With Pen in Hand

The curator puzzles over quick black slashes on sky blue paper: Inky zigzags erratic as a stock chart.

“See, I don’t quite know what that is,” muses Pilar Perez, director of exhibitions for Track 16 Gallery at Bergamot Station in Santa Monica, leaning in for a better look. “Or that either.” She isn’t taking in a canvas or framed watercolor. Rather she’s flipping through her check stubs. The few notes scattered on her neat desk inspire a similar response: “I couldn’t tell you what that was supposed to remind me to do.”

That’s why, Perez says, over the past few years, she’s pretty much weaned herself off pen, pencil and paper--at least when it comes to the documented details of her personal life. Letters are e-mailed. Most bills are paid online. Groceries? Well, that’s why God created the check card! If she has to leave a note for an office colleague, she’ll print it out from her laptop. Important handwritten correspondence she might entrust to Laurie Steelink, one of the artists employed there. And though she still relies, at times, on a quick Post-it to help jog her memory, “I’ve found this computer program that does the same thing. I can leave notes to myself ‘stuck’ on screen. And I’ll know what they say when I come back to them.”

She’s not alone in squinting over hasty marks that may as well be some dead language. Rather, she’s one of the many people who are confounded or shamed by the elusiveness of longhand and comforted by the ease of the computer: The high-end stationery store owner who, though surrounded by beautiful papers, filigreed pens and expensive journals, suffers from performance anxiety. The lawyer who hires a calligrapher to write out his marriage proposal to present as a gift. Many a eulogy has been written on the demise of penmanship in tech-savvy children, with the assumption that previous generations would treasure and uphold the tradition. But after decades of embarrassing struggles with the Palmer Method, many adults have given up, too, and turned to the forgiving and equalizing keyboard.

To people like Perez, the choice seems to offer instant absolution--or, more precisely, a clean getaway. Until they hit an unexpected bump: The note to the meter maid. The in-store credit card application form. The quick “I stopped by ... “ note to a friend.

Love it or hate it, we still need it, and, say experts and handwriting partisans, it’s futile to pretend we don’t. “Handwriting isn’t going away,” says Margaret Shepherd, artist, calligrapher and author of the just-published “The Art of the Handwritten Note: A Guide To Reclaiming Civilized Communication” (Broadway Books, 2002). “It’s a basic of our lives.” So, she and other experts counsel, it’s important for people to make peace with what they have. Even the inky zigzags.

Problem is, there are those who can’t remember when their penmanship wasn’t perceived as a flaw, something they would hide by perfecting, say, the signature, and cutting the rest free. Just the thought of pen on paper--even for the tiniest correspondence--brings it all back in a nightmarish rush: Weekly handwriting contests and their rewards of foil stars. Writing pads with three blue lines: two solid, the center broken. Laminated cards ringing grammar school classroom walls with the Palmer Method’s difficult-to-imitate upper and lower-case loops, swirls and curlicues.

For some, grammar school’s end meant freedom to develop a personal style; for others it only cemented frustration and insecurity. “The realization of having bad handwriting happens in the mid- to late-teen years,” says Rosa Chandler, a Pasadena-based lettering teacher and artist. It’s about then that we become “very egocentric

Adulthood, she says, is often the traditional period for “repair to poor handwriting.” But as we find less need to write, we “repair” less. The result: “We’ve become disgusted at the chicken scratch that is left behind when we write a quick birthday card,” says Chandler, “

The impact of said chicken scratch isn’t as frivolous as we might think. The Detroit News reported in 2000 that “American businesses lose an estimated $200 million a year to poor penmanship through illegible checks, invoices and other paperwork, while the U.S. Postal Service pays handwriting specialists $4 million a year to decipher illegible addresses.” And there’s more at stake than lost mail. A jury in 2000 awarded $450,000 to the family of a Texas man who died after a pharmacist misread the doctor’s handwritten prescription.

Then there are the emotional costs, the queasiness about the scribble that comes out of a pen’s tip, no matter how hard we try.

“Just like the sound of their voices, most people are uncomfortable about the way their handwriting looks,” Shepherd says. “The Pilot pen company did a study and found that people are four or five times more critical of their own handwriting than others’.”

Her tried-and-true advice: Lighten up.

“Perfectionism is what adolescents do,” says Shepherd, who likes to point out that she flunked handwriting in third grade and felt distanced from her longhand for quite some time--until she picked up a broad nib pen. “Most people have to decide what they have is good enough.”

“Virtually anyone can get back into it,” she says. In the beginning, “there might be an unevenness in it, a visual ‘ahem’--like the clearing of one’s voice. But then it starts to flow.” Her book is full of blame-free optimism and sensual lures--hot tea, a good pen, fine paper--writing as its own reward. “I felt like people need encouragement,” she says. The fact you that you handwrite shows that you care. It’s like preparing dinner for friends. It doesn’t have to be an award-winning meal. You are just conveying how you feel.”

Sheila Kurtz, a New York-based graphologist, is more tough-love in her approach. She doesn’t blame the computer or lack of practice for the sorry state of our writing skills. She faults our wiring. Kurtz, the author of “Rewrite Your Life” (St. Martins Paperbacks) and founder and president of Graphology Consulting Group, believes what many a hesitant writer fears: “Whatever you are, whoever you are, will come out on paper.”

Handwriting, she stresses, is really brainwriting. “It comes from your cortex. And you can’t change it until you find out why you are writing a certain way. “ That might strike a chill in people like Perez, who might be wary of what Kurtz would find in a letter’s “weak looking end” or a “t-bar that floats” above the stem. And Kurtz has heard the fears. “Sometimes at seminars these doctors say: When you look at my writing you’ll find out that I’m a serial killer or--fill in the blank ... “

Through something she calls, graphotherapy--handwriting exercises designed specifically to “maximize desirable personality traits”--she claims to be able increase concentration, raise self-esteem or develop confidence by simply changing the shape, pressure or slope of one’s pen-strokes.

But for many, the desire to change is far more basic--legibility. And the prescription for that: practice.

Margaret Yasuda sees the longing all the time. Behind a work table, she sits in the midst of creamy note cards, themed liner paper, handmade invitations and thank-you notes--the tools of aspiration. At her paper and gift store, Mimio in Old Town Pasadena, she offers classes ranging from bookbinding to card-making. “We encourage self-expression, ... and emphasize how easy it can be.”

Convincing students can take some doing, though, says Yasuda, a graphic artist. “People are nervous. They think if it’s not perfect, they don’t even want to try. But it’s not going to be perfect, and those imperfections are what make it special. You get a sense of their personality.”

In our perfectionistic moments, we forget that many prefer the recipe in grandmother’s hesitant longhand, or the quick love note on a Thai take-out menu--smudges, cramped hand and all.

But Perez isn’t so easily convinced: “Oh, dash this off and throw this in and they are going to understand?” For her, not handwriting it isn’t an exercise in aesthetics, it’s a way to be understood.

Shepherd thinks both are possible, in our own idiosyncratic hands. “I’m very wary of people looking at all of this like painting flowerpots,” she says. Handwriting isn’t a trend, “it really is at the core of what we do. The ‘thank yous.’ The ‘I’m sorrys,’ The ‘come overs.’ They are fundamental. But the art is to elevate them into something better. It’s not going up on a gallery wall. “It’s just ink on paper. Between you and your reader.”