Pens and penmanship: a brief history

By DAVID KITTREDGE
Good penmanship, employing the longhand, cursive, or script style of lettering has become a dying art form. I refer to it as an art form, because when done properly it is very pleasing to the eye. The cursive style of writing was invented to speed up the writing process in that all the letters in each individual word were joined for efficiency. Before the advent of the typewriter documents and personal correspondence were hand written and the cursive style of writing was usually used rather than block lettering. 

Thomas Jefferson penned the Declaration of Independence in June 1776. A few days later, it was rewritten in the form we see today by Timothy Matlack. In the first draft Jefferson wrote, not all the letters in each word had been joined in the true cursive style, so Matlack was brought in to rewrite the document, joining the individual letters to create the flowing aesthetic work that we know today. Both men used quill pens as their writing tool.

The quill pens used by Jefferson and Matlack were usually made from goose or turkey feathers which were carved at the tip of the quill with a pen knife in a V shape with a slit cut in the middle to create a slot for the ink to flow. The shaped nib end of the quill is then inserted into hot sand to temper or harden it for extended use. The natural hollow in the quill holds the ink when dipped into a container of ink.

Pens with metal nibs became widely used in the mid 1800s when their design was perfected to ensure ease of use. This type of dip pen was used in schools until the 1950s, when the ballpoint pen finally found favor. I remember seeing holes in the tops of the schoolroom desks when I was in elementary school. These holes in the desks were called ink wells and held small vats of ink into which the students dipped their steel tipped pens to load their pens with ink. I also recall seeing large ink stains on the tops of some of the desks where unfortunate students must have had accidents while using this dip pen method of writing. I imagine everyone was quite relieved when ballpoint pens came into vogue after World War II when they were mass produced and became economically priced.

I’ve noticed over the years that elderly women tend to have very nice penmanship, and when I see it I compliment them on it. I believe they have good handwriting because they were taught penmanship in school, as was I. When I was in the third grade, the school system employed an itinerant writing teacher to come into the classroom about once a month, and he would fill a section of the blackboard with a few letters of the alphabet for us to practice on. We were also taught to correctly hold a pencil or a pen to be able to comfortably hone our writing skills. The other students and I would practice our letters, many of us with our tongues partiality protruding out of our mouths, attempting to emulate the offerings of the handwriting instructor, trying desperately not to end up with hen-scratching. Hen-scratching was a term our full-time teacher used to describe our nearly illegible efforts, which would at times resemble the erratic marks left on the ground by a chicken searching for food with its foot.

The early ballpoint pens we used to write with were not designed very well. The pens could not be trusted as the were apt to leak ink onto our work papers at any given moment. In my case I quite often managed to get my hands involved in the mess, with resultant splotches of ink on my school work. Part of our grade included neatness and consequently my work and my grade were usually being jeopardized by these incorrigible utensils. The worst situation I experienced with these pens happened in freshman English class. The gal sitting at the desk in front of me was apparently deep in thought and had the back end of her green ink-filled pen in her mouth. The pen she was using was badly designed in that it had a hole in the back end where the pen cap was usually stored. She suddenly turned around to face me with her tongue sticking out. She had been sucking on the end of her green-and-white striped pen and had coated her tongue with green ink. She was silently imploring me to let her know as to whether or not she had actually ingested the ink. I merely nodded in the affirmative. The poor thing scurried from the room while pinching her newly lizard-like green appendage with her fingers. Fortunately she returned to school the next day with no ill effects, other than the fact that her tongue was still green. Thankfully, since that time ballpoint pen design has been improved.

In this century the cursive style of writing is seldom taught in schools because it is thought of as being archaic and no longer necessary. Typing on the computer keyboard is taught instead and it is a more efficient way to write and communicate in our computerized world. But research, like the 2014 study by Pam Mueller in the journal Psychological Science, have been done that compare the scores of students who take notes by hand versus students who solely use the keyboard in taking notes, and the students who take notes by hand have a better comprehension and recall of the subject of the note taking. According to Anne Mangen in her 2015 paper in the Journal of Writing Research, it has also been shown that students learn new words at a faster rate when the words are written by hand. Dyslexic “students have difficulty reading because their brains have difficulty associating sounds and letter combinations efficiently,” we heard on the PBS News Hour. “Cursive [writing] can help them with the decoding process because it integrates hand eye coordination, fine motor skills and other brain and memory functions.”

Cursive writing is now again a subject required by several state school boards in the United States.