Page:When You Write a Letter (1922).pdf/143

 bling in no way the characters which we were taught in the elementary schools. The reasons for this illegibility are sometimes haste, sometimes carelessness, and often an attempt to form a signature that would be difficult to imitate or forge. Some of these signatures look more like a Chinese laundry bill than an attempt to write English script. I receive letters regularly from a Boston attorney whose name appended to his communications does not show a single character which has any semblance to anything in the written alphabet in English; I have letters before me from a country banker and a Chicago business man that are as vague to me as the inscriptions of the Rosetta stone. It is only by referring to the names engraved at the top of the sheet that I am able even approximately to guess what the characters are intended to represent. I have been told that my own signature often is not much more intelligible.

Unless a business man has his name printed or engraved somewhere upon his stationery he should write carefully enough for a stranger to recognize his name with a minimum of effort. Anyone