1. An italic style can be written twice as fast as a loopy cursvie style
2. Lesson II Learning to write in an italic hand
3. FAQ - questions answered
4. Handwriting horror stories
   
   Related Links on spelling and abbreviation
5. quayle-spell.html  [humor] invented spellings
6. instruction in italic cursive handwriting - lesson 1  -   lesson 2
7. shorthand and speed writing  - Shaw Alphabet
8. texting
9. writing systems of the world
10. quick link to the discussion group - post your questions

RESEARCH

Copybook Letterforms, Legibility, and Writing Speed
TASK: Write "The quick brown fox...." repeatedly as fast as you can.
RESULTS:  Those writing in an Italic hand could write amost twice as fast
as those writing cursive and the samples were more legible.
sample size: 2500 students

Handwriting Copybook Style	Age 6	Age 8	Age 10	Teen
Italic print-script	33	54	84	96
Marian-Richardson Similar to D'Nealian	16	44	75	78
Cursive Copperplate	not used	*27	45	40

You may or may not know that a study of 2,500 children and teens (ages 6
through 19 in 23 schools) done in England and Scotland some time ago gave
useful data on legibility average, slowest, and fastest writing-speeds for
children/teens who learned to write from different copybooks - legibility
and average writing-speed apparently show strong effects related to the
teaching/use of different styles/methods of writing).

This1955 study (which I think needs replicating today with better standards and
reporting - even if this only should prove feasible on a much smaller scale)
comes from UK educator Percy Wood, who published results and a graphic
in the Summer 1955 bulletin of the Society for Italic Handwriting
(contactable through their listing on my resource-list) and in a UK
educational journal called THE SCHOOLMASTER.

(I've tried hard - without success - to get the full citation/month/year for
the SCHOOLMASTER's version of the article, which apparently came out
simultaneously with, or earlier than, the SIH version - and then I of course want to get the SCHOOLMASTER article itself, so I can see if the SIH version "cut" or added anything!)

Briefly, the study ran as follows (I'm quoting Wood directly here):

"For the test the children were given three minutes in which to write, at
their normal 'composition-book' speed, and as often as possible, 'The quick
brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.' This got them accustomed to the test
and made fairly sure that they were not unduly worried about the spelling.
Then they were given three more minutes in which to write out the sentence
as quickly as possible. It was a simple matter to get comparative speeds in
letters per minute ..."

Below you can find Wood's figures for the speeds the children attained;
these show apparently significant results  (note that I have re-formatted Wood's figures for ease of reference,  rather than forcing you to cope with the sometimes-tangled
prose in which he buried them - also, I have given a definition or two for
the convenience of USA readers who may not know UK handwriting-style
terminology):

/A/
AVERAGE SPEEDS OF WRITING, GIVEN BY STYLE AND WRITER'S AGE:

/a/
"COPPERPLATE" style (the UK term for a style like what American layfolk typically call "the
'cursive' style of writing")

AGE 6                     AGE 8                AGE 10        TEENS

N/A                      "24 to 29"              45            40
(no 6-yr.-olds          (for this
in study used           group, Wood
that style)             gives a range
                        but no average)
 

/b/"MARION RICHARDSON" 
(a method unique to the UK and British Commonwealth nations,
and popular there but unknown in the USA - it has, though, certain
similarities to D'Nealian):

AGE 6                     AGE 8                AGE 10          TEENS

16                               44                       75                   78
 

/c/ ITALIC (for information about the Italic style and what it looks
like, ask me for my resource-list on the subject - also, in the attached
graphic by Wood the 1st and 3rd of the 4 samples shown use Italic)

AGE 6                     AGE 8                 AGE 10        TEENS

33                          54                              84                 96

/B/
Wood also gives interesting results for the FASTEST speeds obtained by
writers of each of these three styles -

according to Wood, the fastest of the COPPERPLATE writers (a
thirteen-year-old) wrote 120 letters/minute, and the fastest ITALIC writer
(also a thirteen-year-old) wrote 144 letters/minute. (Additional letters/minute results for some writers aged 14 and 19, with their handwriting-samples, exist in the attached graphic)
I did note that Wood gives no figure for any teen-aged "fastest MARION RICHARDSON writer," and this is one reason I continue trying to track down the original SCHOOLMASTER article from which the SIH reprinted their piece.

/C/ Wood additionally identifies *slowest* writing-speeds for ten-, twelve-
and 14-year-olds (broken down by style), as follows:

/a/ among ten-year-olds, the slowest writer belonged to the COPPERPLATE
group and wrote 32 letters/minute -  the slowest MARION RICHARDSON ten-year-old wrote 40 letters/minute - and the slowest ten-year-old in the ITALIC group wrote 52 letters/minute -

(I note that this "slow" Italic-writer's speed exceeds the *average*
speed that Wood found for COPPERPLATE writers of the same age.)

