The training model in Chapter 8 is only a starting point. You will not be writing like that forever.
You should use it the way you would use a plaster cast if you break your arm: when the bone is healed and reasonably strong, you take the cast off. Your arm is the right shape, and it moves more freely.
You may be reading this book just because you want to change a few faults. Your writing may already be fl owing and fairly mature.
Quite likely you will have been infl uenced by the model so you will fi nd your handwriting has changed. It may go on changing as you speed it up. After all, if you have gone through the book you will have learned quite a bit about how hand - writing works, and will have taken up some of the ideas.
Make sure that your quick, personal letters are still legible. The fi rst s and r are clearly different. But the same characters written at speed with a different pen are confusing.
If you stick too closely to any model your writing will remain rather childish. It is the personal modifi cations that make a mature hand.
Maybe you have been searching for more help. Then you may have needed the model to retrain the construction of your letters. That will have been a straightforward but time-consuming exercise.
Perhaps you have needed to practise all the basic joining strokes that lead to recognizable ligatures and cursive writing. If you have followed the model closely, the writing that you are now producing is a clear and basic kind of hand. It is clean rather than characterless, but may be almost childish. If so, this chapter is important to you. It shows how to develop a mature personal style.
Three things must be considered:
1 What angle is best for you?
2 How wide do you like the letters in your new handwriting to be?
3 How do your letters change when you join them?
This last is the most complicated part: how you add to or take bits away from the model so your writing fl ows more easily. This makes it your own personal hand.
Victor lost no time in changing the proportions of his s . This is most noticeable in the capital letter on the top line. He enjoys extravagant pp ’ s.
A horizontal emphasis is so natural to Grace that it would affect her writing whatever model she chose.
Here is an exercise for you. Write a sentence carefully in your normal hand. Do it again without lifting the pen anywhere. Do it a few times getting faster and faster until it gets totally illegible.
There is a reason for this. Your handwriting has a different look when you write fast. It has a different shape for different functions.
It can be just as legible when you hurry, and often more interesting.
Stage 1 Careful writing.
Stage 2 Careful writing without penlifts.
Stage 3 Writing at speed without penlifts.
You can fi nd some clues to your own style if you examine the exercises that you have already done. You may think that you have been copying the model exactly, but it is unlikely that your letters are absolutely the same. You may be writing at a different slant: some of the early rhythm exercises were meant to show up your natural slant. Then, no matter how you try, your own letter shapes will show through from time to time: you may have rounded the tops of your a ’ s and g ’ s, or narrowed down some of the letters. This is the real you trying to get through. That was not a good thing when you were trying to copy the model. But now
is the time to encourage this freedom. By this time you have had enough discipline. You have the correct movement. You know the basic joins. You are using a pen that suits you and that you enjoy writing with.
How you dot your letters reveals more about you than you think. When you are in a carefree mood the dot tends to wander. Do not put it too close to the downstroke. If you want to take special care remember that, for balance, the letter j needs more distance.
Now try to get your writing moving freely, using the training that you have already had. Relax and see what happens.
Try this exercise: write an entire line without a single penlift. Do not even lift your pen to dot your i ’ s. The overall effect is probably a bit odd.
A student demonstrates the exercise that makes you write a line without lifting your pen from the page.
The faster she went, the more illegible it became.
The do-not-lift-your-pen exercise: how it worked
The top line shows a sample of handwriting that suffers from problems in joining. Even where it looks as if it joins, it does not really do so.
‘ The little red book ’ , written without a penlift.
Examining the scribble, Nicholas found his personal solution to the ‘ th ’ join and could not stop practising. The ‘ oo ’ join needed a bit of refi ning. writing should look like in the end. Next write the same line again.
As before, do not lift the pen, but this time you should write much faster. It will probably look even stranger than it did the fi rst time.
Now take a long hard look at it. There should be some f ’ s and s ’ s around. In the model they were simple shapes and were not joined.
Look and see how you have simplifi ed or added to them at speed.
If this exercise has worked you are getting closer to having your own handwriting. Then look at your g ’ s. In the model these did not join up to the next character.
The g in the model does not join. When you want to write fast you should join them or not, just as you please.
You must make a loop at the bottom if you are going to join, otherwise you are making a letter than can be mistaken for a q . The point is not just the shape of your descender but how you make the letters fl ow.
Please note that q joins in a different way to g . Similar letters need careful handling to avoid confusion.
There are many ways of looking at the alphabet. Here we are looking at movement. At this stage we could say that writing is a beautiful movement pattern, a zig-zag with a lot of good recognition points along the way to make it legible. That ’ s all there is to it.