Joshua Tenpenny

Still going strong. You know, I’d thought I’d have trouble remembering to do it every day, but even on evenings where I would have liked to forget about it, I always remember…

Despite traveling to a conference this weekend and keeping crazy hours, I have not missed a day yet. Go me! I did five each of the Ashtanga Sun Salutations in my hotel room while I was away, and went to a class at the gym when I got back. I won’t be crushed if I miss a day, but I’m not going to let myself make excuses for why it is okay to skip today.

You know, I’ve been meaning to stick to a daily practice for years, and I’ve avoided it because I thought it would be so hard. I thought I would have to plan and schedule and make a big deal of it. But really all I have to do is do yoga today, and keep doing that. What a concept!

—Joshua

Here’s a sample of my “neat” writing, on a school assignment from a few years ago. That is how I write when I intend it to be legible to someone. If I’m the only one who needs to be able to read it, I relax and the letters begin to fall apart entirely. Vague squiggles suggest the outlines of letters, rather than actually forming them.

I found that even when I slow it down and concentrate, I still had a very hard time writing neatly. Time for some research!

In the library I found a copy of Teach Yourself Better Handwriting by Rosemary Sassoon. When looking for handwriting websites, I found a wonderful free eBook by Gunnlaugur Briem and didn’t realize until much later that Briem was Sassoon’s co-author. They teach italic handwriting. I learned standard Copperplate-derived looped cursive as a kid, but never use it because it degenerates almost immediately into an undifferentiated loopy squiggle. Even at my neatest I can barely read it.

The italic handwriting that Sassoon and Breim teach really appealed to me. The angularity of it seemed easier to write neatly, and I like the look of it. Not so fussy as the looped cursive, but not as childish looking as block printing. I love that they don’t make a firm distinction in italic between print and cursive. You can join some letters and not others, breaking occasionally in long words and omitting the joins that are too awkward for you. Nice!

I picked up a kids workbook for italic handwriting for a dollar on Amazon, Book D in Barbara Getty’s series. I believe it is for third graders. I’ve been working through it, and I am definitely making progress. I think part of why I hadn’t made any progress in the past is that I was trying to work at a normal “adult” handwriting size. If I write large on double-ruled paper, I can make quite nice letters. The series of workbooks has progressively smaller lines, so perhaps if I work through this one and the remaining three in the series I’ll be able to make nicely formed letters at a normal adult size.

So, I’ll keep working on it.