The Palmer method: the school hand, 1900–1950

Austin Norman Palmer was born on a farm at Fort Jackson, New York, on 22 December 1860.^[1] In 1884 he started a penmanship journal, the Western Penman,^[2] and a year later he became a partner in a business college, which he bought three years after that.^[3] His Guide to Business Writing was published at Cedar Rapids, Iowa, in 1894,^[4] a book of 48 pages.^[5] Its preface says what it means by practical: a plain and rapid style, adapted to business purposes.^[6]

The method moved the pen with the muscles of the arm, from the shoulder to the wrist.^[7] Writing with the fingers, Palmer held, would slow the writer down and leave the page heavy and uneven.^[8] What he promised in return was a hand with four essentials: legibility, rapidity, ease and endurance.^[9]

A New York schools superintendent took the method up at the 1904 World's Fair in St. Louis.^[10] Palmer once estimated that 25 million people had learned it,^[11] and it was still used in schools well into the 1960s.^[12] He died in 1927, at 67, still president of the Cedar Rapids Business College.^[13]

The Palmer Method of Business Writing (1915) opens by picking a fight. Palmer's book, it says, has nothing in common with the copybooks used in the public schools for more than half a century.^[14] A copybook headline was first penciled by a skilled penman after a given model^[15] and then engraved, and the child had to imitate that lifeless ideal through long, dreary pages of copying.^[16] Palmer's copies were actual writing, done fast with a muscular movement and photo-engraved, so they kept the writer's individuality,^[17] and his pupils were to take the general style of the copies while developing their own.^[18]

So a Palmer page does not match its book the way a copybook hand matches its plate. Two children taught from the same lessons write the same letter shapes with their own proportions, spacing and slant. Read a Palmer hand by learning that writer's habits from the clearest words on the page, then carry them to the hard ones. The ovals and straight-line drills that fill the practice sheets were never meant to show up in a letter: Palmer says they are of no value except as they lead to writing.^[19]

Mary L. Dougherty's 1917 history traces the idea back to the first half of the 1800s, when one of the period's two influences was muscular-movement writing.^[20] It began with Carstairs in England,^[21] who built an elaborate system of exercises to train the movement,^[22] and it was brought to the United States by B. F. Foster.^[23] Foster's pupils wore a harness of tape that held the fingers still in the correct position until the forms were learned.^[24] In the American systems that followed, Carstairs's combined arm, forearm and finger movement narrowed to the extreme arm movement^[25] and writing classes were set up in the commercial schools.^[26] It was there, after 1900, that drill methods grew up, with movement exercises and counting to keep the rhythm,^[27] and the demand for speed stripped the letters of everything that was not essential.^[28]

That is Palmer's hand exactly. Frank N. Freeman, surveying the systems in 1912, found that the first distinction among them was between an exclusive arm movement and one that combines the arm and the fingers,^[29] and named the Palmer method as perhaps the most complete case of the first.^[30] He predicted that the more moderate systems would win out over the advocates of the exclusive arm movement.^[31] A school hand from the 1910s or 1920s that is plain, quick and nearly free of ornament is most likely Palmer's or one of its rivals, all of them children of the commercial schools' drills.

Palmer's plain hand came after a detour. Freeman's 1911 history of the slant question notes that suggestions for vertical writing had circulated for years but did not have general influence until about 1875.^[32] Then physicians in Germany and France attacked school writing on grounds of hygiene,^[33] because the usual position, sitting sideways to the desk, was held to cause curvature of the spine and eye-strain.^[34] Facing the desk squarely was the cure, and it was concluded that the writing would then have to be vertical.^[35] The agitation came from France and Germany first and then to the United States.^[36]

It did not last. Dougherty records that the front position and vertical writing did not cure bad posture or eyestrain^[37] and that the reaction was to a less extreme slant than before.^[38] Freeman gives the reason: to let the arm carry the hand along the line, the paper has to be tilted to the left until the base line is about perpendicular to the forearm,^[39] and the downstrokes then lean. So an upright, round school hand most likely dates from the vertical years at the end of the 1800s, while a moderate, even slant from the same family points to the arm-movement systems that replaced it, Palmer's among them.

Palmer's diagrams set the pupil in the half-side position, the one mostly used in public schools because of the desks they had,^[40] and they tell the writer to move the paper with the left hand,^[41] three or four times along a line,^[42] and to lift the pen before moving it.^[43] The force that moved the pen was above the elbow, not in the fingers,^[44] and the third and fourth fingers, bent back, made a sliding rest for the hand.^[45]

The book draws a hard line: it is not Palmer Method if the lines are tremulous.^[46] These rules leave marks a reader can use. A writer who moved the paper several times along each line wrote it in short runs, and each run can sit a little higher or lower than the last, so a line that steps up or down between words is still one line. Because the pen was lifted each time the paper moved, a small break inside a long word may be only the place the writer stopped to move it, not the end of a word. A hand moved from the shoulder keeps its downstrokes parallel and its connecting strokes long and smooth; a connection that is short and cramped may be a letter the writer went back to fix.

