Calligraphy

Sometime during my fourth year of school in Romania, my teacher noticed that I had changed my handwriting. Her expression, tone and repetition of this a couple of times throughout that year brought to my attention her disapproval of me changing the way I wrote. Perhaps it was the way I wrote the 'r's or maybe my copying the handwriting of a colleague of mine who I admired because the way she wrote was similar, but still more personal than the standard taught in schools. The way we were taught was cursive script. Initially, the paper we used was not simply lined like refill or in 1B5 notebooks today; instead we used paper that followed the subsequent pattern:

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Note that the spaces between each horizontal line, dotted or not, are meant to be the same size.
The handwriting had to be set between those sets of lines, in a specific way. This was a sort of guideline - think of it like training wheels when you first learn to ride your bike. You always started writing a part of a letter on the lower continuous black line and most letters would have to then fit between that one and the continuous one above it. However, we were taught to not actually touch that line but to instead leave a small gap, probably for aesthetic reasons. Capital letters were written in the same fashion but were supposed to take up the space from the starting line to just under the dotted line above the upper black line. Some lower-case letters like f, l, t, h, k were treated like capital letters in the sense that their extra length had to be accounted for. So the length of the 't' would stretch out almost to the top dotted line. Letters like g, j and y which had 'tails' could have those 'tails' reach down and touch the bottom dotted line. It's quite simple, but I suppose it does take some getting used to. As for what the letters actually look like, they are joined together at one point or another if they belong in the same word. Letters like v, w, l, h and r have little curls within them, which I suppose adds an element of style because it gives the writing a more refined feel. For v and w, the curls look like little pig tails pinned onto the ends of the letters. It does look pleasant if done well, but writing like this takes more effort and time than the script I use now. When you're taking notes in a lecture, there's no time to make perfect curls or to formulate a good curve for the s. So I wonder what the point is of learning such 'refined' handwriting if it is not going to be used later on in classes in that way? Maybe it gave us students an appreciation of handwriting and what it can do to the content to make it more visually pleasing (and thus maybe more persuasive?). Each person adds their own little twang to it of course, which reminds me that some people's writing was quite dissimilar to the standard taught in the sense that it was much less careful, much less neat. Those people would have gotten lower marks for that.

I tried to change mine probably because it wasn't the best and I wanted it to be. I had a look at the handwriting of some girls that were in my class and I was impressed by their ability to make it look aesthetically clean, no matter what they wrote. So, me being a child that wanted to show clean work, copied the little differences in the way they did their curls (maybe they made theirs bigger) and how they positioned their letters all standing up straighter than the slanting slightly-to-the-right norm that we were taught. It's possibly the same type of xeroxing that I did much more recently when I started dotting my i's with small pretty circles instead of butch dots. It was much cleaner, but I became slightly mad about it and made every letter much more circular so the spaces in the writing became more noticeable. How did this had an effect on what I was writing? Not sure, but I personally did notice I took more care in my writing than before. I wanted a cleaner image, likely.

So was this whole process all about image? The way you write can give away quite a lot of things about how you see yourself, or so I have heard on television from a person that studied people's handwriting. In that sense, your handwriting is like a mirror, reflecting things that you may not want to admit about who you think you are. Word processing has taken away part of this vision since you no longer are writing, but typing, but some may argue that the font you choose is also revealing. Deciphering handwriting however can be a difficult if you don't know what each little feature or difference can suggest about the writer.

Maybe when we learn how to write, the fears and aspirations we adopt at that time are shown to us despite our efforts to conceal them or run away. For a child, learning how to write is an important step in learning to communicate with the rest of the world. I had a 'traumatic' experience with this step that has remained tucked away in my mind, hardly resurfacing until now. In my first year of school, we learned the alphabet. We practiced writing letters individually, then words with those letters and finally sentences that emphasised the usage of the letter we happened to be looking at on the day. This practicing was done in a pink A4 workbook which had four pictures at the back, one of which was a close-up of Snow White, with her black hair and a hair band which maybe was red, or white, or blue. The pages were lined as shown above but there were pictures also within so it didn't look too daunting. At school, we mostly used pencil, never pen. We used refillable ink-pens more regularly in the years to come, but at our level, pencils were necessary because often we made mistakes, mostly aesthetic ones I imagine. I was under the impression (possibly influenced by the strictness of the Romanian school system) that our books had to be kept neat and tidy. One day, while the class worked on the letter O, capital and lower-case combined, I somehow managed to make a smudgy mess in the middle of the page, probably from rubbing a mistake out with a cheap eraser because the higher quality ones were too expensive to afford (on the subject of money, a year or so later I got a more expensive mechanical pencil which wowed me because I never had to sharpen it and could just add 0.7 lead on demand and it would actually write well). Our teacher was coming around to check that we did our work and as she came to check each person individually, the class was silent, each pupil awaiting judgment. Just think of it - awaiting JUDGMENT. It was a serious case then, for me, because I was petrified by my smudge on the page. Trying to fix it by rubbing it out worsened it - I actually created a small hole, which of course added to my tension. When the teacher came around in her aura of perfume - i.e. the judgment moments - I remember her finger pressing down near the smudge as she was assessing what I had done and how well I did it. I looked down at this time, shoulders maybe hunched, scared. She asked me what happened there, her nail indicating the (black) hole. I might have stammered an answer and she may have given me a reply but I was still ashamed when she moved on.

At 18 now, I can smile and laugh about the insignificance of what happened, but ten or more years ago, that haunted me for a while. The focus with school was so much on the result... and fear was what led many people, including me, to strive for the best. Yes, I did enjoy the self-satisfaction of getting a question right and being told in front of the class that my writing piece was the best, but I would argue that it was not those moments of success that kept me going through the system for those four years at school but the dread of punishment, of getting something wrong, of BEING wrong. Such pressure to not fail... I'm glad I was fortunate to experience what education was like in another part of the world.