Correctly perceiving the shapes of Business and Ornamental Penmanship is a vital step to mastery, and can be highly challenging for the beginning student. When initially learning to write the letter shapes, one might even be unaware that perception is a skill in itself. It is most likely undeveloped in the beginning but can (and must) be trained in order for one to be successful. Failing to do so may lead to hours and hours spent learning by writing—with no or only slow improvement.

Instead, focusing on establishing a mental image of the shapes and understanding the concepts which constitute them will lead to much quicker progress. Zaner said that you can only perform what you perceive. It might be said even stronger: You can only learn and train with your muscles what your mind already understands. Everything else is trial and error.

Codes of Perception

This article has two goals. First, it aims to train your perception; it encourages you to see by specifically showing the underlying concepts and explaining the details of the shapes which constitute the letters. Secondly, on its way through a selected portion of the alphabet below, it shows practically how shapes and letters can be dissected. This should enable you to do it yourself for cases which are not addressed here.

Your aim should be to establish strong and clear concepts of letters and their shapes. When talking about concepts one could think of mental images, but I aim for something more general. In order to explain this easily, I first have to introduce a term: multi-codality. Everyone might be familiar with the term multimedia, simply meaning that something is communicated with more than one medium at the same time. For example, a movie is multimedia because it comprises a video and an audio track. Multi-codality is slightly different: It means that something (e.g. an idea or concept) is encoded in multiple ways. An example is a cooking recipe, which can be communicated using a textual description, a series of images, or a short movie. They all contain, more or less, the same information, but they communicate it encoded in different ways.

Now back to letter shapes. Even though shapes are fundamentally images, I claim that mental concepts about shapes can have different encodings. Using several complementary encodings deepens your understanding about a shape and makes it more lasting and persistent.

A first encoding is visual imagination of the shape to be learned. This one is easiest to aspire to but very hard to achieve. If your mind is able to reproduce the shapes out of itself, I dare say, you're well equipped to let your hand execute it. Directly trying to achieve this skill of mental conception is quite difficult, however. Other encodings of a letter's concepts are helpful for achieving it and are also helpful on their own:

The next encoding is reached by deconstructing letters into their individual strokes. This is what all instructional books of the old masters already do. See for example, LIOP, p. 5: "elements and principles."

Complementary to visual images and their dissection is verbal or textual description. Being able to recall a detailed description of a shape enables one to rebuilt an understanding of it, even if one forgot its image. Verbal description might draw attention to details which would have been otherwise overlooked. For example:

Describe the stroke. It's an upstroke. Which angle does it have? Around 50 degrees. Is it straight? No, it's bent to the right. How much? Well, slightly. At which point of the stroke is it bent most? Perfectly in the middle of the stroke. And so on...

There are two books which have a good deal of textual description for each shape and letter: The Arm Movement Method of Rapid Writing, by C.P. Zaner includes written descriptions of each letterform along with exercises for practicing it. Theory of Spencerian Penmanship consists almost exclusively of these descriptions.

The last encoding which I will mention here only briefly is sensation of the correct motion. Some instructional books give the good advice to retrace letter exemplars with the back of the penholder. Tracing slowly, while also using the correct muscles (i.e. no finger movement) one can acquire the sensation of how to move to get the letter right.