> When I was about nine I discovered the glory of archaic penmanship on the frontispiece of an old book, and something about all those curly bits and swooshy baroque squiggliegies really appealed to me. I spent an awful lot of time copying and practising until I could write naturally in a very elaborate 18th century hand. For some reason this was very important to me at the time. *shrug* I was probably one of the weirder kids in school, I guess, but my essays certainly *looked* good. :-)

LOL. Are you saying you taught yourself to write in something like Copperplate, that whispery round hand developed in the 1700s from engraver's italics? And you were *nine* when you did this? With all its elaborate curliques, I wouldn't vouch for its overall scanning legibility. But that's quite a feat of manual dexterity during elementary school, B-G. Wow.


> So, anyway, I had spectacularly artistic handwriting until I got to university, where notetaking demanded more speed. Between that and working on computers instead of on paper, my handwriting has now degenerated into a random scrawl of untidy printing. You can't write attractively with a standard ballpoint pen, anyway, but mostly it's lack of practice.
>
> Interesting to think that I can now go for maybe a week without handwriting more than maybe a few words.
>
> Brunnen-"life in general needs more elaborate artistic curly bits"G

By the time I got into grade 4, I abandoned cursive writing outside of the classroom. All those joined loops and whorls looked fine when I penned them slowly, carefully. However the slants in the script got all spikey and ugly when I took notes more rapidly, and I favoured legibility over neatness anyway. I think it had to do with using a ballpoint pen -- I can scrawl with a bic biro, but a fountain pen naturally forces me to wrote more slowly lest I get ink all over.

Huh... In general, I have a weird kind of hybrid handwriting. It's sort of an upright print form, with occasional letters joined together, but the lower loops on my g's and y's and j's are still cursive rounds. I do happen to write the word "the" in exactly the same way that Trip does. I also make f's in an elongated shape that extends below the line, similar to the F-holes on violins... and I suppose my s's are rather unique (printed and cursive at the same time). The main advantage is that I can scrawl this script quickly, in the dark, and still read it later. That's a good thing, because I still write quite a bit by hand, mostly at night. I keep a collection of recycled looseleaf sheets by the bedside just for that purpose. If I deem my shabby musings worthy, they might even get translated to the puter.

But Wolf "still can't believe that codeman learned how to write letters from COMPUTER SCREEN FONT!" spirit