Letter-Perfect

If you think only grumpy curmudgeons and a few picky schoolteachers care about penmanship, you haven’t met Mike Butorac, a muscular, broad-chested fellow with the prettiest handwriting you ever saw.

Butorac works for the Los Angeles Police Department as a crime scene photographer, but he carries on about swirling capital letters and perfect 60-degree slants as if he were a schoolmarm. He rises at 3:30 every weekday morning to practice his penmanship for 45 minutes--copying page after page of letters from his collection of old penmanship handbooks--before making the long commute from his home in Mission Viejo to the LAPD.

Most of his manuals date from the mid-1800s to early 1900s, the golden era of handwriting that Butorac has sought to single-handedly revive. While he’s modest about his own skills, to the untrained eye his penmanship looks letter-perfect.

“I don’t know where all of this is getting me. I just like the way it looks,” he says.

Butorac laments that people don’t take pride in their penmanship anymore. He recalls being called to photograph a suicide victim in a seedy L.A. hotel. The victim was in his 90s. On the wall of the hotel room hung the framed certificate he won in 1921 for passing a Palmer penmanship course.

“He still had it on his wall,” Butorac says. “I guess he was proud of it until the very end.”

Such pride of penmanship has become largely passe, a victim of the typewriter, the computer and the ballpoint pen, which encouraged all manner of bad writing habits because it could be clutched improperly in the hand and still produce a thin blue or black line.

During handwriting’s golden era, how you wrote was a measure of your worth. Elegant penmanship was considered the mark of a disciplined, trustworthy and refined soul.

Anyone who hoped to succeed in business in the 1800s needed a skilled hand to produce reports, forms and letters. Penmanship schools sprang up around the country promising to turn chicken scratch into fine script.

Students, working with flexible quills, spent hours copying penmanship manuals. Some achieved a kind of celebrity status for their handwriting, notably American calligrapher Platt Rogers Spencer, who ushered in the age of ornamental penmanship.

Grand flourishes and embellishments became known as Spencerian script; mastering it remains a pinnacle of penmanship accomplishments and Butorac’s dream.

“It’s never been equaled,” he says.

In the late 1800s, Austin Norman Palmer introduced a simplified and speedier writing style designed for use in business. His Palmer Method of Penmanship, which stressed correct posture, relaxation exercises and muscle movement, became the standard in America until the mid-20th century.

It’s still used today, and it’s the Palmer method that Butorac faithfully practices each morning.

“It relaxes me and helps me get through the day,” he says.

When practicing, Butorac sits with his back straight, taking care that his wrist doesn’t touch the table. He holds his fountain pen by forming a kind of tripod with his thumb, forefinger and middle digit. When he writes, only the forearm and two fingers touch the page.

He warms up by making rows of ovals and reverse ovals, then does push-pull exercises that leave a solid zigzag across the page. Then he practices his letters, working on getting the slant just so and the proper roundness to the characters.

When he writes a check, people often stop to admire his handwriting, and “my stuff’s legible at work,” says the self-effacing Butorac.

It’s safe bet that he has the neatest handwritten reports in the LAPD.

Until a couple of years ago, Butorac’s handwriting was pretty much like everyone else’s, rife with cramped letters and uneven spacing. Then he got married and took over the household bill-paying duties. He decided to improve his penmanship, bought an old Palmer manual and got hooked.

Butorac has found that improving his handwriting has improved his mental attitude. The pages of old penmanship manuals are filled with inspirational slogans, many extolling the virtues of discipline and positive thinking to motivate students.

Butorac flips through the manuals quoting their scripted sayings: “The way to win tomorrow is to achieve something worthy today.” “Train muscle to obey will.” “Master one thing at a time.”

“At first I used to ridicule these positive statements,” he says. The more he read them, the more he began to appreciate their meaning.

“I grew up with a lot of negativity, and my job’s negative, but in these manuals there’s a lot of positive stuff,” he says. “This is what inspires me.”

That handwriting has therapeutic benefits comes as no surprise to Katy Bonnett, a Laguna Beach handwriting analyst and document examiner. Bonnett, who reviews documents to verify signatures, believes changing one’s handwriting can change one’s outlook.

“People should cursive write. It allows them to express and emote,” says Bonnett, who writes in a journal every day. “If you sit down and write an affirmative statement every day and write it neatly, things will start to happen because you’re sending messages to your brain when you change your handwriting.”

Copying inspirational messages helped Bonnett overcome her fear of speaking in front of a group, she says. “It made me more expressive.”

Typing on a computer blocks the flow of emotion that comes when one practices cursive, she says. There’s no mind-to-hand connection, no way of deciphering one’s personality through the shape of the letters.

“People are shifting their energy to more technical interests rather than expressing their feelings,” she says. “There’s less flow, less reaching out to others.”

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When they do take pen to paper, more people tend to print, which, Bonnett says, isn’t as expressive as cursive.

“Every stroke offers clues to the personality,” she says. Graphologists, for instance, maintain that people with high self-esteem tend to make high-crossed Ts, while those with low self-esteem have low-crossed Ts.

They attribute sloppy handwriting to a variety of emotional states, indicating some inner conflict or unhappiness or simply that the mind is working quicker than the hand. That explains the bad handwriting of many doctors, Bonnett says.

“You can’t read the handwriting of some geniuses.”

Nobody’s attributing the decline of penmanship to an abundance of genius. Rather, laziness and a lack of time are cited as the common causes of poor script.

Teachers no longer have time in their crowded curriculum to devote long class hours to practicing penmanship. They even disagree about the best way to teach handwriting.

Most schools teach students to print starting in kindergarten, then begin instructing them in some version of the Palmer or the no-frills D’Nealian method in the second or third grade.

But at several elementary schools in the Irvine Unified School District, students learn a simplified cursive instead of printing as early as kindergarten. They learn to print in third grade. Many who learned to print first consider the method backhanded, but promoters say the cursive-first method is more natural.

“People think it’s so different, but we’ve been doing it for 10 years, and we think the students’ writing is beautiful,” says Karen Bauer, first-grade teacher at Vista Verde School in Irvine. “But we are in the minority.”

Butorac isn’t impressed with the styles taught in modern manuals. He shows off a handwriting book that belonged to a neighborhood child.

“Look at these loopy-looking things,” he says, pointing out the curlicue capitals.

He compares the modern script to cursive found in a second grade manual from 1925, admiring the simplicity and elegance of the letters.

“I use old manuals because they’re the best. Today everything’s watered down. They don’t even talk about how to hold the pen,” he says.

No matter which method students learn, many end up with sloppy script anyway.

“By the time they get to the seventh grade they forget everything they learn. We constantly have to remind them,” says Jeanne Aubertin, vice principal of Mission Parish School in San Juan Capistrano.

Such hand-wringing over handwriting has been going on for eons, Butorac says. Since the days of ornamental penmanship, people have been finding ways to pare down and simplify penmanship, leading to laments.

“I’ve noticed that even in books from the 1800s they’re complaining about a decline in penmanship and how there’s not enough time to write well,” he says.

Butorac will continue to practice his letters, knowing that his fine penmanship no longer has a place in a high-tech society.

“It’s probably useless today,” he says. “But I consider it an elegant accomplishment.”