I was in year 1 (or whatever it might be called in various other parts of the world, when you are five and start school) only 15 years ago, and even that recently I was very clearly told that you do not write the letter a with two stories. Only single storey. And until a few months ago I have done just as I was taught. Now I use double-stories in my handwriting and I hugely prefer them.
Can’t say I got in trouble though, I was always one to try and please the teacher back in primary school :P
I was a big fan of adding serifs to my letters if I got done early. I loved the double-story “a”, and especially the double-story “g”. I stopped doing that around 4th grade or so.
When I reached the ripe old age of six or seven years, one day one of my teachers made my mum come in to the school and made her watch me write out the letters of the alphabet, because they were concerned about me drawing my stems from top to bottom instead of bottom to top like all the much-alike kids, and presumably adults, did. There were a few other unusual ways I had of drawing characters which they pointed out and made my mum observe me comitting to paper with a pencil.
She looked at this jerk teacher and said, “Yes?” The teacher hummed and hah-ed, but was unable to really say that what I was doing was bad. He shrugged and said, “It’s just unusual that’s all. No big deal, but we would like him to draw his letters the same way everybody else does.” My mum laughed and told him what a ridiculous waste of everybody’s time he had made. My method of writing letters was different but my letters did not look substantially different from accepted norms.
Had I been armed at the time with the kind of language skills acquired by the age of thirty-three, I would have told that teacher to “stick your draconian pendantry up your arse for nothing and fack off while you’re doing it.”
So instead I had to settle for staring at him as if he had green skin and antennas coming out of his head.
I made my “b”s look like “d”s. I knew what they were. Why didn’t Miss Whatshername?
See, here’s the thing... The b is loyal, conservative and, well, boring. It points the same way as it’s dad, the B. The d, on the otherhand, is all about exploring and adventure. It’s a rebel. I doesn’t follow in it’s D dad’s footsteps.
I can remember consciously changing from doing the single-storey to double-storey ‘a’ as a child. Probably at about twelve, I suppose. I just thought they looked better. The influence of print, obviously. Nobody complained.
______________________________________________
Ever since I chose to block pop-ups, my toaster’s stopped working.
Did your teacher (or anybody else) want you to write a double-storey ‘a’?
If only. I’m pretty sure that if I went to the my childhood school systems records building and dug my files out, there would be something about my weird handwriting at least once a year.
I found quickly when I started my job in Madrid that kids around the Latin-script-writing world don’t learn to write the same.
I’m used to using cursive majuscules when I write my lowercase in cursive as well, but some of them (the Z, G, F, T, Q and I in particular) are unintelligible for them. They also teach cursive here before printing (???) and don’t connect all the letters.
The only thing I remember doing was to cross my Z and 7 like my dad did ’cause he was a mathematician, whereas all my classmates continued to write them normally.
«El futuro es una línea tan fina que apenas nos damos cuenta de pintarla nosotros mismos». (La Luz Oscura, por Javier Guerrero)
My teachers wanted me, and the other 5 wacky kids from the other public school where we started out, to follow the copperplate-based models everyone else was using, instead of the chancery-based models we used. Fortunately someone must have pointed out the meaninglessness of the distinction, and we were allowed to continue as before. Turns out the chancery hand is useful, allowing quite fast writing without much deterioration. It’s pretty efficient.
I think if kids persisted in writing all caps, they would have been re-trained.
My handwriting as a child, had been so atrocious, that it wouldn’t matter to my teachers how many strokes I used, or what format it followed as long as it was even marginally decipherable. The sad thing is, it’s still just as horrible. I can draw letters well enough, but I can’t write them to any degree of acceptability.
Both Latin and Cyrillic.
:(
_____________________________________________
Personal Art and Design Portal of Ivan Gulkov www.ivangdesign.com
Any one else learn to write with a steel nibbed stick pen you had to dip into a bottle of ink? For some reason, they preferred to trust kids with bottles of ink and steel nibs that spattered and dribbled ink on everything instead of those new-fangled ball point pens.
