Quote of the Day (Nick Foulkes, on His ‘Idiosyncratic’ Handwriting)

“I wonder what psychological torment, latent criminality or sociopathic markers a graphologist might identify from examining my writing. The customary simile of an intoxicated spider staggering across the Nile Blue lined paper of one of those large notebooks from Smythson is pitifully inadequate when trying to describe the varied appearance of my, ahem, ‘idiosyncratic’ handwriting style.”— English historian, author, and journalist Nick Foulkes, “Writing: His Nibs,” The Financial Times (“How To Spend It” supplement), November 2025

Here, Foulkes provides a good reason for reading prolific authors: they’ll likely know a great word to substitute for another when a thesaurus simply won’t do. In this case, the word being replaced by “idiosyncratic” is “illegible.”

I can relate to his feelings, and then some. A close relative came up with yet another "i" word to describe my penmanship. “My handwriting is illegible; yours is indescribable,” he told me some years ago.

The problem with my scrawls was first noted, with extreme disapproval, by a nun who taught me in sixth grade. Time has brought no improvement.

I can still make out my notes from college classes. My first drafts these days of works in progress? No dice. I have to transcribe my notes onto a computer as soon as possible—like, within a couple of hours—and even then it can be touch and go.

Fifty years ago, a priest in my parish enjoyed some local renown as a prominent graphoanalyst who could, like the hypothetical one mentioned by Foulkes, determine character traits from handwriting. Thankfully, that priest never got his hands on a specimen of mine.

Quote of the Day (Richard Selzer, on Writing in Longhand)

“The pen is the writing instrument most congenial to my hand. It has the same length and heft as a scalpel, though one is round and the other flat. Ply either one, and something is shed. From the scalpel, blood; from the pen, ink. I like to watch words issue from my fingers, like a secretion from my body. The word processor does not exist that offers so personal a sense of discharge. Then, too, there are the quick, tiny hisses as the flat of the hand moves across a page from left to right, to say nothing of the long, delicious hiss from right to left when you start a new line. Each time I write a story or essay in longhand, I feel a triumph over the technological preeminence of the computer keyboard.”—Dr. Richard Selzer, “Writing With Scalpel,” in The Writing Life: Writers on How They Think and Work, edited by Marie Arana (2003)

I am all with Dr. Richard Selzer on this: There is no writing more spontaneous, more natural, than writing in longhand. When instructors talk about “free writing” exercises, writing in longhand is what they have in mind. The computer keyboard is an impediment to getting your fugitive thoughts on paper as fast as possible, before they slip away—potential great ideas vanished into the ether.

But I have a confession that anyone who’s been unlucky enough to receive even a postcard from me will understand perfectly: my handwriting leaves something to be desired. In fact, I would even match it against any of those in Dr. Selzer’s profession—one infamous for the number of its practitioners who are difficult to decipher—for general illegibility.

For that reason, unlike Dr. Selzer, I suspect, once I get my ideas on paper, I’m invariably in a mad rush to transcribe my lightning-fast jottings into my computer's vast memory bank. Otherwise, my meditations can vanish as certainly at my own uneven hand as at the computer’s impersonal interference.

Quote of the Year (My Brother on our Contemporary Version of Egyptian Hieroglyphics)

“My handwriting is illegible; yours is… indescribable.”—John T., my oldest brother, setting out succinctly the distinction between us.

(This might be the only quote from our family that deserves inclusion in Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations. Recipients of my handwritten postcards from vacation can attest to its truth!)