hands up if you read that heading and thought ‘penmanship – fancy word for handwriting right?’ Or something similar. A reasonable enough thought. But no. The art of penmanship refers to good handwriting – like calligraphy. Where the word handwriting means exactly what it says – writing by hand as opposed to using a typewriter or computer.

National Handwriting Day

Yes – there is one. It’s on the 23^rd of January. In another blog I had a bit of look at the history of handwriting. So, to complement that here’s a few points on the story of penmanship taken from this history of the same:

• The ancient Romans were among the first to develop a written script for their letters and transactions. By the 5^th C AD this early script lowercase letters and at times flowed like the cursive we know now.
• Following the fall of the Roman empire, penmanship became a discipline largely confined to monastic settings. Think here of mediaeval scripts of religious and classical texts.
  
  
• The price of parchment and demand for books rocketed in the later Middle Ages – so a denser writing style evolved in European languages. In the mid 15^th century, Johannes Gutenberg ran with this Gothic approach for his printing press.
  
  
• At length Italian humanists took exception to the heaviness of this look. They reverted to a Carolingian script and invented a cursive form of it known as Italic.
  
  
• Elegant handwriting started to be a status symbol. As a result, the 1700s saw penmanship schools educating generations of master scribes.
  
  
• Back when the United States was an infant country, it used professional penmen to copy official documents include the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence.
  
  
• In the mid-1800s, Platt Rogers Spencer tried to democratize American penmanship by creating a cursive writing system called the Spencerian method. If you’ve ever seen the original Coca-Cola logo that’s the Spencerian.

From there the slide, first to typewriters and then to word processing software has been a gradual one. It’s worth noting though that, as early as 1955, the Saturday Evening Post had dubbed the United States as a nation of scrawlers.

So, it’s been a slow old death then – of both handwriting and penmanship. Allegedly. I’m not so convinced. We all have times when we need handwriting for something or other. Even if it’s only as a functional tool to get ideas on paper without worrying about the script looking tidy and fluent.

After all – as the UK National Association of Handwriting says: to write is to be human.

PS: For more about writing’s evolution and its importance around the world, see these articles collected by the British Library.

What are your thoughts about handwriting? Do you think it’s a fast disappearing ancient art? Or does it remain a tool for the modern-day?

I make and sell writing instruments so it seems to me that handwriting – and penmanship – isn’t dead yet. If you still write by hand a lot what do you use? I find fountain pens still really popular, some people won't write with anything else.