You guys got to learn in INK!? That’s totally not fair. I learned in crayon. Poorly. I was also the first to learn cursive, and the last to perfect it :)
For some reason they expected our stubby tiny hands to have an easier time gripping monstrously thick crayons and pencils, at least for the first couple years. We were taught a strange hybrid cursive printing, making upright disconnected letters using cursive stroke order, and were brutally chastised for making looping ascenders. Then we were taught proper cursive with normal pencils in second grade. All this discipline was quite literally painful for me, giving me a powerful psychological aversion to handwriting to this day.
By fourth grade I had abandoned it all for all-caps printing when I couldn’t get on a typewriter.
We were taught in the 1940s using pointed steel pens which we dipped in ink bottles. The hard part was that the desks were old and badly scratched and whittled. This caused pen-points to get stuck in a crevasse and splot blobs of ink. Given that we were writing on the grand canyon, my writing was quite good early on. As time went by and I grew older and wrote faster, my penmanship degraded to its present state of illegible scrawly mess.
Dan, it was fat pencils in grade one, normal pencils until whenever is was they started teaching script, when they handed out the pens. Grade 4, I think, ’cause it was in Sylvan Lake, Alberta. There was the obligatory blond girl who got a pig tail dipped in someone’s ink bottle, and then there was the kid who sat behind me who tattooed an iron cross in the back of his hand.
Back to the original question, I saw characters as having personalities, which wasn’t helpful, but at that age I don’t think I was observant enough to notice that the were different types of ’a’s
I cannot speak for myself, but this topic hits home because my daughter, Katrina, age 4 1/2, just started drawing her name using lowercase letters this week. When she asked me how to make an a, I showed her the two-story a, and as far as she knows, that’s the only way to draw a lowercase a, and she does it pretty well. I haven’t heard yet what her pre-K teacher thinks about it, but I’m hoping she’ll be impressed! I know I am.
Her t also includes the little forward hook (for lack of my knowing the technical term) on the bottom of the vertical stroke, which looks pretty great.
What I do remember about my early letters is that I couldn’t wait to learn how to write in cursive. In first grade, I went to the second grade for reading class, where the cursive letters were posted above the blackboard. I took careful note of the illustrations and began proudly writing in cursive in first grade. I guess that was my intro to italics.
I also had terrible handwriting, and my Grade 7 teachers decided to cure me of it by making me print everything. This resulted in my printing becoming as rushed and as bad as cursive. They thought I was sloppy. I wasn’t. I was just in a rush to get the ideas from my head down on paper. It wasn’t until 20 years later when computers came along that I was able to get legible and fast at the same time.
“When I reached the ripe old age of six or seven years, one day one of my teachers made my mum come in to the school and made her watch me write out the letters of the alphabet, because they were concerned about me drawing my stems from top to bottom instead of bottom to top like all the much-alike kids, and presumably adults, did. There were a few other unusual ways I had of drawing characters which they pointed out and made my mum observe me comitting to paper with a pencil.”
You were the deviant by drawing the stems top-to-bottom?
In your region they teach to write the stems bottom-to-top?
Also, the double/single storey “a” is not a real question around here, as most of Europe (at least German speaking countries and Eastern Europe) they teach to write running hands rather than “printed” style, separate letters; in running hand only single-storey version works.
I remember we were only thaught to read “printed” style letter, and learnt parallelly writing (and reading) running hand.
My brother (who went to his first years in school in a different country than I did) learnt in the first year to write “printed style” letters along with reading them in the first year, just to learn to write running hand in the second year (and after that running hand was demanded).
“I think if kids persisted in writing all caps, they would have been re-trained.”
I’m in high school and I’ve been writing in capitals since 6th grade. The only time I use miniscule letters (in cursive) is when I have timed writing exams since it take less time to write. Ive had many teachers who loved the fact my printing is fairly neat and easy to read, but others (especially in middle school) that did not like it very much at all.
It’s interesting really, i write many of my letters much differently that most people. I actually started drawing my Qs with that sort of hook after I saw GE Inspira.
PS I realize the spelling and writing on this paper is pretty disasterous. I was pretty distracted by my friends the day we had this assignment.
At this point, I think any teacher would welcome clear, readable writing in any style.
