Amy Tara Koch is here to tell you that sloppy handwriting isn’t just for doctors anymore.
Her husband, Peter Gottlieb, has a BA, not an MD, yet he has “the most hideous scrawl,” lamented Koch, who lives in Streeterville. When they were courting, he’d send her handwritten postcards from his job as a summer-camp counselor.
“I thought they might be love letters but was never sure,” Koch said.
Now that they’re married, his writing has only gotten worse.
Thanks to his illegible household communiques, Koch has purchased cough syrup instead of toothpaste. She has called people to wish them happy birthday, only to find out it wasn’t their birthday.
Gottlieb, who like Koch is 35, himself has suffered from his scrawl. Reading a note he wrote himself, he once asked a pharmacist for Pitocin, the labor-inducing drug, when he meant to ask for Protopic, a skin ointment.
His excuse?
“I broke my arm in 2nd grade and never recovered,” he offers, somewhat lamely.
Lake View resident Erika Gjeldum-Larson swims in the same inky waters as Koch. Her husband’s writing is so bad that she refused to let him help write the hundreds of thank-you notes due after their October wedding.
“She suffers hand cramps and boredom while I sit on the couch and watch football,” said 24-year-old Steve Larson, somewhat apologetically.
A social nicety
Koch and Larson are not alone. The world is full of bad handwriting, and it’s not due to arms broken long ago. More likely, computers, personal digital assistants and plain old-fashioned laziness are to blame, said Jeanne Drew, an Edgewater-based graphologist who has been minding other people’s p’s and q’s for 34 years.
Penmanship’s plunge bothers Drew.
“It’s a social activity,” she said, noting that people used to pride themselves on their way with a fountain pen. “It’s like we’re losing our innate way of expressing ourselves.”
Like most adroitly performed physical activities, handwriting requires a blend of concentration, coordination and self-discipline.
“It’s a reflection of the neuromuscular system,” Drew said, and that’s one reason graphologists can look at a handwriting sample and divine from it all sorts of personal things. Not just anybody can write well: People with neuromuscular disorders or dyslexia generally have a tough time. (Drew, in fact, is dyslexic; that’s how she ended up a graphologist.)
For those without such challenges, bad handwriting simply boils down to intent.
“Handwriting is communication. If I am interested in communicating with you, I will have a degree of legibility in my notes,” Drew said. If the intent is not to communicate, well, then, illegibility doesn’t matter.
It’s a point Elizabeth Shure protests mightily. Her employees at ShureBerger Inc., the downtown public-relations firm she and her husband own, take her illegible writing for granted. They’ve even made a human Rosetta stone out of Beth Flintoft, the company’s longest-tenured employee.
Shure, 34, said she always has written sloppily. Her poor penmanship is recorded for posterity in the journals she kept in high school and college. Now that they’re stored away, their illegibility keeps them safe from prying eyes.
“I think, Thank God I can’t read them, because nobody else can either,” Shure said.
She loftily rationalizes her scrawl. “I have bad handwriting because I’m more concerned with the message than the way it’s delivered,” she said. “I’d rather pay attention to getting my points across.”
That’s all well and good, unless those points happen to be indecipherable. Case in point: One year, Shure decided to write, in longhand, candid assessments of each employee and have the assessments read aloud at a meeting.
“I wrote that someone was perseverant, a positive quality,” Shure said.
But she neglected to proof her notes, and during the meeting, the designated reader interpreted the word as “procrastinator,” definitely not a positive quality. The employee was embarrassed even though Shure quickly corrected the situation. “We laughed it off–`her handwriting again,'” Shure said.
Unlike Koch and Gottlieb and the Larsons, Shure hasn’t allowed bad handwriting to permeate her marriage. Because her husband, Andrew, writes as poorly as she does, the two simply don’t write notes, not even grocery lists. “We use Peapod,” Elizabeth said.
Mystique of the sloppy
To be sure, bad handwriting isn’t all bad. Neat, legible signatures are easier to forge, Drew noted, while a wild, whirly signature can lend an aura of mystery, even rock-star fame, to a signature. Finally, illegible writing assigns one to a secret sect of society.
“It’s like doctors; they’re a socially removed group,” Drew said.
Too-neat handwriting means trouble too.
“It shows you’re trying too hard to impress,” Drew said. “It’s unnatural, exaggerated and loses spontaneity.”
Super-neat handwriting also is more difficult to correct. Said Drew: “You can tighten something that’s too loose, but it’s more difficult to loosen something that’s too tight.”
The achingly neat rule doesn’t apply to people over a certain age, who view handwriting as a necessary social and professional grace.
Chicago attorney Michael F. Lefkow, 62, has a striking, bold signature that would look right at home on the Declaration of Independence, partly because he uses a fountain pen, as he was taught.
“I’m an attorney, and my signature is important to me because it should be as attractive and clear as the writing I do on behalf of a client,” Lefkow said.
And, of course, not everyone under 60 sports an illegible scrawl. Handbag designer Tangee Harris Pritchett has a contemporary-looking, entirely readable signature, “probably from signing my name so many times,” said Pritchett, who lives in Hyde Park.
She hates her printing, though. “It’s not lined up and neat. If I don’t have a line it goes all over the page,” she said.
Where will all this sloppy writing lead? If what Andrea Gauger says is true, it might be necessary to haul the real Rosetta stone, now at the British Museum, back into service. The Rosetta stone is a tool for deciphering hieroglyphics, the highly sophisticated Egyptian writing system toward which written American English seems to be returning.
Gauger, an English teacher at Luther High School North in Chicago, said that sometimes the only things she can decipher in students’ assignments are the symbols, like smiley faces, and abbreviations, such as b/c or “cuz” for “because,” that pepper their papers.
“The rest, even the students don’t have a clue,” Gauger said with a sigh.
Bad handwriting good for business
Monica McInerney, 35, of Riverside has such good handwriting that she makes a living as a calligrapher, a living that has gotten better as handwriting has gotten worse. Business is booming, she said, not just with wedding invitations but for more unusual requests as well.
One man, wishing to impress a woman he met online (where undoubtedly he wowed her with ultra-neat e-mails), asked McInerney to handwrite a few poems and a love letter. “He had man’s chicken-scratch writing,” McInerney said. The handwritten touch set him back nearly $100, she adds.
Another client asked her to write a love note in the margins of a framed piece of art he planned to give his girlfriend. “He had atrocious writing too,” she said.
All told, covering for people’s bad penmanship accounts for about 25 percent of McInerney’s business. “I’m busier now than ever,” she said.
— L.B.
Get out the decoder ring
The Allies could have used Peter Gottlieb in World War II. With handwriting like this, who needs Navajo code-talkers?
There’s only one problem, of course: translation. Q cryptologists are stumped: “Something, Botox?” “Pimp Paris . . . and George Clooney . . . are friends.” “Been on the run . . . will be back at 8:30.”
Q readers, your country needs you! Submit your interpretation, along with your name and town, to Q@tribune.com by Thursday–and don’t let it fall into enemy hands. We’ll print the real translation and those that came closest.
And thanks, Peter, for being such a good sport.
