Visible Language

R. S. Woodworth is best known among psychologists for his text Experimental Psychology. However, early in his career he produced a research monograph on the accuracy of voluntary movement which included a section on different ways of producing handwriting movements. We reproduce this section here for two reasons: on the one hand it is an early example of a psychologist’s interest in handwriting, which he followed up with careful observation; on the other hand it provides a basis for comparison to show the extent to which current work on behavioral aspects of handwriting is not only concerned with measurement but has progressed to possible theoretical interpretation.

The paper attempts to demonstrate that writing movements — once recorded on a suitable xy-digitizer — can be processed and analyzed by means of a computer for many different purposes. This method is used in the authors’ laboratory to study the human writing apparatus and, to a smaller extent, the reading of handwriting. From the writing movement certain time and frequency functions are derived and the kinds of information that may be obtained from these functions are briefly indicated. Some feasible practical applications are discussed, and the paper concludes with a suggestion on a new kind of writing instruction.

A growing need to check people’s identity automatically — as a safeguard against crime — has led to the development of a computer that verifies signatures by the speed and sequence of pen movements as well as by the finished sample.

Recent methods of classification of features in handwriting for use in the forensic examination of documents are described, including the computerized system of classification. Developments in the statistical analysis of the way people construct numbers and lay out their writing are reviewed. The potential usefulness of these systems in quantifying the current document examiners’ scale of probability for attributing questioned writings to particular authors is examined.

It is proposed that handwriting production is fundamentally an oscillatory process arising from two orthogonal joints. Letter shapes emerge from an oscillation train by a process of constrained modulation. The choice of underlying oscillation and modulations limits the diversity of letter shapes and gives rise to a common writing style. The model was tested by synthetic production of human-like cursive script with a mechanical arm under computer control. In this simulation the vertical joint acts as the driving joint, the horizontal joint as the shaping joint. Various force constraints on the oscillations and modulations are proposed.

A corpus of the author’s own slips of the pen is analyzed. Four processing levels — lexical, graphemic, allographic, and graphic — are postulated with different types of error being assigned to different levels in the production of handwriting.

Two aspects of the variability of handwriting are considered. In the first part there is a discussion of the effects of variability in the shapes of letters on the legibility. An experiment to compare the relative advantages of cursive and block capital writing is summarized. The second part summarizes experiments concerned with the time taken to prepare handwriting movements and with the variability of the timing of movements in the execution of handwriting.

The paper looks into the origin and the development with age of the preference to make either clockwise or counterclockwise curves and contours in writing and drawing. Twenty-six subjects of four age groups performed four writing and drawing tasks. Two of these were writing single symbols and accurately copying patterns; the other two were free scribbling and drawing repeated circles at a high rate. The developing directional preferences that were observed between four years of age and adulthood suggest that two semi-independent motor systems are involved in writing: one, more primitive, for rapid non-figurative tasks evolving from flexion-first to extension-first; the other, which occurs later but more rapidly under a higher degree of cognitive control, for precision and symbolic functions, favoring counterclockwise curves, irrespective of the writing hand.

Copying is a common technique for training perceptuo-motor skills such as handwriting. An experiment is described in which stimuli to be copied were presented dynamically or statically close to or distant from children seven and ten years old. The implications of the results for teaching handwriting are discussed.

The purpose of this paper is to suggest a conceptual framework for the handwriting system, consisting of three elements: the hand, the writing instrument, and paper. Within this system the hand control mechanism, the writing instrument design, and their integration in the dynamic writing on the paper are discussed relative to efficient, legible, motivated as well as fatigue-reducing handwriting performance. Based on this system framework, an overview of relevant studies and a proposal for needed areas of research are presented. Designs of the writing instruments (in terms of penpoints, shanks, and other physical characteristics), the reduction of writing fatigue, and comparisons of various instruments are analyzed.