I think it’s interesting that S is often ligated in your print-writing. Caps slow you down because of their structure and disconnected strokes. People avoid script writing because it’s so easy for it to disintegrate, but it doesn’t have to. You have the discipline to learn a good hand and stick with it.
You could also make a font from your neat handwriting....
To illustrate just how lowly my “penmanship” ranks, here it is in progression from best to worst(most hurried).
_____________________________________________
Personal Art and Design Portal of Ivan Gulkov
www.ivangdesign.com
Reading this I remembered a little scam I had in grade four. I (it seemed to me now) often had to stay late after school to write lines. “I will study my spelling before tests.” was one popular phrase I’d have to write out a hundred, or even two hundred times after school.
I hit on the idea of holding two pencils so that I could write two lines at at time. I had to be careful to hold each pencil slightly differently and alter my hand position from one line to the next so that the lines weren’t too similar and keep the pressure even so they weren’t too different..
You were the deviant by drawing the stems top-to-bottom?
In your region they teach to write the stems bottom-to-top?
Strike that, reverse it. I was the deviant drawing stems bottom to top in a region taught to draw stems top to bottom. Or something like that. Meow, it was so long ago I can’t recall the details very well. But the basic problem was my method of pen action differed from the norm even tho my writing looked much like everybody else’s.
I too was taught to write in connected miniscule forms, “running writing” as they called it, but after high school I switched to writing with “printed capitals” and have written that way ever since. Caps take longer than miniscules to write but I love the neatness of capital letterforms. That probably has something to do with becoming a type designer—-fascination with structure.
Hee-hee! Oh yeah, Chris. I was the blasphemer with the funny (to them) ways of doing things. I was attracted to things unorthodox from a young age. My unorthodox color sense won me the easter egg competition in 1st grade, and when the other kids discovered my favorite planet was Saturn I had to switch to Neptune because they all jumped to Saturn. Copy cats.
>>Caps take longer than miniscules to write but I love the neatness of capital letterforms.
Is it just me, or does the rule about not setting things in all caps NOT apply to handwriting? It seems to me that I can read something written in all caps just fine. It doesn’t seem like it’s screaming all the time like in text. Also, there’s greater variation of “bouma”.
Look at alexhb’s example above, and you’ll see what I mean. It’s not hard to read at all.
I used to put serifs on all my papers’ titles back when I was still handwriting 1-page essays in 3-5th grade, but I only had one teacher tell me to “stop being silly” or something like that. I thought that’s what “real” letters were supposed to look like, and I was under the impression that there was one master typeface that existed for the alphabet (something that looked like times or garamond i guess. In college, I made myself write two-story a’s and eyeglass g’s, but by then, everything I passed in to teachers was typed.
Dan,
What “rule” about not setting things in all caps do you mean? I guess you mean the generally accepted notion that all caps typography is less readable than lower case.
That one applies more to type than handwriting. The flipside (and here we go again with topic drift into a discussion of readability) is the matter of familiarity. Despite Hrant’s non-acceptance of the idea, I can’t find fault with Zuzana Licko’s maxim, “We read most what we read best”, because it’s basically true. I have met people who insist that lower case type is harder for them to read than all caps. It turns out these individuals read very little book typography and write in “printed capitals”, and these handwritten caps are the principal form of lettering they read. By near-complete lack of exposure to what we know as typography (book settings using lower case with caps for capitalised words), these people read best the form of lettering thay are most familiar with. It makes sense. I think Hrant’s rejection of Zuzana’s maxim has more to do with his unfortunate experience with one of Emigre’s fonts than his capacity for rationale and readability theory.
Notwithstanding, lower case forms are inherently more legible and inherently more readable on both a technical and aesthetic basis. This much we know. So what an individual finds more legible or readable is a matter of personal experience.
In the example above there’s a lot of rounded corners, gently curved straights, and variation of alignment, and I’m sure those factors help make it more readable than type capitals with their profusion of straight lines.
