Page:Theory and Practice of Handwriting.djvu/166

148 of the arm is indeed requisite in Vertical Writing, but nothing unphysiological can be discovered in this fact. Otherwise we should have to suppose that in all the Middle Ages, which, as is well known, knew only perpendicular characters, or characters inclined at the most 10° to 15° to the right, violence was done to the wrist in the writing of every line for what reason no one understands and yet throughout those many centuries not a single person among millions of writers observed that this way of writing was uncomfortable, nay unnatural, and that the laws of movement of the hand demanded Sloping Writing with oblique direction of the line. In all the antique representations hitherto accessible to me of monks, women, and children in the act of writing the straight middle-position is without exception to be seen (see Figs. 1 and 2). To venture to describe such time-honoured customs as contrary to nature is really to depreciate the inventive faculty of our ancestors. At the same time it is by no means to be denied that in very quick writing, to which particular callings at the present day see themselves forced, Sloping Writing with oblique position of the paper is requisite; indeed I even think that in the growing need for rapidity of writing lies the cause of the predominance which within the last two centuries Sloping Writing has been gradually acquiring. The excessive right-inclination of the down-strokes, amounting to 45°, which to the detriment of the clearness and legibility of our handwritings has only in recent times become customary, must in any case be described as an error which nothing justified, not even haste and hurry. To attain the objects of quick writing a slightly oblique position of about 20° would abundantly suffice. But it seems to me in no way justifiable to use the oblique style in elementary teaching; it offers no advantage at all except in writing at headlong speed, and is therefore entirely unnecessary for the great majority of children not only at school but also throughout life. Moderately rapid writing, as school experiments to be mentioned later have shown, is quite compatible with perpendicular characters (see p. 122, also p. 153).

If sloping writing with oblique middle-position of the copy-book involved slight left-inclination of the head only, then a serious objection could scarcely be raised against this way of writing; every side-inclination of the head, however, has as its result, on statistical grounds, a compensatory twist of the spinal column, whose far reaching effect cannot be underestimated if we take into account the many hours which in the course of the whole school-time are spent in writing. The principal danger lies in the fact that there are no means of keeping children who write the sloping style fixed in middle position with moderately oblique position of the copy-book; even under the eyes of the teacher, and still more in writing without expert oversight, there