Penmanship

 

Recently, when I was visiting my godson, he was amazed by my daring, revolutionary and transgressive method of writing in block capitals. He was agog, he was aghast– a saving light had come at last! See, he explained to me that “capitals are much easier to do” and so, much like Uncle Rory, he would deal with them exclusively from now on. I had to sadly explain to him that this was a privilege only allowed to adults and that, having proved that I could do joined up handwriting and remember when something Should Be Capitalised and wHEn It ShOuLD noT, I was now allowed to disregard everything I’d bothered to learn because people knew it was from indifference, not incompetence. He had not earnt that right.

But, as I was saying this, I began to wonder if I had indeed ever really proven this: in Primary School, I was sent to the Headmaster’s office a lot because of the “presentation” of my work. I argued it didn’t matter, because it was the content that my teachers were after, although I doubt I used the word “content.” My headmaster said “presentation” was important– I repeatedly asked why and he could never give a satisfactory answer.

I started writing in block capitals the day after I finished Sixth Form (not an exaggeration: I kept a handwritten diary at the time and the change is demonstrable). Up until the end of Sixth Form, I was still getting reprimanded by my teachers for my sloppy scrawl (I remember there even being some points allotted toward Penmanship in my A-levels, but now that I think about it, they may just have told me that to try and scare me into conforming). I would get marked down because to my teachers, my “o” was a “6” and my “g” was either a “y” a “q” or a “%”: I didn’t really care. I knew this calligraphy malarkey was bullshit because I’d spent such a long time learning to join up letters and then was told in Secondary School that doing so would get me detention. And so, the second I was allowed, I jumped on the all-caps bandwagon and never looked back.

Fast forward six years and I am trying to teach children not too familiar with the Roman alphabet or the rules for capitalisation how to write and I suddenly see a flaw in my plan. There was actually an early warning for this when I first filled in forms at the City Office with my supervisor and was told that they were unusable because not only was my handwriting too big to fit in the space but my “I”s, “L”s, “1”s and “7”s were unrecognisable to a Japanese reader. I would have to learn how to write English like a Japanese person does before I could teach a Japanese person how to write English. I think that’s ironic.

Anyway, back to the classroom– I have just been asked to write the day, date and weather report on the board and all the kids are gobsmacked because I’m not using little letters. The teacher kindly asks me to rub it out and write it again because, I realise, Japanese doesn’t have capital letters and the children need as much instruction as possible in that area. So, somewhat shakily, I rewrite the words.

No one can read it.

My “r”’s and “’t”s are indistinguishable– my “y” is not a letter but some kind of weird symbol akin to the shibboleth: you know you’ve seen it on a Microsoft keyboard but you don’t know what it’s for. The less said about my vowels, the better.

The teacher asked one of the pupils to come and write it for me and it’s then that I realised that a thirteen year old has nicer handwriting than I do. I am embarrassed now to mark the children’s work because I feel I’m defacing their papers with my horrid little scrawl. I’ve tried to improve; I approach writing on the board like a move in noughts and crosses: slow, deliberate, almost certain to screw me over in the long term. But it’s hard to undo a lifetime’s habit in a month. I’ve managed to stop putting such insanely long tails on my “g”s and I now always remember to put the tittle on my “i”s and cross my “t”s all the way through. But my “w”s still look like a tiny pair of bosoms, my “b”s like bent spades and my “e”s might be an arroba, a schwa or an eye staring out from some sort of wormhole, it’s hard to tell. At the moment, I just try and avoid writing if possible because honestly, these kids have it down and I don’t want to ruin it for them.

See, I inherited my bad penmanship from my father, who in turn learnt it from his grandfather and so on and so forth, but I have a chance to break the cycle. We can let the Kelly scribble die with me and rid its pointy, scratchy, illegible ugliness from the earth, if only I don’t taint these children with my awful form and tendency to smudge.

The thing is, part of me is angry because I have now come across possibly the only situation in the modern world (where we all rarely look up from our keyboards unless it’s to use voice recognition software) where the quality of an adult’s handwriting is actually, genuinely important. I have retroactively proven my headmaster correct. I guess he must have known, even then, when I was eight years old, where my life would lead. I guess the writing was on the wall in ugly, scribbled block capitals.

Rory Kelly