I was taught italics with a fountain pen. My handwriting is now an ill eligible scrawl. I actually did use fountain pens till maybe 15 years ago. I have a large collection of beautiful and potentially valuable (if they are ever cleaned up) vintage fountain men's. they are beautiful, whatever else you say. These days for pens I used the now-no-longer-made Rotring 600 old style, hexagonal in shape, coper covered with black I used one through LS for exams. I was one of the early people to enter my notes on a computer, the new wing of the LS had vastly insufficient outlets, and only a few of us did it then. Of course all students use computers or tablets now, at least in LS. But I wrote my exams by hand because of a superstitious fear of the computer crashing during the exam and losing my work. I feel for my professors who had to struggle through my scrawl.
Sent from my iPad
On Nov 25, 2012, at 10:08 AM, "Carrol Cox" <cbcox at ilstu.edu> wrote:
> Since I went blind I have had a difficult time composing over a page or two.
> Why? My reading of my own text is a slower process, & I can only hold so
> much in my head at once. So I lose control of the structure of what I'm
> writing or trying to write.
>
> Now, I discovered about 45 years ago that many of the botches that my
> students turned in were _literally_ fragments; that is, the sentence had
> been a complete sentence in the mind of the student, but his/her
> writing/printing was so slow that only pieces of the original sentence got
> transferred from brain to paper. And there was no way in which instruction
> in grammar or rhetoric could change those broken sentences or broken
> paragraphs. And now when I attempt to write a longer piece, only fragments
> of the whole reach the screen. If I were using cursive I would now have
> descended to total illiteracy.
>
> Using the keyboard gives one much more control over what one is writing than
> using a pen or pencil. (Incidentally, when fountain pens replaced pencils,
> there were many who thought it would destroy writing.) I've only been
> reading Jordan on this thread because I am totally unable to grasp what
> earthly reason anyone would have for preferring cursive to a computer
> keyboard. I don't want to see the pitiful efforts some posters may be making
> to defend cursive. I have no doubt that student writing will have improved
> greatly since they abandoned cursive for computers. They should master their
> own language more fully. It's possible that texting will bring about a
> similar improvement in the mastery of English.
>
> Carrol
>
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