Indiana dumps cursive

It’s fine with me. I always had sloppy handwriting, and hated the 3rd grade boot camp in cursive writing that was pretty much a national staple. Those who enjoy calligraphy-like activities may have enjoyed that phase of school life, but I did not.

I’ve probably told this story before, but here goes…

In the early 1990’s I was killing time at a Barnes & Noble in Chicago, and happened to pick up a book on handwriting analysis. The analysis for my own handwriting was something like: “This is a conformist with no creativity, since he still makes all of his letters exactly as he was taught them in third grade.”

I was so annoyed by this insulting verdict that I resolved then and there to change my signature into something a bit strange. I immediately did so, and have kept the “strange” signature ever since (beaten to the punch in this respect by my youngest brother Raven, who simply prints his first name and then draws a raven flying into an abstract rendering of the sun– that’s his legal bank signature, seriously).

If my new signature were analyzed now, the analysis would probably flip from “uncreative conformist” to “untrustworthy sociopath who refuses to follow instructions.”