Astral Facts, January 2010

The Handwriting on the Wall

Astral: (Theosophy) Consisting of, belonging to, or designating, a kind of supersensible substance alleged to be next above the tangible world in refinement; as, astral spirits; astral bodies of persons; astral current.

If you’re like me, you probably were occupied with so many things that you missed the celebration for “National Handwriting Day,” which occurred, as it does every year, on January 23rd, the birthday of John Hancock, one of the most famous for handwriting.

And if you’re like most people, you might be thinking it’s not really a big deal – anything worth noting is already in our faces via email, texting, “all a-Twitter,” or other such channels of Twaddle.

People don’t write in diaries or journals any more – we have our personal blogs and Facebook pages to satisfy the primordial autobiographical urges – why bother with the clutter and mess of pen and ink!?

Why, indeed?


The recent issue of American Educator, Winter 2009-201, published by the American Federation of Teachers, addresses the topic of handwriting skills and composition and higher level thinking skills. The author (Steve Graham) notes that children often find that their ideas flow much faster than their hand moves, and they get frustrated at not being able to write down their thoughts fast enough. http://archive.aft.org/pubs-reports/american_educator/index.htm

As a result, gaps occur while the mind must slow down and wait. When the hand has finished putting down the thoughts from a few minutes ago, the mind has often raced ahead and the next idea jotted down has fluency failings or it is written so illegibly that the content is totally lost. The student gets frustrated, decides “I can’t write; I’m not a writer,” and the self-fulfilling prophecy is verified when the student does fail in writing. We don’t have time in our elementary schools just to focus on handwriting itself, copying significant passages from significant tomes – handwriting is in the tombs.

And today, we really don’t need to write our thoughts out in much detail. Consequently, if we do, the lack of skill and practice is a handicap. For example, Kitty Burns Florey, the author of Script and Scribble: The Rise and Fall of Handwriting, notes in the January 29th entry in her blog,

But I think it’s too soon to declare legible penmanship a lost art. Maybe the problem lies in calling it an art rather than a simple necessity like knowing how to add and subtract. Hardly a day goes by when the average person doesn’t have to write something on paper. We take notes at meetings, we make lists, we address an envelope, we send a thank-you letter, we keep diaries. A radio talk show host who interviewed me this morning had jotted down some things he wanted to discuss but confessed he couldn’t read it back so had to wing it.
http://blog.coreknowledge.org/2009/01/29/handwriting-is-still-alive/

Back in 1986 (February 24th), Lance Morrow’s whimsical article in Time magazine entitled “Scribble, Scribble, Eh, Mr. Toad?” extends Kenneth Grahame’s Wind in the Willows story to Mr. Toad discovering mechanical writing tools and progressing much the way he did with his vehicle fetishes. What if Toad (or any of us) found those no longer available, relegating himself back to the primitive mode of communicating in handwritten form? Perhaps, we might discover,

Toad drove his pencil onward. Grudgingly, he thought, This is rather interesting. His handwriting, spasmodic at first, began to settle after a time into rhythmic, regular strokes, growing stronger, like an oarsman on a long haul. Words come differently this way, thought Toad. To write a word is to make a thought an object. A thought flying around like electrons in the atmosphere of the brain suddenly coalesces into an object on the page (or computer screen). But when written in longhand, the word is a differently and more personally styled object than when it is arrayed in linear file, each R like every other R. It is not an art form, God knows, in Toad script, not Japanese calligraphy. .....

Writing in longhand does change one's style, Toad came to believe, a subtle change, of pace, of rhythm. Sentences in longhand seemed to take on some of the sinuosities of script. As he read his pages, Toad considered: The whole toad is captured here. L'ecriture, c'est l'homme (Handwriting is the man). Or: L'ecriture c'est le crapaud (Handwriting is the toad). http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,960730,00.html

OMG! 2 ltl time, 2 mch 2 say!
@TEOTD IWAWO!
But ICBW,
TTFN.

(Oh my goodness, too little time and too much to say.
At the end of the day, I want a way out!
But it could be worse.
Ta-Ta for now.)

Walter Lowe

Astral Facts is a monthly presentation of Humanities Science, produced in the bowels of the
Humanities Science offices.