Theory of Spencerian Penmanship - writing that trains you how to think | Hacker News Reader

Theory of Spencerian Penmanship - writing that trains you how to think

iampeth.com

21 pointsaggieben6 comments

On one hand, this looks very cool... On the other, there isn't much more frustrating on the net than trying to read a book that has been scanned into images.

The mighty hacker would make a three-liner bash script to pull all images with wget, echo a .tex file with graphicx image figures, and pdflatex it.

Please do.

I have the Mott reprint and workbooks for this but still haven't cracked them. More's the pity. I do enjoy merely studying the system, but they're really meant to be used, not just read. Unfortunately for the left-handed, due to its era this book makes no allowance for chirality. If you're a lefty who furthermore hooks your hand over to write, well...

Once, men and women of letters took joy in writing and in penmanship and wrote much. Today, especially in the sciences, we find writing tedious, excuse our poor handwriting and avoid it when we can. Perhaps the cycle started before the era of the computer, when the joy of penmanship was drained out of our learning of writing.

Here's a few videos of experts by way of an antidote:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C09ebUBAd_s

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hFs84W50kzc

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GjUQ4CckYNU (left-handed!)

Unfortunately for the left-handed, due to its era this book makes no allowance for chirality. If you're a lefty who furthermore hooks your hand over to write, well...

This occurred to me while reading through the theory book. What if you made a pen that, instead of continuing straightly from the handle into a tip, curved inward? It seems to me the real difference between writing left handed and right handed is that lefties have to push and righties can drag.

If the tip of your pen curved inward, lefties could do a lot more dragging (and maybe all dragging, if you held the pen right).

Am I the only one who had vivid memory of the smell of old books, when looking at the scans?

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