Ancient Web: Eric Lee Tried to Replace Longhand with Handywrite

Part of the Ancient Web Collection.

The computer age promised to eliminate handwriting. Eric Lee's website proposes a less fashionable solution: make handwriting better.

Read the alternative handwriting guide.

The long, illustrated page compares ways people have tried to record words faster than conventional cursive. It discusses Pitman shorthand, Gregg, Teeline, alphabetic abbreviation systems, Alexander Melville Bell's Visible Speech, the International Phonetic Alphabet, and Blissymbolics. Lee is not neutral about the tradeoffs. He objects to systems that gain speed by dropping so much information that old notes become hard to decipher.

That objection leads into his own project, Handywrite. The idea is to represent the sounds of English with economical pen strokes, keeping enough vowel information to write complete, readable words. Conventional spelling gives a word many letters for relatively few sounds; his scheme trades familiar shapes for quicker motion.

Learning a language for your notebook

The site offers numbered lessons, symbol charts, exercises, and a shorthand extension for those who want to abbreviate frequent words. One page suggests that learning abbreviations for common function words may be more useful than inventing shortcuts for everything. Another makes the simple distinction between writing phonetically and spelling traditionally.

The appeal is tangible. You can trace symbols on paper while moving between pages that explain why the strokes take their shapes. The project invites users to contribute practice material and transcriptions instead of simply downloading a proprietary font and stopping there.

Lee's claims about relative speeds and the deficiencies of established systems are his arguments, not controlled comparative test results. Some historical statements on the page also deserve checking against specialist linguistic histories. The page matters as an independent proposal, not as a final authority on orthography.

Its link-heavy layout, embedded example images, and digressions into other handwriting traditions give it the distinctive feeling of a webmaster teaching a difficult enthusiasm to strangers. Nobody needed to approve a market for a replacement alphabet. He published the whole thing.

Explore the handwriting comparison and start the Handywrite lessons.

Part of the Ancient Web Collection.