Bach Canon "Per Contrarium Motum" (MIDI-sequenced by Kate
for electronic instruments)
Welcome to the
where
SOUTHPAW SCRIBES HAVE IT "WRITE"!
Since at least 30% of the inquiries I get come from lefties, I
hope that those left-handers who need better handwriting won't
object to whatever help they can get from a handwriting
improvement specialist who can write left-handed but usually
doesn't. Learning to write left-handed has done a lot to help me
teach lefties: I really recommend that anyone teaching
handwriting should learn to write with the opposite hand
in order to better understand, demonstrate, and teach
handwriting skills for people who don't share the teacher's
handedness.
Some people think that left-handers naturally write poorly and
cannot change this. In my observation and experience, the
supposedly "natural" scribal problems of left-handers come
above all from instruction given by those who do not know how
to teach a lefty to write ... so either they neglect
the lefties when they teach (I've seen teachers going
around a room, showing right-hander after right-hander how to
hold the pencil and the paper, but skipping all the
left-handers), or (worse) they require their
left-handed students to hold their pencils and papers exactly
the same as the right-handed students! (Even classrooms
where teachers do their best to instruct left-handers properly
often have desks that work for right-handers only: those
"tablet arm" chair-desk constructions with one-half of a desktop
firmly bolted to the right side of the chair:
right-hand-friendly, I suppose, but definitely
left-hand-hostile.
Given proper instruction and non-hostile equipment,
left-handers can and do write as well as right-handers.
(Proof: left-handed pro calligraphers, such as Gaynor
Goffe and Timothy
Noad.)
Almost every letter I get from a lefty (or from a lefty's
mother, father, or teacher) asks for good books or series to
teach handwriting to left-handers. So far, I know of only
one that I can recommend:-
/1/
To anyone who writes left-handed, or who teaches
left-handers, I
strongly recommend the new series
Among other things: if you look at the
lower right-hand corner
of each page, you'll note that the series' authors (Mark
and Heather
Stewart) have found a most ingenious and (when properly
understood)
most effective means of ensuring that left-handed writers
learn to
position their writing-books or other paper properly for
left-handed
writing (instead of just struggling along by themselves to
find a position, or attempting to copy the paper-position
of right-handers, as too many
lefties without proper guidance will inadvertently tend to
do.)
If and when you order, please let the
company know that you heard
from me about their series. You can most easily do so by e-mailing the
publisher, Christopher J. Marshall, at cm@robinswoodpress.com.
Another book with useful tips for lefty writers is Annie
Thomassen's Left-Handed But
Not Left Behind however the handwriting model
used is not very good.