/b/ among twelve-year-olds, the slowest writer (again) belonged to the
COPPERPLATE group and *also* wrote only 32 letters/minute -  Wood gives no figure for the slowest twelve-year-old writing MARION RICHARDSON, but does report that the slowest ten-year-old in the ITALIC group wrote 72 letters/minute - however, I note that this "slowest Italic ten-year-old's" speed not only exceeds Wood's "average Copperplate ten-year-old speed" but falls only three letters/minute below Wood's "average Marion
Richardson ten-year-old speed."  So it would appear extremely probable that the slowest Italic writer in this study wrote no slower - and probably faster - than the slowest Marion
Richardson writer of the same age.

/c/ for fourteen-year-olds, the slowest writer (yet again) belonged to the
COPPERPLATE group (this writer wrote 48 letters/minute) - the slowest of
Wood's Italic-writing fourteen-year-olds wrote 90 letters/minute, or almost
twice as fast as Wood's slowest Copperplate fourteen-year-old.
      (again, no figures are given for a fastest MARION RICHARDSON writer,
but note that this "slow" ITALIC writer is writing 12 letters/minute faster
than the average writing-speed for either MARION RICHARDSON or COPPERPLATE
writers of the same age)

If even a *slow* writer using Italic writes faster than the average for
writers using "Copperplate" which is what Americans would identify as
"cursive writing," this seriously challenges the belief
    (still generally assumed among USA
    layfolk/teachers/school-administrators
    almost 50 years after Wood's work)

that "the 'cursive' way of writing" (what Brits call copperplate) allows the
fastest production of letters.

Finally, the attached graphic from Wood's report

(pictures and speed-data for the handwritings of two pairs of Italic and
non-Italic writers matched for age - two teens aged 14 & within a month of
each other's ages, and two university students aged 19)

suggests that "copperplate" (i.e., USA-style conventional cursive) not only
/a/ produces fewer letters-per-minute than Italic for the same-aged writer,
but /b/ tends towards far less legibility even at those slower speeds.

(NOTE: people with some computers have trouble viewing certain formats of
graphics - if you have trouble viewing this, let me know: give me a
FAX-number and I will fax you the same graphic)

So ... with conventional "copperplate"/"cursive writing" not only
slower than Italic but less legible too, what reason exists to teach/require
people to write this way? (Teaching people to *read* it - something which
takes much less time to learn - will obviously remain necessary as long as
people exist who write in this way. But, in my experience and observation
one can teach even a five- or six-year-old (one literate in the "printed"
alphabet, at least) to read "cursive" in 1 - 4 ten-minute lessons:

much less time than the weeks and months one must waste if one feels the
need, for whatever reason, also to teach/require a(n older) child or adult
to also *produce* such writing.)

QUESTION: 

Why doesn't this Steve Bett guy look at the dictionary when he wants to spell the English language? Shouldn't he learn how to spell "handwriting," if he wants to run a group about it?

ANSWER FROM STEVE BETT: 

The quick answer is that in the digital world you have to compete for domain names and the name handwriting was already reserved by someone else for a graphology site.  We had to invent a new spelling.

Now for the long answer:

There is a good argument for handryting being a superior spelling of handwriting.  If you look at almost any English dictionary you will find two spellings, a historical spelling and a pronunciation guide spelling.  The Merriam Webster on-line dictionary [www.m-w.com] gives the latter spelling as /handrIting/.   Here the capital letter is used to distinguish the "long vowel" from the short i in bit.  As in my, fly, and by, the long vowel can also be written as Y.  Cut Spelling, a notation promoted by the simpified spelling society recommends replacing -igh with y.  high becomes hy in this streamlined spelling system.

I do look at dictionaries of the English language. Dictionaries of our language give two types of spellings for each word - conventional spelling and pronunciation-guide spelling. Because I strive for simplicity in our language, I prefer the pronunciation -guide standard of spelling, and I use it wherever it makes more sense than the historical spelling  [e.g., thru, tho, thoro, ruff, thot]

Strict followers of the conventional spellings of words often deviate from those conventions for the sake of speed. If  you take handwritten notes of a lecture on handwriting, sooner or later - as you spell the eleven letters of the word "handwriting" over and over again - you will either lapse into a scribble or eventually streamline it down into something like "handrtg": eliminating letters, but maintaining full legibility for the letters that you do retain. I consider it better to abbreviate legibly than to insist on an illegible scrawl representing each and every letter of a word conventionally spelled. For info on a legible system of abbreviations that you may want to use for speed's sake in your personal notes and possibly elsewhere, visit the site http://www.easyscript.com

As to the name of this group, [handryting] - I chose this name because someone else had already reserved the group [handwriting] for the discussion of graphology (the belief that details of your handwriting reveal the details of your personality).

It happens, also, that the spelling "handryting" (and "Rapid Ryting") use principles of a system called "cut spelling." [provide link]     The "cut spelling" system makes a few substitutions to shorten written English: for instance:

        always writing the /f/-sound as "f"
       (e.g., "photograph" becomes "fotograf"),

        always writing the /j/-sound as "j"
        (e.g., "judge" becomes "juj"),

        and always writing the /ah-ee/ sound as "y"
        (e.g., "high" becomes "hy."

