A Few Notes About Rhythm

We can’t begin this lesson without first discussing rhythm. It is a crucial component of arm movement-based penmanship and is the key to achieving consistency and continuity in our movement, and subsequently, in our script.

Until recently, I considered rhythm to be too advanced of a topic for a series focused on the fundamentals of business writing. The more I delved back into the basics, however, the more I realized how integral an understanding of rhythm is to writing, and how necessary it is to incorporate it into our practice from the beginning. While rhythm certainly has advanced applications, in its most basic form it is actually quite simple.

So what exactly is it?

The word itself appears in countless penmanship and calligraphy texts, and pops up frequently in forum discussions, but it often seems that everyone has a different idea of what it means. It would be wrong of me to say that one definition or interpretation of rhythm is more correct than another; after all, the concept itself (essentially musical) in the context of penmanship is an inherently abstract, and therefore subjective one. For the purposes of these lessons, however, I have defined a very specific application of rhythm to the training of muscular movement writing, and I will attempt to explain it here.

I think that the word rhythm is sometimes overgeneralized and used to refer to what are essentially consequences of ductus—how individual strokes are combined, where pauses or pen lifts are made, changes in the speed of the movement, etc. Certainly, many of these interpretations are valid. In a way, it makes a great deal of sense why we might use the word rhythm in this context, as we are speaking of repetitive patterns and sequences of strokes. But rhythm can also describe something much more specific—and simple. To understand what I mean, let’s take a look back at the push-pull movement that I analyzed in my post “Anatomy of the Writing Engine.”

The push-pull is a superb exercise for both observing the phenomenon of rhythm, and understanding its integral function in movement writing technique. There are two reasons for this:

1) It involves a continuous, regularly repeating movement.

2) It is the purest application of the composite forearm + upper arm mechanism—what I have called the “engine of muscular movement.”

Observe in the following video how the rocking motion of the arm is nothing more than a regularly repeating alternation of a forward-back movement against the desk, executed at a constant rate or tempo.