Today is National Handwriting Day! National Handwriting Day falls on January 23rd every year, which is John Hancock‘s birthday. There are lots of reasons to celebrate handwriting. Studies show that writing by hand makes you smarter and improves memory. Handwritten documents can not only increase your own memory, but preserve your memories for future generations. […]
handwriting
Handwriting and fonts
Murielle passed along this site a few months ago, which allows you to create a font from your own handwriting and use it to send your friends an email. Alas, we were both too late, because the campaign ended last June and the service is no longer active. I still wanted to blog about it, […]
The 150-year-old complaint
I was flipping through this month’s issue of Scientific American when I noticed the following complaint: Has not the curse of steel pens swept over the land until decent handwriting is almost unknown? Do not ninety-nine persons in a hundred use steel pens, and has more than one out of the ninety-nine the effrontery to […]
Happy handwriting day!
Ok, so it isn’t a real holiday. But I still think handwriting is an important cause to promote in the age of electronics… according to the Writing Instrument Manufacturer’s Association (WIMA), which sponsors it, “National Handwriting Day is a chance for all of us to re-explore the purity and power of handwriting.” It falls on […]
Guest post: NaNoWriMo and young writers
Brent Acuff is a middle school band director in Hutto, TX. This is his fifth year participating in NaNoWriMo and his second year mentoring a Young Writer’s Program. I have read a lot lately about the decline of handwriting in public schools. Being a teacher in a public school myself, I would tend to agree […]
Small writing
Werner Herzog’s notebook, which I blogged about the other week, reminded me of a great post by John at Pencil Wrap. (I got to it via The Pen Addict and have been meaning to write about it ever since.) As a mid-height chicken scrawler, I’m always awed by examples of small writing, which look so […]
Letters and numbers and quirks
Handwriting is influenced by a number of different factors: age, patience, personality, where and how you learned to write… And although it’s a bit trivial, I love thinking about how handwriting habits evolve. I learned to write in the US, for example, but my father’s family is German, and I remember, at some point, deciding […]
Turn Your Handwriting Into A Font
Browsing the counters at Fahrney’s Pens in Washington, DC, I noticed some beautiful hand-lettered signs. They were made by one of the employees. She was kind enough to demo her skill, creating small, perfect letters effortlessly. I was amazed. I told her she ought to create a font from her hand-writing. A […]
Handwriting sleuths
Nifty little piece on Slate last week about forensic handwriting apparently, handwriting experts have been asked to help determine the authenticity of a postcard that was supposedly written by Linda Sohus after her 1985 disappearance. According to the article, those experts will examine: Twenty-one distinguishing characteristics. According to one standard textbook, that’s the number of […]