Other respellings (on this page, and in "cut spelling" generally) remove redundant letters (letters that don't represent sounds used in the word):

e.g. "have" becomes "hav" -  "give" becomes "giv" -

but note that "gave" stays "gave" (instead of changing to "gav") because the
"e" at the end has a function in this spelling.

Nobody should feel obliged to do as I have done, though - even the many who'll choose (for any reason) to stick with conventional spelling will find their workload vastly lightened when they write simply (using the easy-handwriting tips shown on this page) and abbreviate as much as they dare. 

For one of the possible ways to achieve dictionary-standard
pronunciation-guide spelling with a standard keyboard and without much
visual disruption, see the "SOS - Streamline Our Spelling" page [or 
whatever you want to call it] at http://www.unifon.org/ss-1.html

S P E L L I N G

....If you look at the spelling of the first book ever published to teach handwriting in our ABC (published in Italy in 1522 - LA OPERINA by Ludovico Arrighi), quite a few of the spellings in it differ from modern Italian. 

            (E.g., Arrighi spells the word for "white" as "biancho"
            whereas modern Italian spells it "bianco.")

Italian, of course, has had a far easier job than English could have had (when it came to keeping the spelling in tune with the spoken word), because Italian has changed far less in the past 500 years or so than English has.

For instance, at about the time that the art of printing reached England,
English vowels differed greatly from what they have since become.
            E.g., in Middle and very early Modern English,
            the word "hire" sounded like "HEE-reh,"
            and the word "here" sounded something like "HEh-reh":

("e" always representing the vowel-sound in "end" - everywhere, including at the ends of words - and "i" always representing the vowel-sound in "ski"

So the fifth alphabet-letter was pronounced  "EH," and the ninth was "EE": as still throughout Europe) ...

... the printing-press made the spellings "hire" and "here" permanent just BEFORE English shifted its vowels: so just BEFORE the words changed in standard usage to sound (as they now do) like "HA-ir" and "HiR." [See vowel shift]

(If Chaucer and his coevals could hear today's pronunciation of "hire," they would think we were saying "hair." If they could hear today's pronunciation of "here," they would think we were saying "hir": the commonest medieval spelling (and pronunciation) of our word "her.")

You can see the Great English Vowel Shift (as linguists call this) happening in documents written as late as the days of Elizabeth:

one of her letters as a princess spells the same word - "here" - as  "here" in one line (following the spelling that she (and we) would customarily see) but just a few lines later in the same letter we see the same elegant Italic handwriting spelling the very same word as "hire" (representing the sounds that she actually said and heard:

when learning how to read and write, Her Majesty had doubtless learned from a tutor ranked as one of the leading intellectuals of the day ... simply to write "i" whenever she said/heard that particular vowel -

just as a German, Italian, Spaniard, etc., still learns in childhood reading and writing - because their languages didn't have a Great English Vowel Shift to change and complicate it all!)
 

As to how far spelling changes in a language: almost all languages have changed their spelling since the first days of writing in that language:

changed it slightly or greatly, depending (often) on how frequently the speakers/writers of the language have done anything about up-dating the written representation of the language to match the language itself         (the "spoken language," as we often hear it called).

For instance, the Portuguese-speaking nations convene an international congress every 50 years or so to update the spelling of Portuguese in order to match the constant tiny changes in spoken Portuguese.

EXAMPLES:   In Portuguese today we spell "Rachel" as "Raquel" and "Canaan" as "Canão":   but up till 50 years or so ago, Portuguese spelled these names "Rachel" (same as English) and "Chanaan"

(so you see that the 50-year gradual "pruning"-process of synchronizing spelling with speech inevitably "weeds out" reflections of past pronunciations/etymologies: "fossil spellings" as some call them. Therefore, I can't call Nan entirely correct when she assumes that:  ... names  ... would ... retain their spelling [even if we spelled more simply], especially as most specific names are linked to their origins.

Spelling reform would mess up medical prescriptions:

> If Doctors can change the spelling of the medications they prescribe, it will be a worst mess than the bad handwriting.

The spellings of most medications are already simplified and usually phonemically correct so there would be no particular need to respell these words. Most medications are Latin and Greek root words but we routinely butcher the pronunciation.  Iodine is pronounced ["eye" oh-dine] only in English speaking countries.  Everyone else associates I with the Latin [I] sound as in *VISA,  *amino and frito. For Latin root words, the recommendation would be to pronounce them as in Latin rather than respell them acording to some English shifted vowel standard.

Pharmaceutical houses do, though, at times change the names/spellings of medicine: often, indeed because spelling- or handwriting-errors have repeatedly caused problems in certain cases when two medicines had similar-looking or -sounding names. The US Pharmacopoiea, in fact, now maintains an official list of  "problem" look-alike/sound-alike names which have caused Rx errors -
e.g., Celebrex (used for arthritis) versus Cerebex (used for schizophrenia).

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