Classes wrote to a count. It made the work more interesting and toned down the movement of the naturally nervous pupil,^[47] and the first straight-line and oval drills were to be made at two hundred downward strokes to a minute.^[48] Speed mattered in both directions: too much was just as bad as too little.^[49] Some counts were sentences. To make pupils stop at the top of capital A, so that it closed instead of making a loop, there was a chant: "You stop, you stop, at the top, you stop, every time, at the top."^[50] Small a, in groups of five, was to be written at seventy a minute.^[51]

The book even says what each fault looks like: correct speed gives a light, firm line, too little gives shaky, tremulous lines, and too much gives irregular letters.^[52] Read the faults back to the writer. A firm, light line all the way across means a practised hand writing at its natural pace, and its letter shapes can be trusted. A shaky line is slow, careful writing, and its letters are usually fully formed even if they tremble. Irregular, uneven letters are the hand written too fast, and that is where the a and o, the r and the x, run into one another. Read those words by their length and context first, then by their letters.

Palmer gave slant no special study and said it would take care of itself if the rest was right.^[53] Pupils following the same rules still ended with different slants, because of the length of their arms and other physical differences,^[54] and the degree of slant was not a matter of grave importance as long as each writer kept a uniform slant in his own writing.^[55] Palmer's copies lean at about 55 degrees, as the table above gives it; most of the systems that stressed rapid, free writing sat at about 60, Freeman found.^[56]

Freeman too concluded that slant was not of primary importance.^[57] So slant does not date a Palmer hand, or tell it from its rivals. What it tells you is the writer. Each writer's slant is steady, so a stroke that leans differently from its neighbours is probably not a downstroke at all: it may be a connecting stroke, a crossing, or a letter added later. Measuring a few clear l's and t's first gives you the slant to read the rest against.

The Palmer hand is small. The 1915 book counts small o, one-sixteenth of an inch high, as one space;^[58] small l stands four spaces, a quarter of an inch,^[59] and the loop of d rises about two and a half spaces above the base,^[60] and Palmer warns that writing good in other respects is often spoiled because the loops are too long and run into the lines above and below.^[61] In the copybooks of former years, he notes, the one-space letters were one-eighth of an inch, twice as high as his.^[62] The 1888 guide already made the point, saying the copybooks made these letters about twice as high as Palmer did,^[63] and gave small r and s a quarter of a space more than the other short letters.^[64] Above all, the 1915 book says, keep the height, slant and spacing uniform.^[65]

For the reader that ratio is the key. Short letters are tiny and the loops are four times their height, so the shape of a word is mostly its loops. The 1888 guide gives the loops that rise four spaces as b, h, k, l and f^[66] and the ones that hang three spaces below as g, y, f and z.^[67] Count the loops above and below a word before reading its letters. Where loops tangle with the line above, follow each one back to the base line it starts from. A short letter that stands a little taller than its neighbours is often an r or an s.

Palmer did not start plain. His 1888 Guide to Muscular Movement Writing claims the muscular movement is all that is needed for business writing, card writing and combination writing,^[68] and for fancy writing with smooth shades it praises the oblique holder.^[69] It teaches ornamental capitals too, with a warning that the last capital N is fit only for ornament,^[70] and its first, quickly made M is the business style.^[71]

By 1915 the shading had gone: nothing equals an oblique holder for ornamental writing, the book says, but there its usefulness ends.^[72] Expect two families of capital in a Palmer-era box. The plain capitals of the school copies are the hand as taught. Shaded, flourished capitals among plain small letters are the writer's own ornament, and they follow older patterns: read them against the Spencerian capitals, not against the 1915 book.

Palmer gave figures a lesson of their own because they did a clerk's real work: nothing, he says, is more important to the average bookkeeper or office clerk than good figures.^[73]

His reason is a reader's: letters in a word may be known by the context, but each figure must depend upon itself for legibility,^[74] and figures should be made small.^[75] That is the warning to heed on any page of accounts. A word that loses a letter can be guessed; a figure cannot, and a misread 1 or 7 changes a sum or a date. Read the figures of a Palmer-trained hand one by one against the writer's own clear examples elsewhere on the page, and check any total against its column.

By the 1910s the schools wanted to measure the hand they taught. Leonard P. Ayres's 1912 scale for the Russell Sage Foundation rated school children's writing by how fast it could be read, from 15,780 timed readings by ten paid investigators.^[76] Its steps carried the values 20 to 90 because teachers knew those numbers as marks on children's school work,^[77] and it was printed in blue ink to match the ink most used in the public schools.^[78] A school paper of the period marked in those tens may have been graded on such a scale, and blue writing on it is the schools' ordinary ink.

Ayres's findings are a reader's advice as well. What mattered most for legibility was, first, the spacing between the words and, second, the spacing between the lines,^[79] while well-spaced writing with somewhat irregular letters was often quite easy to read.^[80] Upright writing was the most legible, medium slants next and extreme slants least.^[81] When a Palmer page is hard going, find the word breaks first. Once the words are separated, even uneven letters usually give way.