Pens

Ah June. The month of the hot weather. The month of the start of a really serious case of heat, haze, and humidity. The month where school-going children get their first major reprieve from the academic year. The month that... I could go on, but it's pointless.

What I mean to say is, it's 2015, and June. So, an entry is in order, and what better thing to talk about than the fountain pen and penmanship in general?

I got my first ``proper'' fountain pen back in 2009, and it has been nearly 6 years since. I never looked back---I've been using my fountain pen for almost all forms of writing, save cheque writing because fountain pens do not allow the underlying carbon copy to record the transaction correctly.

Man does it take me back to look at that writing sample from the past. I've fixed my cursive since then. Specifically, my capital `I', `F', `Q', `T', `J', `H', `A', `N', small `r', `f' have been fixed to conform to something more traditional looking. The reason for that was due to a reply from T-Mobile some time back, when I wrote a handwritten letter asking for a waiver of some fees due to me not being in the US any more and that I had already cancelled the phone account---the details didn't matter as much as what happened in my address. The first letter of my street name was misread as ``Fl'' instead of ``H'', which made me seriously reconsider how I was forming my words.

Of course, later on I adjusted my writing even more because I realised that there was a very good reason to have a ``standardised'' cursive script, and that the form that I was using was far from being standardised. In fact, it was some kind of bastardised form of pseudo-calligraphic-cursive-printed nonsense which was ugly, and more importantly, prone to misreads like the anecdote I referred to earlier. So I fixed them as best as I could, and I think that they look a little better now. Which of course segues (I adore this word---it does not sound like [SEG-ewws] but more like [SEG-ways]) into the other thing I want to talk about, that is, penmanship.

I'm not sure about the current school curriculum in SIN city, but back in the day, I remembered that we took up some form of cursive writing in class as part of English lessons. I believe it was in primary three or four that we were first introduced to cursive writing. I didn't really care for it much, ended up doing lots of printing, until I reached primary six where my awesome English teacher Mr Lin Min would basically be writing in cursive for everything. Note that these were the days where the ``word processor'' was mostly ye olde typewriter, and often times it was much faster to write notes out for the students with pen and paper instead of relying on the typewriter. The typewritten texts were reserved for the massive vocabularly lists, things that were better suited for the rigid formatting that typewriters are awesome at, but I digress.

In a world where reaching for a word processor is as convenient as coughing, it would seem that penmanship is dated at best and completely irrelevant at worst. I disagree with that thought for a variety of reasons. Logorrhea is the chief symbol of our times, as people (including me!) will happily type hundreds upon hundreds of meaningless drivel in order to convey a simple point, defenestrating conciseness of diction. Part of the reason for that is that typing on a word processor (I'm using this in the most general form of the noun) is quite effortless as compared to picking up a pen and then writing it down on a piece of paper. In the time it takes to write up this entire blog entry, I can probably write down only half of what I have typed up right here. It sounds counter-intuitive then to say that penmanship is even more needed now than before, but it is true---requiring an actual effort to put thoughts down on paper will skew the writer to actually sit down and think carefully what he/she wants to say before finding the right expressions and thus writing them down. This will naturally yield a much concise and pithy piece of writing.

Thus, it is still possible (and preferable even) that a handwritten essay of five hundred words is more worthy of reading than a thousand-word essay that was typed up in a word processor on a computer.

Pithiness aside, penmanship also trains one thing that we are sorely lacking in this day of the ``service industry''---fine motor control. Back in the manufacturing/artisan era (industrial/pre-industrial society), people did lots of fine craft work with their hands. That requires some rather exquisite fine motor control. Musicians, artists, they all have to keep the fine motor control up if they want to be successful at what they do. Even the peasant needs fine motor control to repair their own gear, weave their baskets and what not. But these days, with lots of push-button automation, we are finding that the need for such activities is gradually fading away. Writing is among the last bastions of easily accessible fine motor control activities that is left. While it doesn't necessarily mean that one ought to write lots of essays with the pen, it does mean that one should take the opportunity to write whenever they can, just so that they maintain their fine motor skills. Need a list? Don't pull up the damn word processor (or spreadsheet program; ugh) and just handwrite it. Need to inform someone something? Write a quick memo instead of sending yet another email---this is especially true when the person is like... a family member.

Anyway, I'm just ranting and losing steam. I think I'll stop here and move on. Till the next update then.