Working Up

by Dwayne Phillips

Sloppy handwriting costs MONEY!

I was happy when I moved from 6th grade to 7th grade. The reason was simple – there would be no more penmanship classes. I would get all A s in school and no more C s. Penmanship was, anyways, a made up subject so that girls could get a good grade (excuse my bad attitude, but I was after all just a little boy).

I always hated penmanship. I knew what I meant. So what if someone else had trouble reading what I wrote with a pencil? That was their problem.

Fast forward a few decades. I would sit in meetings with other engineers and someone would be at the white board. They would mumble something towards the board, write a few things, and turn around. “See?”, they would ask.

Yes, I could see that they had put ink on the white board, but I had no idea what it was.

Time wasted. Money wasted.

Fast forward to a couple of weeks ago. We were writing some documents as a group at work. People would write their comments on their printed copies. I had to type the comments into a master copy on the computer.

I could see their ink on paper, but I had no idea what it was.

Time wasted. Money wasted.

When I was 45, I bought a book on penmanship. It had the good old pages of how to make letters. It had the dashed-line letters where I would slowly and carefully trace how to make the letters. It had the blank lines requiring me to write each letter dozens of times. I worked through the entire book.

Note: this book, like many “modern” books, taught only blocked printing. It did not teach the looped cursive style.

I write in a journal. I practice writing by hand every day. I write by hand more than most people. My penmanship is better now than at any time in my life.

What is my secret to writing in a way that is legible?

I try hard.

I hate to write this blog post. I sound like Miss Campbell (that is Miss Campbell, not Ms or Mrs Campbell), my teacher from the first grade. This, however, is not griping for the sake of making a six-year-old boy do boring work over and over.

This is about wasting time and money.

In case I am not clear on this, let me repeat:

Bad penmanship is about wasting time and money.

So every engineer out there – let’s get over our disdain for what happened to us when we were six years old.

Try harder. Write legibly.