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Penmanship
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== Teaching methods and history == === Books used in North America === [[File:Handwriting.png|thumbnail|'[[The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog]]', written by two different hands]] [[Platt Rogers Spencer]] is known as the "Father of American Penmanship". His writing system was first published in 1848, in his book ''Spencer and Rice's System of Business and Ladies' Penmanship''. The most popular Spencerian manual was ''The Spencerian Key to Practical Penmanship'', published by his sons in 1866. This "[[Spencerian Script|Spencerian Method]]" Ornamental Style was taught in American schools until the mid-1920s, and has seen a resurgence in recent years through [[charter schools]] and [[home schooling]] using revised Spencerian books and methods produced by former [[IAMPETH]] president [[Michael Sull]] (born 1946). George A. Gaskell (1845β1886), a student of Spencer, authored two popular books on penmanship, ''Gaskell's Complete Compendium of Elegant Writing'' and ''The Penman's Hand-Book'' (1883). [[L. H. Hausam|Louis Henry Hausam]] published the "New Education in Penmanship" in 1908, called "the greatest work of the kind ever published."<ref name="Hausam">{{cite book|url=http://skyways.lib.ks.us/genweb/archives/1912/h3/hausam_l_h.html|volume=III|issue=Part 2|title=Kansas: a cyclopedia of state history, embracing events, institutions, industries, counties, cities, towns, prominent persons, etc.|publisher=Standard Pub. Co.|location=[[Chicago, Illinois|Chicago]]|year=1912|access-date=10 March 2013|quote=L. H. Hausam, president of the Hausam School of Penmanship, Hutchinson, Kan., was born in St. Charles, Mo., 14 June 1870|first=Frank W.|last=Blackmar|url-status=dead|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20050422083117/http://skyways.lib.ks.us/genweb/archives/1912/h3/hausam_l_h.html|archive-date=22 April 2005}}.</ref> Many copybooks were produced in North America at the start of the 20th century, mostly for Business Style penmanship (a simplified form of Ornamental Style). These included those produced by [[Austin Norman Palmer|A. N. Palmer]], a student of Gaskell, who developed the [[Palmer Method]], as reflected in his ''Palmer's Guide to Business Writing'', published in 1894. Also popular was [[Zaner-Bloser Method]], introduced by [[Charles Paxton Zaner]] (15 February 1864 β 1 December 1918) and Elmer Ward Bloser (6 November 1865 β 1929) of the Zanerian [[Business College]]. The A. N. Palmer Company folded in the early 1980s. Modern Styles include more than 200 published textbook curricula including: [[D'Nealian|D'Nealian Method]] (a derivative of the Palmer Method which uses a slanted, serifed manuscript form followed by an entirely joined and looped cursive), Modern Zaner-Bloser which accounts for the majority of handwriting textbook sales in the US, A Beka, Schaffer, Peterson, Loops and Groups, McDougal, Steck Vaughn, and many others. Italic Styles include [[Getty-Dubay Italic]] (slightly slanted), Eager, Portland, [[Barchowsky Fluent Handwriting]], Queensland, etc. Other copybook styles that are unique and do not fall into any previous categories are Smithhand, Handwriting without Tears, Ausgangsschrift, Bob Jones, etc. These may differ greatly from each other in a variety of ways. The first made video for correcting messy handwriting especially for people with ADHD and or dysgraphia was "Anyone Can Improve Their Own Handwriting" by learning specialist Jason Mark Alster MSc. === Schools in East Asia === [[File:KanjiPractice.jpg|thumbnail|A typical Kanji practice notebook of a 3rd grader]] By the nineteenth century, attention was increasingly given to developing quality penmanship in Eastern schools. Countries that had a writing system based on logographs and syllabaries placed particular emphasis on form and quality when learning.<ref name="Gray, William S. 1961 pg 189">Gray, William S. (1961) "The Teaching of Reading and Writing". Chicago: Scott, Foresman, and Company. p. 189.</ref> These countries, such as China and Japan, have pictophonetic characters that are difficult to learn. Chinese children start by learning the most fundamental characters first and building to the more esoteric ones. Often, children trace the different strokes in the air with the teacher and eventually start writing them on paper.<ref name="Gray, William S. 1961 pg 189"/> In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, there have been more efforts to simplify these systems and standardize handwriting. For example, in China in 1955, in order to respond to illiteracy among people, the government introduced a Romanized version of Chinese script, called [[Pinyin]].<ref name="Robinson, Andrew 2007 pg 196">Robinson, Andrew. (2007) The Story of Writing. London: Thames & Hudson Ltd. p. 196.</ref> However, by the 1960s, people rebelled against the infringement upon traditional Chinese by foreign influences.<ref name="Robinson, Andrew 2007 pg 196"/> This writing reform did not help illiteracy among peasants. Japanese also has simplified the Chinese characters it uses into scripts called kana. However kanji are still used in preference over kana in many contexts, and a large part of children's schooling is learning kanji.<ref>Robinson, Andrew. (2007) The Story of Writing. London: Thames & Hudson Ltd. p. 208.</ref> Moreover, Japan has tried to hold on to handwriting as an art form while not compromising the more modern emphasis on speed and efficiency. In the early 1940s, handwriting was taught twice, once as calligraphy in the art section of school curricula, and then again as a functional skill in the language section.<ref name="Adal, Raja 2009 pg 244">Adal, Raja. (2009). "Japan's Bifurcated Modernity: Writing and Calligraphy in Japanese Public Schools 1872-1943." ''Theory Culture Society.'' 26:233-248. p. 244.</ref> The practical function of penmanship in Japan did not start to be questioned until the end of the twentieth century; while typewriters proved more efficient than penmanship in the modern West, these technologies had a hard time transferring to Japan, since the thousands of characters involved in the language made typing unfeasible.<ref name="Adal, Raja 2009 pg 244"/>
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