I devised a test one time where I took a seriffed roman font I was working on and ran a grunge filter on it—-a combination of randomize nodes and envelope. That grunged all the letters up nicely, thinning them in spots, thickening in other spots, warping of straight lines, size variation, off-zenith alignment, and characters moved off the baseline. The auto-grunged font was easier to read than the straight one I had arrived at purely by design.
Did Hrant or someone else at some point offer up a theory as to how randomness, noise and distortion (in the right amounts) enhances the readability of a font?
James,
Here is Quote from Kevin Larson’s paper, “The Science of Word Recognition, or how I learned to stop worrying and love the bouma”
“The weakest evidence in support of word shape is that lowercase text is read faster than uppercase text. This is entirely a practice effect. Most readers spend the bulk of their time reading lowercase text and are therefore more proficient at it. When readers are forced to read large quantities of uppercase text, their reading speed will eventually increase to the rate of lowercase text. Even text oriented as if you were seeing it in a mirror will quickly increase in reading speed with practice (Kolers & Perkins, 1975).”
It’s pretty evident, that “readability” depends on training and that some might read allcaps better than lowercase (supposing they read little modern printed matter, and by some chance read a lot of uppercase text).
lowercase and uppercase are just two sets of forms for the same idea (which incidentally have common roots). Similar to different styles:
We have late medieval, early modern accounts of Dutch and German readers not coping with Antiqua. Probably one could find newer ones from the 19th century as well.
On the contrary, nowadays most untrained readers of today have serious problems with Fraktur.
It’s all a question of practice.
Actually, what I discovered after developing a secret alphabet as a child was, that not only was it possible, that someone is more proficient in reading than writing (this is evident. So many people read, but can barely write, or if so, unrecognizibly), but you can also be more proficient in writing than reading! I mostly took some notes in my secret alphabet when I was scribbling something (in boredom) and others should not be able to read it, so I rarely read it. Even though I made up the alphabet myself, I could fluently write it, but only decipher it sign-by-sign!
It was quite a relevation on how the human mind works!
Actually, we know, that medieval copyists worked the following way: one read (aloud), many wrote (that was time-saving... multi-tasking/parallel processing, if you will). I would not be surprised, if the latter were less fluent in reading (of course depending on how much they read in the time not spent with writing).
I don’t use double story a’s or g’s, I never learned how to write them fluidly. However, I’ve only started adding a cross stroke to my 7’s and a hard top to my 3’s because I think it looks cool.
I’ve never seen anyone actually write double story letters until recently. I caught one of my co-workers doing it. Needless to say, it seemed weird to see him write that way.
When I was about five or six I was told by my teacher that I clearly hadn’t done my homework (simple writing exercises) myself, since my letters were more cursive-looking than they apparently should have been. I was unwittingly mimicking my parents’ handwriting.
Ross
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11.Mar.2008 9.54pm
I was in year 1 (or whatever it might be called in various other parts of the world, when you are five and start school) only 15 years ago, and even that recently I was very clearly told that you do not write the letter a with two stories. Only single storey. And until a few months ago I have done just as I was taught. Now I use double-stories in my handwriting and I hugely prefer them.
Can’t say I got in trouble though, I was always one to try and please the teacher back in primary school :P
-Rafe
12.Mar.2008 1.38am
How many of you got in trouble when you were kids for drawing the letter a with two stories instead of one?
Did your teacher (or anybody else) want you to write a double-storey ‘a’?
12.Mar.2008 1.48am
I was a big fan of adding serifs to my letters if I got done early. I loved the double-story “a”, and especially the double-story “g”. I stopped doing that around 4th grade or so.
12.Mar.2008 2.49am
When I reached the ripe old age of six or seven years, one day one of my teachers made my mum come in to the school and made her watch me write out the letters of the alphabet, because they were concerned about me drawing my stems from top to bottom instead of bottom to top like all the much-alike kids, and presumably adults, did. There were a few other unusual ways I had of drawing characters which they pointed out and made my mum observe me comitting to paper with a pencil.
She looked at this jerk teacher and said, “Yes?” The teacher hummed and hah-ed, but was unable to really say that what I was doing was bad. He shrugged and said, “It’s just unusual that’s all. No big deal, but we would like him to draw his letters the same way everybody else does.” My mum laughed and told him what a ridiculous waste of everybody’s time he had made. My method of writing letters was different but my letters did not look substantially different from accepted norms.
