Saturday Data: Penmanship

How is your penmanship?

     Young people raised on computers might not even know the meaning of the word! But generations of Alabamians learned how to write in school by repeatedly writing the same sentences and phrases over and over and over.
 
     The Alabama Department of Archives and History has a penmanship exercise book in its collection, and it has been digitized so you can scroll through the 1852 book by Issac Barr....though I'm not sure the lesson topic was especially uplifting...at least on this page.

      And that includes handwriting! People have been talking about the death of penmanship for decades, back to the emergence of typewriters.
     In 2003, CBS posted a report about computers killing handwriting. 
     My parents learned by using the "Palmer method" of penmanship, which is illustrated in this YouTube video.

[Saturday Data is a regular feature of www.TimLennox.com]