Since I first learned to write in elementary school, I have always had poor penmanship. In hindsight with what I know now, I was not mindful of what I was doing. In other words, I was too 'destination' oriented and not focusing enough on the process/journey. Also, aside from looking a lot like my father, the one family quirk that I have is my paternal grandmother's handwriting. I press harder on the paper while writing the same chicken-scratch penmanship as granny had. Taking after my grandma is the best part of my penmanship, she was a kind woman and I loved her very much.
As a kid in school, my writing composition was judged on my poor penmanship instead of my writing content in yet another example of form over substance in our schools. Going back to college in my twenties, I was in the enviable position of having a serious technological advantage over my classmates since I was one of the very few students that had an IBM PC. That allowed me to focus on composition and communication while letting go of my penmanship problems. Thanks to the miracle of word processing with WordStar 3.3, correcting mistakes and editing my papers was vastly easier than re-writing an entire paper or even one page. My writing jumped two letter grades from C- work to A- work from high school to 5 years later after I enrolled UC Santa Barbara.
Nowadays, I like my writing enough to be able to blog about gratitude nearly every day. Never saw that coming when I was a kid. I hated writing back then. I have created dozens, if not hundreds of papers, on a volunteer basis for community organizations. The papers, flyers and brochures are good enough that they let me make the next one after viewing my last creation.
My current project is to create (paper) bookmarkers to be distributed at all 43 King County Library System (KCLS) libraries. I created an example last month, then showed it to 50ish people for feedback and their support. The best suggestion was to print it on one side of the page to save 50% on printing costs compared with double-sided printing.
Now I get to create a 2.2" x 8.5" layout, five to the page, to be distributed at the libraries. In one sense, this will be my largest printing project ever. I will print 5 reams of paper resulting in 3500 bookmarks making a stack almost five feet tall. Past printing projects have used twice as much paper and money, but this will be most 'pieces' of printed material in my experience.
I am grateful for modern word processing & desktop publishing software and my skills in composing documents. Thanks to PCs and printers, I am now at least a functional if not a good writer. It is also good to live five miles from the MS company store. Xmas gifts from my MS friends tend to come in a box about 12" x 10" x 3".
I graduated from UC Santa Barbara in 1970.
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