Had I been armed at the time with the kind of language skills acquired by the age of thirty-three, I would have told that teacher to “stick your draconian pendantry up your arse for nothing and fack off while you’re doing it.”
So instead I had to settle for staring at him as if he had green skin and antennas coming out of his head.
j a m e s
12.Mar.2008 4.58am
I made my “b”s look like “d”s. I knew what they were. Why didn’t Miss Whatshername?
See, here’s the thing... The b is loyal, conservative and, well, boring. It points the same way as it’s dad, the B. The d, on the otherhand, is all about exploring and adventure. It’s a rebel. I doesn’t follow in it’s D dad’s footsteps.
-=®=-
12.Mar.2008 5.00am
I can remember consciously changing from doing the single-storey to double-storey ‘a’ as a child. Probably at about twelve, I suppose. I just thought they looked better. The influence of print, obviously. Nobody complained.
______________________________________________
Ever since I chose to block pop-ups, my toaster’s stopped working.
12.Mar.2008 5.29am
Did your teacher (or anybody else) want you to write a double-storey ‘a’?
If only. I’m pretty sure that if I went to the my childhood school systems records building and dug my files out, there would be something about my weird handwriting at least once a year.
12.Mar.2008 2.15pm
I found quickly when I started my job in Madrid that kids around the Latin-script-writing world don’t learn to write the same.
I’m used to using cursive majuscules when I write my lowercase in cursive as well, but some of them (the Z, G, F, T, Q and I in particular) are unintelligible for them. They also teach cursive here before printing (???) and don’t connect all the letters.
The only thing I remember doing was to cross my Z and 7 like my dad did ’cause he was a mathematician, whereas all my classmates continued to write them normally.
«El futuro es una línea tan fina que apenas nos damos cuenta de pintarla nosotros mismos». (La Luz Oscura, por Javier Guerrero)
12.Mar.2008 2.58pm
My teachers wanted me, and the other 5 wacky kids from the other public school where we started out, to follow the copperplate-based models everyone else was using, instead of the chancery-based models we used. Fortunately someone must have pointed out the meaninglessness of the distinction, and we were allowed to continue as before. Turns out the chancery hand is useful, allowing quite fast writing without much deterioration. It’s pretty efficient.
I think if kids persisted in writing all caps, they would have been re-trained.
12.Mar.2008 4.05pm
My handwriting as a child, had been so atrocious, that it wouldn’t matter to my teachers how many strokes I used, or what format it followed as long as it was even marginally decipherable. The sad thing is, it’s still just as horrible. I can draw letters well enough, but I can’t write them to any degree of acceptability.
Both Latin and Cyrillic.
:(
_____________________________________________
Personal Art and Design Portal of Ivan Gulkov
www.ivangdesign.com
12.Mar.2008 5.00pm
Any one else learn to write with a steel nibbed stick pen you had to dip into a bottle of ink? For some reason, they preferred to trust kids with bottles of ink and steel nibs that spattered and dribbled ink on everything instead of those new-fangled ball point pens.
-=®=-
12.Mar.2008 5.08pm
You guys got to learn in INK!? That’s totally not fair. I learned in crayon. Poorly. I was also the first to learn cursive, and the last to perfect it :)
12.Mar.2008 5.37pm
For some reason they expected our stubby tiny hands to have an easier time gripping monstrously thick crayons and pencils, at least for the first couple years. We were taught a strange hybrid cursive printing, making upright disconnected letters using cursive stroke order, and were brutally chastised for making looping ascenders. Then we were taught proper cursive with normal pencils in second grade. All this discipline was quite literally painful for me, giving me a powerful psychological aversion to handwriting to this day.
By fourth grade I had abandoned it all for all-caps printing when I couldn’t get on a typewriter.
12.Mar.2008 7.11pm
I took to cursive quickly, and print like a toddler because of it.
