Zaner-Bloser. Now there’s a name I hadn’t heard in almost 40 years. It all came back to me, reading the front page article in Saturday’s Tribune about young Jancarlo Perez of Chicago, who became a two-time winner of a national handwriting contest—sponsored by Zaner-Bloser.
When I was learning penmanship in the second and third grade, it was the Zaner-Bloser method that my grammar school taught. The handwriting textbooks which we used every day and the light green lined writing paper—they all came with the name “Zaner-Bloser” on them.
My teachers were sticklers for precision, and I recall my seven-year old left hand was ultra steady and obedient. My tall letters went up to the top line and stopped right there; my small letters hugged the dotted center line of the page without ever going past. When it came to cursive, my loops were nearly perfect and I could duplicate them at will. At least in the beginning I was an A student in penmanship.
Then came junior high (as we called it back then) and a strange thing happened. Style points gave way to speed, and I developed bad, bad habits, habits from which I’ve never recovered. I became a juvenile penmanship delinquent, and as a grown-up I’ve never reformed. In fact, at our house it’s become something of a joke. My wife orders me to keep away from the checkbook, because she can never make out my letters or my numbers.
These days it’s rare for me to receive anything written in longhand, but occasionally I do. It’s even rarer for me to receive something from a letter writer who obviously still has the skill and patience to form their letters carefully, precisely and legibly, while adding touches of their own unique style. Penmanship, it is clear to me, is becoming a fading art. And, with email and texting dominating our lives these days, I don’t hold out much hope that it’ll ever return to its former glory.
Tags: Jancarlo Perez, penmanship, Zaner-Bloser
