It might not be a window to your soul but it’s better for your brain. Why writing – once an ancient ‘handicraft’ – is still worth doing well.
King Charles famously used a fountain pen and ink to scrawl his princely “black spider” memos to the British government about everything from the war in Iraq to the Patagonian toothfish. When David Bowie penned the lyrics tohe floated careful little bubbles over his “i”s. Leonardo da Vinci wrote in his neat Latin script from right to left and in mirror image, possibly, it is believed, to avoid smudges as a left-hander.
David Bowie wrote his Jean Genie lyrics on an A4 page in 1972, which sold for $110,000 at auction in 2023.Even Bowie got the treatment when his papers came up for auction in 2016. One magazine had a handwriting expert look over the longhand lyrics tofrom 1972. “For someone who was so experimental,” they noted, “it is surprising that his writing is quite slow, upright to slightly left, with self-protective arcade structures ...
The work of handwriting analyst Cliff Hobden includes checking whether signatures are genuine or suspect and scrutinising differences in letter design, proportion, alignment and spacing. Hobden, who does work for private investigation firm Lyonswood, says scrutinising handwriting is “analogous to a road accident”. “You look at the road from above, you’ve got a pair of skid marks.
By the 1970s, ornate variants had largely been erased in schools by writing styles that were easier to learn and faster to use. There are currently five main types of joined-up handwriting taught in Australia, all derived from Modern Cursive, a style imported from Britain in the mid-1980s, according to Kevin Brown, whose websiteoffers resources for students and educators.
“Here are some words from older kids,” she says, pointing to her screen. “What do you think that word is? Is it ‘lake’? No, ‘take’.” We peer at another word. “It looks like a Y but could be a funny-looking V or an incomplete H,” she says. We take a guess at a few more. Maybe “video”? Yes, “because of the E and O, you can sort of guess. A few illegible letters can change the whole word, making it impossible to read.
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