12.Mar.2008 7.53pm
We were taught in the 1940s using pointed steel pens which we dipped in ink bottles. The hard part was that the desks were old and badly scratched and whittled. This caused pen-points to get stuck in a crevasse and splot blobs of ink. Given that we were writing on the grand canyon, my writing was quite good early on. As time went by and I grew older and wrote faster, my penmanship degraded to its present state of illegible scrawly mess.
ChrisL
12.Mar.2008 8.33pm
Dan, it was fat pencils in grade one, normal pencils until whenever is was they started teaching script, when they handed out the pens. Grade 4, I think, ’cause it was in Sylvan Lake, Alberta. There was the obligatory blond girl who got a pig tail dipped in someone’s ink bottle, and then there was the kid who sat behind me who tattooed an iron cross in the back of his hand.
Back to the original question, I saw characters as having personalities, which wasn’t helpful, but at that age I don’t think I was observant enough to notice that the were different types of ’a’s
-=®=-
13.Mar.2008 8.17am
I cannot speak for myself, but this topic hits home because my daughter, Katrina, age 4 1/2, just started drawing her name using lowercase letters this week. When she asked me how to make an a, I showed her the two-story a, and as far as she knows, that’s the only way to draw a lowercase a, and she does it pretty well. I haven’t heard yet what her pre-K teacher thinks about it, but I’m hoping she’ll be impressed! I know I am.
Her t also includes the little forward hook (for lack of my knowing the technical term) on the bottom of the vertical stroke, which looks pretty great.
What I do remember about my early letters is that I couldn’t wait to learn how to write in cursive. In first grade, I went to the second grade for reading class, where the cursive letters were posted above the blackboard. I took careful note of the illustrations and began proudly writing in cursive in first grade. I guess that was my intro to italics.
13.Mar.2008 8.30am
I also had terrible handwriting, and my Grade 7 teachers decided to cure me of it by making me print everything. This resulted in my printing becoming as rushed and as bad as cursive. They thought I was sloppy. I wasn’t. I was just in a rush to get the ideas from my head down on paper. It wasn’t until 20 years later when computers came along that I was able to get legible and fast at the same time.
13.Mar.2008 9.19am
James,
“When I reached the ripe old age of six or seven years, one day one of my teachers made my mum come in to the school and made her watch me write out the letters of the alphabet, because they were concerned about me drawing my stems from top to bottom instead of bottom to top like all the much-alike kids, and presumably adults, did. There were a few other unusual ways I had of drawing characters which they pointed out and made my mum observe me comitting to paper with a pencil.”
You were the deviant by drawing the stems top-to-bottom?
In your region they teach to write the stems bottom-to-top?
Also, the double/single storey “a” is not a real question around here, as most of Europe (at least German speaking countries and Eastern Europe) they teach to write running hands rather than “printed” style, separate letters; in running hand only single-storey version works.
I remember we were only thaught to read “printed” style letter, and learnt parallelly writing (and reading) running hand.
My brother (who went to his first years in school in a different country than I did) learnt in the first year to write “printed style” letters along with reading them in the first year, just to learn to write running hand in the second year (and after that running hand was demanded).
14.Mar.2008 4.22pm
“I think if kids persisted in writing all caps, they would have been re-trained.”
I’m in high school and I’ve been writing in capitals since 6th grade. The only time I use miniscule letters (in cursive) is when I have timed writing exams since it take less time to write. Ive had many teachers who loved the fact my printing is fairly neat and easy to read, but others (especially in middle school) that did not like it very much at all.
It’s interesting really, i write many of my letters much differently that most people. I actually started drawing my Qs with that sort of hook after I saw GE Inspira.
PS I realize the spelling and writing on this paper is pretty disasterous. I was pretty distracted by my friends the day we had this assignment.
14.Mar.2008 4.30pm
PS I realize the spelling and writing on this paper is pretty disasterous. I was pretty distracted by my friends the day we had this assignment.
Where I went to high school half the kids could barely read, so don’t feel too bad about your spelling.
14.Mar.2008 4.32pm
At this point, I think any teacher would welcome clear, readable writing in any style.
