Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 44.djvu/97

Rh teacher's fancy. The other eight weeks the class received sometimes two and sometimes three thirty-minute lessons per week.) Let it be understood that these are not isolated cases, but that every member of the class shows the same marked contrast. The slanting writing is part of a composition, while the straight writing was from dictation.

Now let the reader hold the page farther and farther from him until the vertical writing becomes indistinct, and then try his



eyes on the slanting writing at this distance. Unless his sight is different from that of a large number of persons whom the writer has tested, the universal verdict will be in favor of the legibility of the vertical writing. The test becomes much clearer when a short-sighted person, who wears glasses, takes them off and tries to read the two styles of writing. To such people, so plain is the proof that they wonder why straight writing has not been adopted in the schools long ago.

It is claimed that vertical writing can be more rapidly written than slanting for the reason that the perpendicular of every right-angled triangle is shorter than the hypotenuse, and therefore