Writing wrongs. Lloyd Reynolds and the fine italic hand. From Newsweek, 1964.
Editor's note: This article was published in Newsweek magazine forty four years ago this week, on October 5, 1964. The issue's cover story reported initial findings issued in The Warren Commission Report. Tucked snugly into a column titled Education, we spied this call-to-action from Lloyd Reynolds, who at the time was teaching art and calligraphy at Reed College. Reynolds suggested that Palmerian script – with its many loops, tails and curlicues – should be supplanted with an "uncomplicated fifteenth century style called italic cursive." We do hope you'll enjoy.
Eighty years ago, an obscure Iowa schoolteacher named Austin N. Palmer introduced a method of handwriting which, in almost a score of variations, has become an educational standard. When done well, the ornate Palmer method produces a script that is easy to read and not tiring to write. But in careless hands, Palmerian script becomes a scrawl, and more and more these days, as evidenced by the inscrutable notes left for baby-sitters and paper boys, American penmanship resembles Persian cuneiform. Now, as Prof. Lloyd J. Reynolds sees it, the handwriting is on the wall for the Palmer method.
"Learning Palmer takes long hours of dull practice," said Reynolds, who teaches art and calligraphy at Oregon's highly rated Reed College. "Pupils simply don't put in the time it takes to learn it properly. And it's impractical in the classroom. The student with a notebook on his knee or on the arm of a chair hasn't got room to make the necessary sweeping movements of his forearm. It's like a baseball pitcher trying to warm up inside the dugout."
Reynolds would like to change the script. The 62-year-old professor believes that an uncomplicated fifteenth century style called italic cursive is vastly superior to Palmer writing with its many loops, tails, and curlicues. "Italic," says Reynolds, "is relatively easy to learn, it is legible and attractive, and speed comes with use, not dreary drill."
In his classes on campus and at the Portland Art Museum, handwriting doctor Reynolds prescribes an easy-step method to cure chronic student scrawl. He suggests first that the "patients" in his two-hour-a-day six-week handwriting course give equal height to the various elements in their letters. Then he makes them reduce the excessive slope of their writing and eliminate most of the loops. Later, they learn which letters to connect and which to leave unjoined. Finally, Reynolds shows students how to introduce shading and contrast in their penmanship. "By then," says Reynolds, "they're writing a script based on italic and have switched to a broadnibbed pen."
Art? While italic cursive is used extensively in English classrooms, Reynolds, who thinks art instructors should teach handwriting, knows of only one school system – in suburban Rochester, N.Y. – where it is taught in the U.S. But in the age of the telephone and typewriter, when most messages are phoned and most papers typed, why should students with so much else to learn spend any more time than necessary on handwriting?
Reynolds, who taught himself italic cursive 30 years ago after students complained about his penmanship, says handwriting can be a splendid form of self expression. "The pen dances across the paper," he says, "leaving a trail of action and form, graceful and satisfying. Handwriting is the poor man's art."
But Prof. C.W. Hunnicutt, chairman of the department of elementary education at Syracuse and recording secretary of the Handwriting Foundation in Washington, D.C., thinks that italic may establish a pedagogical niche for itself but that it won't become the dominant system. "It's the newness that attracts students to italic," says Hunnicutt.
"Despite many handicaps in teaching penmanship today," Hunnicutt contends, "the average kid's handwriting at the fifth- or sixth-grade level now is superior to that of his counterpart a generation ago. Teachers are focusing less on busywork and more on diagnosing individual problems. Art form or not, there will always be a need for good handwriting. We can't carry typewriters in our vest pockets."