I think it’s interesting that S is often ligated in your print-writing. Caps slow you down because of their structure and disconnected strokes. People avoid script writing because it’s so easy for it to disintegrate, but it doesn’t have to. You have the discipline to learn a good hand and stick with it.
You could also make a font from your neat handwriting....
14.Mar.2008 5.37pm
To illustrate just how lowly my “penmanship” ranks, here it is in progression from best to worst(most hurried).
_____________________________________________
Personal Art and Design Portal of Ivan Gulkov
www.ivangdesign.com
14.Mar.2008 6.12pm
Reading this I remembered a little scam I had in grade four. I (it seemed to me now) often had to stay late after school to write lines. “I will study my spelling before tests.” was one popular phrase I’d have to write out a hundred, or even two hundred times after school.
I hit on the idea of holding two pencils so that I could write two lines at at time. I had to be careful to hold each pencil slightly differently and alter my hand position from one line to the next so that the lines weren’t too similar and keep the pressure even so they weren’t too different..
Three pencils were just too awkward.
-=®=-
14.Mar.2008 6.31pm
You were the deviant by drawing the stems top-to-bottom?
In your region they teach to write the stems bottom-to-top?
Strike that, reverse it. I was the deviant drawing stems bottom to top in a region taught to draw stems top to bottom. Or something like that. Meow, it was so long ago I can’t recall the details very well. But the basic problem was my method of pen action differed from the norm even tho my writing looked much like everybody else’s.
Harumph.
j a m e s
14.Mar.2008 6.37pm
I too was taught to write in connected miniscule forms, “running writing” as they called it, but after high school I switched to writing with “printed capitals” and have written that way ever since. Caps take longer than miniscules to write but I love the neatness of capital letterforms. That probably has something to do with becoming a type designer—-fascination with structure.
j a m e s
14.Mar.2008 7.37pm
Sounds like they thought you were quite a heinous criminal at such a young age, James :-)
ChrisL
14.Mar.2008 10.59pm
Hee-hee! Oh yeah, Chris. I was the blasphemer with the funny (to them) ways of doing things. I was attracted to things unorthodox from a young age. My unorthodox color sense won me the easter egg competition in 1st grade, and when the other kids discovered my favorite planet was Saturn I had to switch to Neptune because they all jumped to Saturn. Copy cats.
j a m e s
15.Mar.2008 1.08am
>>Caps take longer than miniscules to write but I love the neatness of capital letterforms.
Is it just me, or does the rule about not setting things in all caps NOT apply to handwriting? It seems to me that I can read something written in all caps just fine. It doesn’t seem like it’s screaming all the time like in text. Also, there’s greater variation of “bouma”.
Look at alexhb’s example above, and you’ll see what I mean. It’s not hard to read at all.
15.Mar.2008 9.20am
I used to put serifs on all my papers’ titles back when I was still handwriting 1-page essays in 3-5th grade, but I only had one teacher tell me to “stop being silly” or something like that. I thought that’s what “real” letters were supposed to look like, and I was under the impression that there was one master typeface that existed for the alphabet (something that looked like times or garamond i guess. In college, I made myself write two-story a’s and eyeglass g’s, but by then, everything I passed in to teachers was typed.
15.Mar.2008 11.15am
Dan,
What “rule” about not setting things in all caps do you mean? I guess you mean the generally accepted notion that all caps typography is less readable than lower case.
That one applies more to type than handwriting. The flipside (and here we go again with topic drift into a discussion of readability) is the matter of familiarity. Despite Hrant’s non-acceptance of the idea, I can’t find fault with Zuzana Licko’s maxim, “We read most what we read best”, because it’s basically true. I have met people who insist that lower case type is harder for them to read than all caps. It turns out these individuals read very little book typography and write in “printed capitals”, and these handwritten caps are the principal form of lettering they read. By near-complete lack of exposure to what we know as typography (book settings using lower case with caps for capitalised words), these people read best the form of lettering thay are most familiar with. It makes sense. I think Hrant’s rejection of Zuzana’s maxim has more to do with his unfortunate experience with one of Emigre’s fonts than his capacity for rationale and readability theory.
