Notes Kelly:

Less creditably, "a few minutes with pen in hand" paid off undeservedly well for one student at a Washington, DC high school when college application time came around. Reports NEWSWEEK, senior-year students who worried about their uncertain handwriting skills each paid $5 to this sure-handed classmate to write their names and addresses on college application forms: a sad reflection on the morals of that skillful student scribe -- and an equally sad commentary on an educational system that has let numbers of students head for college without learning, somewhere along the line, to write a few lines competently by hand.)

"Handwriting is civilization's casual encephalogram."
-- Lance Morrow

"You may not be able to read a doctor's handwriting and prescription, but you'll notice his bills are neatly typewritten."
-- Earl Wilson

" ... behold, the false pen of the scribes hath written falsely."
The Bible , Jeremiah 8:8

"I have terrible handwriting. I now say it is a learning disability ... but a nun who was a very troubled woman hit me over the fingerswith a ruler because my handwriting was so bad."
-- attributed variously to Andrew Greeley and Akhmed Zakayev"Somehow I started introducing handwriting into my drawings, and after a time, the language took over and I started getting very involved with the handwriting and then the look of the handwriting."
-- Patti Smith

"I once did hold it, as our statists do,
A baseness to write fair, and labour'd much
How to forget that learning, but, sir, now
It did me yeoman's service."
 --William Shakespeare, HAMLET, Act 5, Scene 2

>"Here is a golden Rule. ... Write legibly. The average temper of the human race would be perceptibly sweetened, if everybody obeyed this Rule!"
-- Lewis Carroll (Charles Lutwidge Dodgson) in “Eight or Nine Wise Words About Letter-Writing” reprinted in The Letters of Lewis Carroll: , vol. II, ed. Morton N. Cohen, Oxford University Press (1979).

"I do not know whence I got the notion that good handwriting was not a necessary part of education, but I retained it until I went to England. When later, especially in South Africa, I saw the beautiful handwriting of lawyers and young men born and educated in South Africa, I was ashamed of myself and repented of my neglect. I saw that bad handwriting should be regarded as a sign of an imperfect education." -- Mahatma Gandhi, Gandhi An Autobiography: The Story of My Experiments With Truth

" ...But the effort that cost her [Eliza Dolittle] the deepest humiliation was a request to Higgins, whose pet artistic fancy, next to Milton's verse, was caligraphy[sic], and who himself wrote a most beautiful Italian hand, that he would teach her to write. He declared that she was congenitally incapable of forming a single letter worthy of the least of Milton's words; but she persisted; and again he suddenly threw himself into the task of teaching her with a combination of stormy intensity, concentrated patience, and occasional bursts of interesting disquisition on the beauty and nobility, the august mission and destiny, of human handwriting. Eliza ended by acquiring an extremely uncommercial script which was a positive extension of her personal beauty ... "
-- George Bernard Shaw in his Afterword to PYGMALION ("Sequel: What Happened Afterwards")

"When Fred went to the office the next morning, there was a test to be gone through which he was not prepared for.
Now Fred," said Caleb, "you will have some desk-work. ... . How are you at writing and arithmetic?"
Fred felt an awkward movement of the heart; he had not thought of desk-work; but he was in a resolute mood, and not going to shrink. "I'm not afraid of arithmetic, Mr. Garth: it always came easily to me. I think you know my writing."
"Let us see," said Caleb, taking up a pen, examining it carefully and handing it, well dipped, to Fred with a sheet of ruled paper. "Copy me a line or two of that valuation, with the figures at the end."
At that time the opinion existed that it was beneath a gentleman to write legibly, or with a hand in the least suitable to a clerk. Fred wrote the lines demanded in a hand as gentlemanly as that of any viscount or bishop of the day: the vowels were all alike and the consonants only distinguishable as turning up or down, the strokes had a blotted solidity and the letters disdained to keep the line-- in short, it was a manuscript of that venerable kind easy to interpret when you know beforehand what the writer means.
As Caleb looked on, his visage showed a growing depression, but when Fred handed him the paper he gave something like a snarl, and rapped the paper passionately with the back of his hand. Bad work like this dispelled all Caleb's mildness.
"The deuce!" he exclaimed, snarlingly. "To think that this is a country where a man's education may cost hundreds and hundreds, and it turns you out this!" Then in a more pathetic tone, pushing up his spectacles and looking at the unfortunate scribe, "The Lord have mercy on us, Fred, I can't put up with this!"
"What can I do, Mr. Garth?" said Fred, whose spirits had sunk very low, not only at the estimate of his handwriting, but at the vision of himself as liable to be ranked with office clerks.
 "Do? Why, you must learn to form your letters and keep the line. What's the use of writing at all if nobody can understand it?" asked Caleb, energetically, quite preoccupied with the bad quality of the work. "Is there so little business in the world that you must be sending puzzles over the country? But that's the way people are brought up. I should lose no end of time with the letters some people send me, if Susan did not make them out for me. It's disgusting." Here Caleb tossed the paper from him.
... "I am very sorry," were all the words that [Fred] could muster. But Mr. Garth was already relenting. "We must make the best of it, Fred," he began, with a return to his usual quiet tone. "Every man can learn to write. I taught myself. Go at it with a will, and sit up at night if the day-time isn't enough. ... "

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