The Missing Ink by Philip Hensher

Author:Philip Hensher [Hensher, Philip]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780230767362
Publisher: Pan Macmillan UK
Published: 2014-06-27T04:00:00+00:00

The Marion Richardson alphabet.

Richardson’s programme aims towards a free cursive handwriting, and she says, as A.N. Palmer was saying shortly before her, that it should use ‘only easy movements of the hand and arm’.2 Richardson’s wonderful insight was that these easy movements were to be found in children before they even thought of writing, ‘in primitive forms of decoration and in childish scribble’. Unlike Palmer, whose classes centred on the blackboard, and on grim unison drills, Richardson wanted the child to explore a range of patterns for themselves, playing with crayon on paper as a foundation of good handwriting. She warns against imposing an ‘adult sense of correctness’ on children. After reading of handwriting masters whose interest is in conformity, duty, and preparing for a job in commerce or the civil service, it is a pleasure to come across someone who really knows what it is to be a child, and sees that not as something to subdue in the interests of a professional future in an office, but something valuable in itself.

These pre-writing exercises are of very great importance. Not only are they a source of delight to the little child, being but a development of the spontaneous scribble that children make in imitation of ‘real’ writing, but by presenting the several writing rhythms in isolation one at a time, they make it possible for him to experience the essentially cursive nature of handwriting from the beginning, even before he has actually learnt to write.’3

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.