Notwithstanding, lower case forms are inherently more legible and inherently more readable on both a technical and aesthetic basis. This much we know. So what an individual finds more legible or readable is a matter of personal experience.
In the example above there’s a lot of rounded corners, gently curved straights, and variation of alignment, and I’m sure those factors help make it more readable than type capitals with their profusion of straight lines.
I devised a test one time where I took a seriffed roman font I was working on and ran a grunge filter on it—-a combination of randomize nodes and envelope. That grunged all the letters up nicely, thinning them in spots, thickening in other spots, warping of straight lines, size variation, off-zenith alignment, and characters moved off the baseline. The auto-grunged font was easier to read than the straight one I had arrived at purely by design.
Did Hrant or someone else at some point offer up a theory as to how randomness, noise and distortion (in the right amounts) enhances the readability of a font?
j a m e s
15.Mar.2008 11.27am
James,
Here is Quote from Kevin Larson’s paper, “The Science of Word Recognition, or how I learned to stop worrying and love the bouma”
“The weakest evidence in support of word shape is that lowercase text is read faster than uppercase text. This is entirely a practice effect. Most readers spend the bulk of their time reading lowercase text and are therefore more proficient at it. When readers are forced to read large quantities of uppercase text, their reading speed will eventually increase to the rate of lowercase text. Even text oriented as if you were seeing it in a mirror will quickly increase in reading speed with practice (Kolers & Perkins, 1975).”
ChrisL
15.Mar.2008 12.32pm
I can’t find fault with Zuzana Licko’s maxim, “We read most what we read best”
I think you’ll have to strike and reverse again!
15.Mar.2008 12.44pm
Cheers Chris. Thanks for posting that information.
I think you’ll have to strike and reverse again!
No, Kevin Larson’s research supports Licko’s Maxim. Can you find fault with it, and if so please explain?
j a m e s
15.Mar.2008 1.17pm
I think that he means that your quote is out of order, not that the idea is wrong! Didn’t she write “we read best what we read most”?
15.Mar.2008 1.43pm
Ah, thankyou Dan. I had a growing suspicion I had those two words swapped around.
Ha!
j a m e s
15.Mar.2008 6.25pm
I think Mr Gill said the same thing (... only differently.) :o)
-=®=-
27.Mar.2008 5.38am
It’s pretty evident, that “readability” depends on training and that some might read allcaps better than lowercase (supposing they read little modern printed matter, and by some chance read a lot of uppercase text).
lowercase and uppercase are just two sets of forms for the same idea (which incidentally have common roots). Similar to different styles:
We have late medieval, early modern accounts of Dutch and German readers not coping with Antiqua. Probably one could find newer ones from the 19th century as well.
On the contrary, nowadays most untrained readers of today have serious problems with Fraktur.
It’s all a question of practice.
Actually, what I discovered after developing a secret alphabet as a child was, that not only was it possible, that someone is more proficient in reading than writing (this is evident. So many people read, but can barely write, or if so, unrecognizibly), but you can also be more proficient in writing than reading! I mostly took some notes in my secret alphabet when I was scribbling something (in boredom) and others should not be able to read it, so I rarely read it. Even though I made up the alphabet myself, I could fluently write it, but only decipher it sign-by-sign!
It was quite a relevation on how the human mind works!
Actually, we know, that medieval copyists worked the following way: one read (aloud), many wrote (that was time-saving... multi-tasking/parallel processing, if you will). I would not be surprised, if the latter were less fluent in reading (of course depending on how much they read in the time not spent with writing).
27.Mar.2008 7.09am
I don’t use double story a’s or g’s, I never learned how to write them fluidly. However, I’ve only started adding a cross stroke to my 7’s and a hard top to my 3’s because I think it looks cool.
I’ve never seen anyone actually write double story letters until recently. I caught one of my co-workers doing it. Needless to say, it seemed weird to see him write that way.
27.Mar.2008 8.33am
When I was about five or six I was told by my teacher that I clearly hadn’t done my homework (simple writing exercises) myself, since my letters were more cursive-looking than they apparently should have been. I was unwittingly mimicking my parents’ handwriting.
Ross